Ugh

Homecoming. Blah.
It was my first and last homecoming of high school, and while I know that I would have greatly regretted not going, I also can't say that I had the great time I was hoping for.

Since I don't have my driver's license yet (in fact I was the only person in our group without a license), I had to get rides from Luke (thanks!). Of course, that's not to say that everyone was able to drive. Parents apparently get in the way.

Well dinner was pretty good, but it was stupidly expensive. I blame everyone who voted for Italian for causing this...including myself. Regardless, the bread was really good, but I was basically full when we got our entrees. How people could still eat dessert is beyond me.

After dinner, we went to the dance. It was okay, except that we were waiting outside for Jason for about as long as we were at the dance...miscommunication ftl.

Luke's afterparty looked to be redeeming. There was a lot of food, although I was still mostly unable to eat after the dinner. I managed to eat a small piece of mooncake...and a couple of chips. That was about it. We played melee for a while. First round I decided to play Jigglypuff (she's so fun to use :)) and got second behind Lenny (who has been playing melee instead of bridge...grrrr). Next round I played ice climbers, since the last time I had played melee was at Ved's house and I went about 1-8 in 1v1s...with the 1 win being from ice climbers. Well, that happened again, and I somehow won, even though we were playing on flat zone, so nana got KOd basically instantly every time I spawned. I'm probably the only person to be best with ice climbers.

Then the poker started. Each person started with 210 (10 1s, 10 5s, 5 10s, and 4 25s), and we started with 1/2 blinds. I managed to be the first one out (blargh). Here's the last hand I played. I call preflop with KJ suited.

Flop: AQ10 rainbow

At this point I have 39 left and an ace high straight, so I go all in and get called.

Turn: 8
River: A

This looks pretty good for me. I confidently flip over my KJ showing my straight and my opponent shows pocket queens. Not only did I get completely screwed on this hand, I was the clear favorite until the river came up. He NEEDED the board to pair to win that. Ugh.

So then at this point Luke kinda stopped playing and he's short stack anyway, so I take over and lose all his chips. On one hand I picked up KJ suited and jokingly told him that he was going to get eliminated on that round. Didn't quite happen, but it was pretty close (I took a pretty big hit from that one). So then after that I managed to lose again. Yup. Out of a 10 person poker game, I was both 9th and 10th.

Renjie got out next and we played some melee. I think I went like 2-5 or something like that against him. Not a good percentage for me.

Anyway after the poker died out I was pretty much meleed out, so I got up and watched stuff happen for a bit. Then I realized that I was REALLY tired (it was around 3, I think?) and started to go to sleep. I forget whether Amanda came before or after I had gotten out my sleeping bag and was lying down...oh well. I know she came in before I actually went to sleep though. Part of that was because while I was trying to fall asleep, people were talking loudly. I wouldn't have minded, but they were talking about homework and college apps. Ugh.

Well eventually I fell asleep. I was vaguely aware of some of the activities that went on while I slept, like cleaning up Luke's pool table and more conversations that annoyed me. As I started to regain consciousness, I listened to the conversation that was going on. It was not so bad, but I decided to just stay lying down and not officially "wake up" for a while. When I did, I was pleasantly surprised. I had gone to sleep being annoyed at some of the people at the party, but when I woke up it was a smaller crowd and the conversations were more fun. Regardless, I still can't say that the homecoming party was amazing. It was fine, and I know I would be feeling much worse if I hadn't gone, but it could have been better...for those of you who don't know why, I'll let you imagine what I might be referring to. GLHF :)

When I got home I was still feeling kinda bad after the afterparty. No offense to Luke, but last year's parties were a lot more fun. I got home around 10 and just went to sleep until probably 2 in the afternoon. When I woke up I was still had some residual annoyances with our class, but not nearly as bad as it was during the afterparty.

I'm still really annoyed at a lot of the people in the class of 2010. The combination of laziness and hypercompetitiveness is unbelievably irritating. If you're going to be lazy, don't bitch about your lackluster college application. If you're going to be hypercompetitive about college apps, don't be lazy in your extracurriculars (*cough* math team *cough*). You know why TJ's math team has sucked the past three years? I'll tell you why. It's because of the class of 2010. Look at last year's rankings. Look at how many 11s (the class of 2010) there are in B and C team. Think about how much work you would want people to do to make the B team for a school like TJ. If everyone on math team had done that much work then we'd probably win ARML easily. No joke. The class of 2010 is extremely talented, but their laziness is only compounded by the fact that they can just slide into the TJ B team without working for it, and therefore don't work for it. And now basically all of them have stopped working toward doing well on math team altogether. Here is the top of last year's ARML rankings after removing seniors.

Brian Hamrick
Dan Li
SeungIn Sohn
Jimmy Clark
Renjie You

Now look at the skill gap that appears somewhere in here. For the first math team practice, we did an old Mandelbrot that wouldn't count for anything but lettering, so Renjie and I decided to do it without paper: the only thing you're allowed to write down is the answer. On the 14 point contest, I got 13; Renjie got 6. That's the gap in our top 5. When you get down to 15th, people just suck massively. We got two fours at ARML last year - out of TEN. Everyone on TJ A should be getting 7 MINIMUM.

I'm not saying that everyone needs to spend all their free time on math team, but the people who say that they care about math team should care about the math, and they should be competent at it. Ugh.

At least the freshmen look promising ^_^. Seriously, the best thing that could happen for math team right now is that enough freshmen qualify for our HMMT teams that all the seniors from 15 down on ARML rankings don't get to go. Maybe that will shock them enough that they might become good enough to win ARML.

At least some stuff is going well...kinda. Ugh.