what's wrong with me?

Inspired by Katie's blog
This week I am going into cruise control. No, it's not an option, it's a statement. I feel like really don't have a choice. This is NOT coming from a senior. Sad, I know, but it's got truth in its foundations. With summer dangling in front of me like my favorite maguro sushi from Genki, especially rich, dark red and tender, it's too difficult to maintain my focus. If there were a Jimmy Cricket conscious hovering on my shoulder, he would be disappointed and take on the role of a drill sargent. "What are you doing, Sara? Pull yourself together, and shake off those cobwebs accumulating in your brain, amongst thoughts of the beach and fresh summer dresses. Those go on the backburner! This is crunch time, where you should be working harder than ever before! We're talking about the end of your all-important junior year!" In the back of my mind, I silently agree and tell myself to snap back into "robot student mode"... that is, If I could.
Autopilot has taken over my body. I no longer have the focus to do really much of anything. I've experienced too much second-hand senioritus and now it's killing me. That is why cruise control has somehow morphed into my body's natural mode. For instance, tomorrow is my math quarter test, which counts double for my grade. I need to do extraordinarily well since I totally bombed the last test. But am I prepared? Hardly. I was supposed to study yesterday as well as today, but I got distracted by an interesting phone call, and really, what teenage girl would rather study for math when they could be having a thunderous laugh attack, and unearthing juicy gossip! Okay, maybe the really dilligent and dedicated girls would. I should've been more like them, but sadly, I wasn't.
But why do I keep comparing myself to others? It's natural. However, comparing myself to myself through my academic career would be a bad idea also. If I think about it even more, one of the main reasons why I am so screwed is because this quarter/semester will be compared to last semester and sophomore year, where the living was easier and that showed in my grades. This is horrible, I should slap myself on the wrist for even thinking about this, but if I hadn't done so well, my grades now would seem like they were an improvement/maybe even good. So should I have done worse before to minimize the poor student image I am creating for myself now? Preposterous! This is totally the worst attitude I have ever seen myself have. I shall never speak about this again. Now I am a poor soul condemned to the confines of a textbook, thinking about my actions and regretting the apathetic mood I am exhibiting right now.
The worst thing about my whole attitude is that I am fully aware that it sucks, but I am too lazy to make much of a change. Actions speak louder than words, but right now, my words are drowing my actions tenfold. I wish I could just say that my work ethic has been leeched by Harry Potter dementors. If only that were a plausible explanation. But for now, I am going to have to suck it up and shift into overdrive because I know that if I continue my current attitude towards school, I am going to be in for a rude awakening later. Enough talk, let's get to steppin! I've got to figure a way to get out of cruise control.

The Excess Accumulation of Statements

Have you ever tried to lengthen a paper because the requirement was 3-4 pages and you said what you needed to in 2? Did you use longer ways of saying a certain sentence, or did you add extra "reinforcement" sentences that basically say what you already did, creating irrelevant and repetitive nonsense? I myself haven't really had a problem with making my papers longer, however, I believe that creating a paper "length" requirement can sometimes reduce the quality of the assignment. I was taking notes for AP biology on the chapter talking about the structure of a plant. In the definition of an axillary bud, it talked about a "lateral shoot" and then added on, "commonly refered to as a branch". I thought that was funny because I could picture people calling branches "lateral shoots" in an effort to sound more intelligent, and used in a paper if there was length involved. QUANTITY DOESN'T ALWAYS MEAN QUALITY, PEOPLE. I get so annoyed when people ask, "How long is your paper? Mine is about 5." I'm just like, "Okay that's great. So you wrote 2 more pages than the required. It could all be a bunch of *insert inappropriate word here*. If anything, I would focus on cutting down excess pages to see if there are more concise and clear means of saying what I have written.
Because students may feel pressured to have the paper be x length long, or x number of words, they may find themselves stretching out their sentences instead of efficiently creating sentences with concise words. They might even turn to being "Thesaurus happy" and using the thesaurus to look for a new "bigger" word in place of almost everything. For example, take the sentence "I used a pen to write my paper." In "this essay needs to be 4 pages" mode, the sentence could be "I grasped the ink spewing thin, cylindrical writing implement lightly and began to scribble the roman alphabet into organized rows on my thin wooden sheet." No no no that is bad. I know this is a bit of an exaggeration, but I'm pretty sure almost any student can relate/knows someone guilty of this. Teachers should not find that QUANTITY is what matters, quality is much better. I know a lot of teachers have already discoved this, but it should be reinforced. I would personally rather read a paper that may be a little short rather than a paper that is long and begins to sound like blah blah blah.It's falling on deaf ears.