I am tired.

I am very persuasive. It's a talent that I didn't know I had. I've really noticed it a lot lately, though.

It goes like this:

6:30 am. Alarm goes off. It's not a pretty music alarm, or a light fading alarm-- just one that beeps impatiently in some off-key note. A travel alarm, actually. I haven't been able to find my real one.

I look at the time. I press the snooze button and start talking to myself (not aloud)...

"Good job. You totally woke up early," I'll think. (And really, I'm right. Six is an unearthly hour.)

I continue, "--and for that, you really deserve to be able to sleep a little longer."

It seems like sound logic to me: I did something good, I deserve a reward, and the reward I want most is sleep. So I flip the little switch that turns the alarm off, or doze in between times that I have to press the snooze button...

Until I finally actually get up at...when? Ohhhh, 7:30 am. Which is when I'm supposed to be leaving the house. And then I have to scramble to get ready as fast as I possibly can.

In the morning it seems to make sense, but when I think about it later, it kind of makes me laugh.

I have had two big tests that have returned me to "official college student" status by forcing me to stay up cramming until it starts to get light outside. Ah, the joys of summer school.

My math teacher has done a good job of keeping me awake, though. He says some of the funniest stuff, in his own little math-teacher way. Yesterday, he finished solving a problem on the board and he asked us "You like writing Solution Set?" He was talking about a way of writing the answer that goes like this: Solution Set {(1,3)}, where the answers would be 1 and 3.

We stared at him, and didn't say anything. He asks a lot of questions that he doesn't really want answers to. Yeah, we were quiet except for our class All-Star, who says he loves math, sits in the middle of the front row, and shouts out the answers to everything. "YES!" our All-Star shouted out, emphatically.

"Too bad," the math teacher responded. "That is tooooo much writing. You have to write this thaaaang, and a commaaa, and this thaaaaang... We will just puuuut a baaahhhhx." He boxed his answer.

He thought for a minute and added, "By the way. When you write the book, you have to be very formal. But we are not writing books." So. Since we're not all writing math textbooks, we're allowed to omit the solution set. Sweet!

And then today, we finished Section 5.4. We had 15 minutes of class left, and the math teacher said he wanted to do half of 5.5 and then we could go home. He wrote the title on the board:
Section 5.5 Nonlinear Systems of Equations.

"Do yeuuuu know what we will studaay in 5.5?" he asked us. Our class All-Star shouted out something that was wrong. "No. We will studaay Nonlinear Systems of Equations. Now we leeern somethaaang. Now we caaan go hoooouumme." And that was it. He put the section title on the board, and that counted as starting 5.5 so he dismissed the class.

He makes me laugh.

Two more little items of news:

I am on call for jury duty this week. And that could be exciting. I just called to know if I have to report tomorrow, and I don't. I'm grateful, because I have a temple trip planned with my mom and sisters.

Right before my little brothers left for a three week long vacation with my Dad, the neighbors granted us the privilege of adopting two manti. Lucky us. I think we should feed them to the skink. Not really. That would be mean.