Brettia

Though Aristotle is my moniker, I haven’t put it all that much on philosophy for a while, so here it goes. As I’ve already written, my schedule next year is shaping up to be tough one. With four honors classes, one of which is independent study designed to be even harder than regular honors, I’m going to have to fight to keep my head above water. Not that that’s a bad thing, of course, but it will require some adjustment of my work ethic and habits.

Last year, I had two honors classes, and I had only five real classes because one was taken up by PE. Now, I’m taking seven classes (technically speaking), four of which are, as I said, honors classes, while one other is a regular class (but an advanced level for my grade) and the other two are technology classes (one for working on the school website, the other for an online Photoshop course I’m taking).

My first class will be Algebra 3-4 with DelGrosso, whom I’ve heard is a great teacher, but still tough. Hopefully he’s not too tough, because math has never been my best subject (I still got a 96 last year though). My second is Honors Chemistry with Mrs. Reisener. She is rumored to be a pretty nice teacher, but still strict. I’ve never met her, so I dunno. This is the only class I’m worried I won’t like, because for some strange reason, my heavily technically/logically oriented brain is aversive to science of any kind. The third class on my schedule is AP Euro History with Mr. Epstein, who is a new teacher I guess, because I’ve never heard of him. It looks like he’s replaced my social studies teacher from last year, Mr. Fogelson. This class will undoubtedly be hard, with lots of essays and stuff like that. And it’s an AP course, which means an AP test is coming in the spring. Thus end my hard classes. Mondays are really going to be great.
The fourth class on my list is the independent study English course, during which time I’ll be working on the school website and hopefully getting it up to scratch. My experience with HTML/CSS is so good at this point (nearly three years now) that this will be like sleeping, hopefully. Next will be lunch, a welcome break from a busy morning, and then will come my Photoshop class, which shouldn’t be any more strenuous than some clicking around and creative graphicking. (I don’t think “graphick” is a verb, but I declare it to be, therefore it is. That’s what’s nice about programming: if you want something to be some way, you type a line, and it comes into being. It’s control freak heaven.)

My final class is Spanish 5-6, which will be my third year of it. I’m certainly not fluent, but I can write Spanish really well using a dictionary now that I have a good grasp of the grammar and stuff. This year is supposed to be a project year with lots of culture and history, which sort of sucks, because I’d rather just learn the language and get it over with. Then there’s the fact that I’ll be in a class with lots of juniors and seniors and hardly any sophomores (spl?), since I’m a year ahead. Luckily, since CSHS only requires two years of Spanish, most of the junior idiots and jocks won’t be taking it this year because they will have already gotten their two years, so I should be with people who actually care about learning the language.

And that’s it. It’s not so bad, when I take a step back and look at it, but it won’t be easy, and it’ll certainly be harder than last year. Most kids I’ve talked to have said that sophomore year is hardest because you have lots of work and still two years until graduation. At least with junior year you’re nearing the home stretch. It was the same way in middle school, sort of: sixth grade was easy with easy teachers and assignments designed to not scare kids back into elementary school, seventh grade was a good deal harder, with semester-long electives and harder teachers, and eighth grade would have been a bit easier, except that the teachers were all trying to “prepare us for high school,” though I think they went a bit too far. There were lots of threats of burning yourself out and how teachers would be ruthless, but that really isn’t the case.

It is funny, though, how some students will get themselves on a teacher’s blacklist (I’d say hitlist, but not all teachers want to go that far) by being a general prick, and then complain to their friends how everything was unfair and that teacher was, if male, gay, and if female, a bitch. And then they would go on to say that everything else was gay, like “School is gay!” or “That kid’s gay!” or whatever. I think some people are so scared of the occasional homosexual thoughts that they have (c’mon, everyone thinks of something wrong every once in a while) that they have to make sure the entire world knows that they are vehemently straight by trying to label everything gay. And then it turns into the word everyone uses for something they don’t like, even though it usually doesn’t make sense. And if someone from somewhere else happens to hear them, that person might think, Why is that kid calling school happy? What a nerd. So it ends up being a stupid thing to say no matter how it is construed, not to mention the fact that it would be considered a severe insult if a person who really was homosexual happened to hear it. Unless the homosexual person is in denial too, in which case he’d probably agree.

It’s complicated. Kids need to find a new buzzword. I just say, “Wow, that sucks,” or “Ha!” if someone starts complaining at me about something. But if I complain at someone else, they just call it gay. I proceed to give them a confused look and leave. This look awakens deep-seated insecurities in the complainee, and thinking that I have somehow discovered their deep secret, they run off to tell someone else that I’m the gay one. Or that someone else is; it really doesn’t matter who. I should probably note that I don’t have anything against gay people, though I still think it’s a bit unnatural.

In another year or two the craze will hopefully die down, and all the laws allowing gay marriages will have been passed, so that we don’t have to be reminded about it constantly anymore. And if they keep having “homosexual” awareness parades, they should have “heterosexual” parades too. Or we could just combine them and call them “anyone who feels like parading” parades, in which case I wouldn’t attend because Phoenix is too damn hot for parading. Pool parties would work. Or better yet, pool party parades, where they dig up Central Avenue and put a pool in all the way down its length, and then the paraders swim rather than walk. The marching band wouldn’t fare well; I’ve heard a waterlogged tuba before, and it is not a good sound.

This happy, parading peace won’t last though, because then the Lobbyists will gather in Washington and try to repeal aforementioned laws, thus undoing about ten years of work. Pool party parades will cease, and Central Avenue will be filled back in, finally allowing some angry commuters the means to get home from work. After a few axe-murders (having to wait in your car for a year or so while people swim by would be pretty frustrating), we’ll be back to square one. And so it goes.

I had originally planned to write about work vs. play, and somehow I never got to it, so rather than keep that stuffed up in my large head for any longer, I’ll add that in too. You can stop reading now if you want. This makes me remember that part of the movie Babe where the farmer dude looks down at the pig after they’ve won the sheepdog competition and says, “That’ll do pig, that’ll do.” Others might recognize the line from the first Shrek, where the ogre says to Donkey after crossing a rickety bridge over boiling lava, “That’ll do donkey, that’ll do.” I think the donkey was more deservant of praise, myself.

Um, anyway…. Jim and I have already decided that this year is going to be painful for us. I don’t mean “saw me open with a rusty chainsaw” painful, but even worse, “melt into the ceiling” painful. My friend Dylan has already opted out on AP Euro, though he had planned to take it. Normally I’d try to talk him into staying with it, but I did the same thing last year with AP World History, and under the circumstances (he’s a really good golfer, and must practice a lot), I can’t blame him.

I think my time can be divided into points with eight categories: School, Friends, Sleep, Hygiene/Food Intake, Sports, Hobbies, Family, and Business. With a total of 50 points to use up, here’s how it would break down next year:
School: 18 [7-hr school day, homework, bus ride]
Friends: 2 [some nights 0, points would accumulate during week]
Sleep: 14 [this equates to about seven hours]
Hygiene/Food Intake: 4 [about one hour for meals, lunch not included; includes time spent getting ready for school/bed, going to bathroom outside of school]
Sports: 0 [not enough points left for this]
Hobbies: 4 [includes PHP, LitMag, reading, various other things; not much time for all of that]
Family: 2 [includes chores, points accumulate over week]
Business: 6 [includes all websites done for money, checking/responding to all email, etc.]
I don’t know how well I’ll do on a seven-hour sleep regimen. Eight would be better. Anyway, the fact that my time will become incredibly valuable is going to mean that concessions will have to be made in certain places. I could cut back on school, or do less business stuff, or stop doing my chores and incur the wrath of my cat, or quit tinkering with PHP and Linux and possibly lose the best skill in my arsenal. Like anything, programming must be practiced for the programmer to stay in best shape. I know grades matter, and being valedictorian or salutatorian and getting major scholarship dough would be convenient, but I just don’t know if that’s really what I want. And though I have a small college fund somewhere and my parents will probably chip in a bit, I’m going to need some kind of scholarship, a considerable amount if I’m going go to Caltech or a major technology school. However, this is completely disregarding the fact that my business is growing, and that by the end of high school, at a consistent $1,000/year, I could have about $2,500 by graduation (this is subtracting out the cost of my computer).

And $2,500 will most likely be a low estimate, since my real earnings right now amount to more like $1,600/year (though there have been upside surprises), and I’ll probably be raising my rates within the next year or so. It’d be cool if I could gather a small army of kids with my skills and unite them into one company where we all share the profits, but so far I haven’t found a single person with even the interest to learn what I know, though Jim has expressed interest in learning HTML. If he’s quick and I can drill it into him by December or so, we might be able to found our own company. Even if we weren’t incorporated or LLC-d, we could just pretend that we were, present customers with a pretty, professional company website, and we’d be set. It’s truly amazing how much business there is out there, if you have enough connections and know who to talk to.

For example, as I’ve written many times, I did a wedding website for my uncle not long ago. Now it just so happens that my uncle is a stock broker with dozens of clients and my new aunt has a big family with lots of prospective clients for me. And not only that, but my new aunt’s parents paid for a big, nice wedding, and I believe nearly 300 people attended either the wedding or the reception. My uncle used the website as his main means of notifying guests about where everything was happening, so it’s had almost 500 unique visits in about a month of being online. I slipped my name and a link to Brettia in at the bottom of the page, so those 500 visitors all saw that it was me who did the site and could click the link and find all my contact information and more information about me and my services. I had lots of people tell me that they might have work for me, and I’m already in contact with one of them.

So business is doing well, and to stop would be to get rid of what could end up being a very lucrative revenue stream for me. (In other words, my only revenue stream.) And this brings me to what I wanted to write about in the first place, the continual struggle between business/school and hobbies/friends/family, or simply work vs. play. I’ve always been a bit of a workaholic, but I’ve gotten more laid back in recent years. Whereas I used to do my homework immediately upon getting home (in 5th and 6th grade), I now do it at 8:00 at night or sometimes later. But I also have a lot more to do now than I did then: my life no longer consists of school, family, and reading. (Which was really pathetic, and I haven’t improved by much, but I’m still better than I was.)

I’m caught between the desire to do what I want and the reminder from my conscience that I need to do something else. For example, on a normal day I might arrive home and find that a new version of a major Linux distribution has come out, with all kinds of new features and an updated kernel. My first instinct is to fire up a BitTorrent client (BitTorrent is a peer-to-pear file download system for large files, necessary because Linux distros easily top two gigabytes in size) and start the download, which might be completed in two or three hours, depending on how many people are trying to download at once. Then burning it to install CDs could take another hour and a half because of my slow burner, and the installation can take from one to two hours, on my slow system. Then I might spend another hour looking at it and experiencing pure joy from all the new features and changes.

So, in total, I use up four hours of background time, where I can do something else while keeping an eye on the download or CD-burn, and two hours of direct time, where I can do nothing else at the same time. Unfortunately, these events often occur on nights when I have a lot of homework (which, next year, will be every night), so I end up with an assignment to do at 10:00 at night. You would think that I’d be smart and use the background time to do homework, but that doesn’t ever end up being the case.

Therefore, I must be a good little boy and figure out a schedule that works for me. Here’s one idea:
Average Day:
7:00 - 7:20 | Wake up, get dressed, eat something, go to bus stop.
7:20 - 7:50 | Bus ride. Catch up on assigned readings or read my own book.
7:50 - 8:10 | School, before first bell. Get stuff from locker, talk to friends/Trapani.
8:10 - 2:30 | School.
2:30 - 3:00 | Bus ride. Catch up on assigned readings or read my own book.
3:00 - 3:30 | Watch TV, cool down, get a snack.
3:30 - 4:00 | Check email, daily websites, post on Brettia.
4:00 - 5:00 | Homework Phase I: work on anything due the next day.
5:00 - 6:00 | Business stuff, if no business, tinker as per what is new for that day. Or, write on this blog.
6:00 - 6:45 | Dinner/clean up afterward.
5:45 - 6:15 | Finish any HW not done before dinner, if nothing to do, move on to Phase II below.
6:15 - 7:30 | Homework Phase II: work on longer term projects, essays, etc. Extend time to 8:00 or 8:30 if need be.
End of Phase II - 10:00 | Tinker, do whatever. Go to bed at 10:00 for nine hours of sleep, but 11:00 or 12:00 is fine some nights if HW load is heavy.

Very cluttered, but weekends would be generally free if I work hard enough on weekdays. I’ll figure something out. Right now I’m trying to come up with a good name for my web design company, so I guess I’ll finish early. Bye for now.

Check this Out

DiedOnline, a website that emails your friends and family if you die. Interesting concept.