One of these days, I'm going to make a bunch of copies of AP practice tests, and use them as kindling to set the school on fire. Those BASTARDS! I wrote the fifth practice essay for the AP test yesterday in English. Except this time, we won't be "critiquing" each other's work, so I'll fail for sure. I suck at analyzing those stupid passages about pigeons and civil rights. Am I an evil person for hating the classics? I love literature, but I don't like to hack it to pieces! Jesus! I don't care if George Eliot used a cumulative sentence to better convey the meaning of her unbearable pain. I really don't. And while I see how learning that could help my own writing, I don't see how doing only this analysis and no writing of our own is supposed to help us in any way, except prepare us for some standardized test. As great a book as it is, I think that trying to figure out why Ellison's descriptions of the moon, the church, and the organ are related is going to ruin the experience of reading it for me. Mrs.Schnell said it would be life-changing, but I think it's only life-changing in that it made me choose honors English next year. Ah well.

You know, war is sort of unpleasant. Been watching a CNN documentary on WWII and D-Day the past few days, and man, is it ever depressing. Great hearing story after story told by these vets about how their buddies got their faces shot off by angry Germans 150 feet above them. It makes one realize how meaningless and devastating at the same time. You see, when we learn that 9,000 American and British troops died here or 2 million Jews died there, we take notes and write it down as a statistic. When we read Anne Frank's diary and get a personal account from someone who really stood up for hours, naked and packed in a train like sardines, while shipped to concentration camps where the biggest concern for the Nazis was finding the most efficient method of killing. Did you know that before Normandy, we sent 6,000 Canadian soldiers to "invade" (probe the defenses of) the French countryside? They were all massacred. A statistic known only by historians and sympathetic war protestors like me. Goddamnit, I guess I'm just getting tired of hearing about American tanks run over little kids, or bombs missing their targets and hitting apartments. War isn't about survival, sadly--it's about minimizing casualties. That's all strategists do. They don't save lives, they figure out how to waste the least.

Meh. Despite my dissatisfaction with, well, the human race, my life is really quite nice these days. Or at least, in my worst feelings of detachment or depression, I've got practically no work to do at all. And I've got someone really quite remarkable to turn to. Valentine's Day was 11 months for Larkin and I.