Ever looked at one of your parents and seen yourself in like twenty, thirty years? I do it all the time. Makes me sick to my stomach. So I think I'm going to grow up to be a hermit. I'll live alone in an anonymous community and take up a profession that requires little to no interaction—writing, I hope, but we'll see how that goes—and the world will be all the better for it. That way no one will have to deal with me except for me, and the only time I find it difficult to deal with me is when I'm dealing with other people. So everyone wins. I'm not going to torture someone by marrying them just so I can have a couple of screwed-up kids to torture, too. Because then the world will end up with more people like me, and who needs that?
If I'm living alone, I can find healthier, more productive channels for my anger besides other people. Because of course, when you're with other people it's incredibly tempting to just shoot your anger right at them like a paintball gun, splatter it all over their face and give them a good gash in the head in the process. If I'm alone, that temptation won't be there. So I can just turn my anger toward politics or society or the wall or my keyboard. Something productive, or at the very least a healthy waste of time. Time is there to be wasted, after all. When you think about it, what else do we really do?
The cat can make three parallel scratches at a time. I know this from experience. Therefore, it is unlikely that a row of four or more scratches all perfectly parallel to each other is the work of the cat. The cat wishes he could take credit for that, because it is a beautiful specimen, but ego aside, the cat knows that it was the work of masochism and not sadism. Everyone should know that. Maybe everyone does know that. Likely, if they took the time to think about it, everyone could know that. Likely, they would realize how unlikely it is that those marks were left by the cat. But most people don't think twice about such things, let alone more than twice. It's lucky for some people that this is true. Maybe for other people it isn't quite as lucky.
Here's a new one: I hate when I'm in the living room watching television with someone (ok: parents) and the phone rings and they answer it right there. Not only do they stay in the room, but they talk SO loudly. I know that turning up the volume would be rude and pausing it until they're done would be passive aggressive, so what am I supposed to do?
I'm sorry, but the phone is portable. The television is not. Get your rear end off the couch and go in the other room.
I took the ACTs in December for the first time and got a composite score of 32. My combined writing score was also a 32. For all of the colleges I am looking at, 32 is the top number of the average range of composite scores they accept, except for Johns Hopkins, which has the top of the range at 33.
When people ask my mom how I did on the ACTs, she precedes every response with "Well, she's only a junior."
Here's what happened. I'm in AP US History and the tests we take are mostly, if not entirely, multiple choice. Somebody who has the same teacher as me found the website where he gets most of the multiple choice questions. It's a good site, with lists of questions organized by periods in history that roughly correspond to the chapters in our textbook. I had a test today, so yesterday I went on the site and went over the lists of questions for the topics my test would cover. I didn't really mean for this to happen because I was trying to review the information, but by the time of the test (which ended a few minutes ago) I could answer almost every question correctly without even reading the entire question because I had done them all so many times. So I just took the test and many—I could probably even say most—of the questions on it were from that website. I know for a fact that I answered all of the questions he took from that website correctly.
Why it might be cheating: I knew that my teacher got his questions from that website, so reviewing them so many times was in some ways almost like having a copy of the actual test and going over the questions until I knew all of the answers. For a few (not many, but a few) of the questions I learned the answer by memorization even though I didn't quite understand it.
Why it might not be cheating: Not all of the questions were from that website, and when I was reviewing them I didn't know which questions he would use. Also, part of the test was free response: he listed four key terms from the unit and we had to pick three and write a paragraph with basic information about them. Luckily for me, it just so happened that I knew three of them quite well (I had no idea about the other one) so I'm pretty sure I got full credit there. But the point is that using that website wasn't quite like having a copy of the test because I didn't know what the key terms would be.
