I'm stuck wishing I could be someone else. It is very frustrating. I think I am not weird enough to be considered a truly good, weird, homeschooled freak, and yet my normalcy is lacking is some pretty fundamental ways which, along with the obvious unpleasantness of the scheme in the first place, prevent me from being what is called "a normal person". I am lazy and I sit around accomplishing nothing all day. This in itself does not make me unhappy. The discomfort comes both in realizing that other people with whom I compare myself actually do accomplish things, and in reflecting that all people above, below, and around me expect me to accomplish things. There are bug bites all over my legs. Sometimes I feel like Harriet the Spy (in other words, psychotic) but mostly I feel like a failure. This is a premature feeling because I haven't really failed at anything YET. However, I can tell from where I am that I wouldn't want to be in the place in which I realized I was a failure. (I am not even going to ask you to make sense of that one.) Don't mistake me, though, all this introspection took place in less than a few hours, so it's not like I sit around all day accomplishing nothing and reflecting on my failings. Yet that is not a wholly inaccurate portrait either. Other times I scrutinize the lines in my hands, but those are generally less conclusive. I also take pictures of myself, which I then download and store on my computer in a sort of digital "hall of shame" about which I try not to think. I watch good and terrible movies, which my mother obligingly rents for me. I hide from my father, who, perversely, does not enjoy seeing me waste my time. I read books, some good, some indifferent, which sometimes momentarily inspire me to do things, but the urge dies out rapidly, as do most of my inclinations to be productive these days. It is really a bad habit--a filthy habit, if the expression tickles your fancy--but one which I neither really want nor immediately need to break. In a general way, I think, "It is the second week of May. I should finish my second quarter in every subject. Then, I will finish each subject for the year in a week each. This way, I will get a summer." However, then I remember that Physics is both tedious and boring, that I really have no hope for my "May Magnificat" essay, and that I cheat on just about every test to get a good grade. This is being disastrously too honest so I'd better stop. I need a drink of water.