the AP test

Yea for English. Nay for tests.

This is the first homework assignment I’m starting for this weekend. I’ve been putting off doing the AP multiple choice questions that were assigned to us for the weekend, and to be honest, I don’t even want to look at it. It kind of makes me queasy and sweaty in the palms every time I think about the AP test. I actually can’t believe it’s almost time to start thinking about it. I guess I got a bit scarred from 10 honors last year. I’m praying that I’ve improved since then. And yes, I really can’t tell if I have. Is that a bad sign?

Well, to go back to my 10 honors experience, I remember Mrs. Parks gave us this multiple choice AP test. And I thought, Great! What better way to test these nonexistent reading comprehension skills of mine added with a nice time limit?

I swear I’m the slowest reader alive. It didn’t help that my concentration was at rock-bottom and my paranoia was constantly gnawing away at me. I had to read a paragraph three times because I couldn’t retain any of the information. Even for questions I knew the answer to, I read them an extra number of times in case I missed something, which was a pretty bad idea. Seriously, I had more than ten questions left after the teacher called the last five minutes.

I ended up bombing the test, as expected. I don’t know if it’s a smart idea to announce my grade on a public blog post, but I don’t really care. So, I got about a fifty percent. And it kind of sucked. Because I always thought I was better at English than math. But I’ve never gotten a fifty percent in math. (I’m very sorry for the sentence fragments. Maybe I do just suck at English.)

I’m still recovering from that experience (I don’t know why I’m being so dramatic). I think it triggered an anti-test mindset in me, and my pessimism is setting me up for failure. A lot of my other test grades after that started plummeting, like my math tests (to be honest, those were always bad), my AP chem tests (actually those were bad too), and my ACT (I put A for 10 of the questions I didn’t answer in the science section).

I don’t really like this post and I don’t even want to post it, but I can’t seem to remember anything we did in class this week except for the essay (which I don’t want to remember), so I don’t have a choice. Or maybe I'm just too lazy to rewrite another blog post. I hope, however, I’m able to get over my negative mindset and actually tackle this test thing soon.

See you soon, AP English test. I won't fail you this time.

Dreamers are the Losers

Yea for success. Nay for failure.

I wasn’t relieved after I finished The Great Gatsby. I was just depressed. Not because the book was over, but because of the ending. I realized Gatsby, no matter how hard he tried, never actually climbed the social ladder.

The “American Dream” doesn’t exist.

Now, that’s really harsh and unpleasant to think about. It literally means that hard work amounts to nothing. I found myself asking the web if the American Dream exists. I got a bunch of results with the word “still” caught in between the question. And I almost laughed. Has it ever existed? If the 1920s had it bad, we have it worse. According to the internet, success requires “extra time and patience,” and certainly more than ever. Our standards are at an all-time high, and merely graduating high school can’t get you a job. Everyone will laugh in your face.

Fitzgerald is clear on the fact that new money can never be old money, and even if one tries, it will all just end in a morbid way.

I truly want like to believe the opposite. I want to believe hard work does equate to success. I want to know that my work will pay off. I don’t want to think about the slackers that will ultimately face the same fate as I do. And I certainly don’t want to become some rich, lonely, old money wannabe that gets killed by some irrelevant, sad man.

So I think I’ll just carry on with my old ways, whether that’s the right way or not. I would rather live life thinking I can change my fate of a sad, Troy resident than be stuck in that pessimistic mindset. Thanks, though, F. Scott, for the heads up.

Females are Fools

Yea for knives. Nay for murder.

Daisy, as she talks about her daughter, says, “I’m glad it’s a girl. And i hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

When I first read this, I was confused by the strange way Daisy expressed her hopes for her daughter. Why would she want her daughter to become a fool? I became to realize this reason was the fact that she was female. Actually thinking about it, it’s kind of depressing. A woman like Daisy did virtually nothing at the time when this book was written. She has no motivation, dreams, and her life is pointless. Daisy hopes for her daughter to grow up unlike herself, who is aware of her pointless, unambitious life.

And this led to my question: can ignorance prevent depression? Is knowledge misery?

After some thinking, I realized I was being silly. This can easily be answered by both you and I. It is obvious we need our brains and knowledge to survive. We need knowledge. Then why is the phrase “ignorance is bliss” tossed around in everyday speech? Turns out, we need both knowledge and ignorance. We probably need to know how to use a fork and knife. We probably don’t need to know how if feels to kill someone.

Daisy does not want her daughter to find out about the meaningless life of a female, as she believes, she is living. Because if she does, realization may be even worse than killing someone.