i don’t mind and your words were very encouraging. afghanistan has a women’s soccer league and taliban restrictions have lessened there. even though women who are ‘honor-killed’ aren’t publicized for the shame of the family some of it has been shared in the news to tell people that it is not right to discriminate and harm people. even though i’m still self-conscious of what others think of me, i still do what i want. i won’t be the girl with fashion and make-up, but someone who is smart and enjoys whatever is comfortable. my inner bully is really irritating at times and tells me ‘you are being stupid. look at how others are viewing you. why are you doing this?” my motto is to be yourself and stand for what you believe in, even if you feel self-conscious. there is a girl at my school who is bullied b/c she is goth and she has purple streaks in her hair and often has a cat ear head band and always wear shorts. i always offer her a smile and i even like the music she listens to. there could be a lot of people staring at her or she could be sitting around alone and i wouldn’t care what others say b/c i know what it’s like to be different so i befriend her. she has a great sense of humor and is a great artist. of course my parents a bit stereotypical so they think she’s strange. i don’t care when people laugh, i say “so what? they don’t know her.”

it does take a lot of patience to deal with the inner bully, but i have been forming new thought that work on uprooting the inner bully when it is there. i imagine the inner bully as a weed and i get a shovel and i uproot it, the holes left there are annoying b/c the inner bully goes back and tells me that i have limitations that make me a bad person, so i fill those holes with flowers. i am creating a garden in my mind of flowers. i like solving limits algebraically than using the graphs or tables. graphs and tables are still a bit confusing, but they’re starting to make sense. a limit is “is the value that a function or sequence “approaches” as the input or index approaches some value.”

so the limit as x–>0 of 5 is 5 since as x is approaching zero, the function is getting closer to 5. finding limits with sine, cosine or square roots and fractions is a bit more complicated b/c sometimes they have undefined values or the limit does not exist such as in this case: lim x–>0 of 1/x. if you were to plug in zero for x, it would be undefined. however with limit problems, you should always check to see if there is another way to solve them b/c some functions do have limits that you have to solve for a finite value.
this is the basic idea of limits, but they get more complex as you have to graph them b/c sometimes their is an open circle for the points that are not continous and a closed circle for the ones that are. limit values have many different graphs as long as it follows the rules, which is one thing that i am still working on.
arrow means approaches

i spent the lunch period taking the multiple choice test, it was really long and took a whole 2 hours. my classmates all stayed during lunch and many were so nervous that they didn’t eat much lunch. everyone seemed jittery and there were many pencils and papers rustling. it was an open notebook test, but it was still hard. i think i got 15 wrong and skipped three questions. there were 97 questions. i think i may have received at least a 65 on it. i learned a lot about limits today in ap calc and there are still some things i need to review. i’m a bit nervous about my grades this year because for the first ap calc test i received a 75. my grade is an 87.5 in ap calc and a 86.4 in ap biology. my special friend seems stressed today and i feel bad for him, i was busy trying to get to class and just brushed by him.

there are 5/17 questions i need to ask my ap calc teacher on the review sheet before the test on limits on friday. i need work on finding points of discontinuity, working with square roots and also limits at infinity. i was doing great on limits until my inner bully snuck up on me during class today and told me that i was a loser and it made me really annoyed. i also have 6 questions i’m still unsure of in my ap biology test corrections which i took the test yesterday and received a 66 on it. my inner bully is being very aggravating today and keeps telling me that i am dumb, worthless and ugly. it makes me really mad. i sat at a table with dave and storm today for lunch. they were quite entertaining. storm was flipping his water bottle and making it twirl like a top. other people such as benton (he is really good with computers) let me read his book called shutter by Courtney Alameda and it is about ghosthunters and it was really cool. we had an assembly during the second half of second block ( seniors went 9:25-10:05) and the principal talked about making senior year the best year. steve (my former lunch buddy) was helping me with my ap calc hw during the assembly. after the assembly was over, my special friend waved at me, he could tell that i was stressed despite the smile i had on my face. so during lunch, he was walking around chatting with his friends and also looking out for me giving me an encouraging smile. i was still a bit stressed after school, but i saw my special friend riding his bike around enjoying nature and he invited me to come and enjoy the scenery of the trees. we listened to music and felt the wind on our faces and soon i was laughing.

I like your analogy of the inner bully to “Green Eggs and Ham.” I read the book a couple times and I think I can still quote most of the passages:) i stayed after with my ap calc teacher and limits are a bit more clearer now. i am still working on understanding the trig limits with tan and csc (opposite of sine). so in school today, i had a successful battle with the inner bully b/c before it even built its polymer chain out of monomers, i caught it. every time there approached a thought in my mind that was something like this “you are noth…, you can’t…, you’re not this or that” i wouldn’t let it complete its sentence, i would say “i am great and i am capable of many things. and others things like it. as i was walking to homeroom, i was worried about my ap calc (1st block) during homeroom (transition between 1st and 2nd block usually on wednesdays for 10 minutes), so i was running through the equations in my head. my mind was filled with thoughts and i was quite distracted with solving things, so when my special friend looked at me, i ignored him. i felt really bad for doing that, but i had to focus on the problems from ap calc so we walked in silence for a while. i took a different route to talk to my former ap english teacher before going to homeroom and i think my special friend was sad to see me take a different route. anyway, i feel a bit guilty for avoiding him, but i had things to do. during 3A lunch, my special friend did a impression of me carrying my books and running, he is a good actor and our friends and me were laughing. in school, i’m always hurrying to class with my books b/c i like school and often don’t want to be late for class. anyway, when i forgot my books during third block ap biology and had to run to get them and was a bit out of breath (books are heavy and i was wearing a backpack). while carrying the books and running to get to class, i saw my special friend and he was laughing at how funny i looked running with heavy books and i also started laughing as well. anyway, he offered to help me carry the books. we had a drill where we left the building during fourth block and among a lot of the students, i spotted my special friend standing there watching the sky. he saw me looking at him and he smiled at me. it’s really cool how we can always spot each other no matter where we are. we don’t even have to use words to communicate. with him i feel whole and complete, but there is a part of me that holds back and that part is my inner bully who is afraid to let go. the inner bully knows that my special friend makes me feel truly alive and whole and it feels threatened that the host is escaping the parasite for a while so it tries to sneak in by saying little things like “you’re not good enough for him. what are you doing, you should be studying! go get a life you don’t deserve a chance, you’re too different to be friends.” i hate my inner bully b/c there are times when i really want to tell my special friend something and i can’t b/c the inner bully gets in the way. but i think my special friend knows i care, even though sometimes i may ignore him when i’m stressed, i still give him a smile from time to time. we usually don’t talk much in our first days of school, but soon we’re having fun. i wonder what college will do between me and my special friend, but i think we will let each other go and if it so happens we may see each other again.

i like my ap calc class because i realize a lot of the students are like me. we are all very ambitious and a bit shy on the first few days. i like the teacher because he makes math fun and explains things quite well. i feel more confident about the test tomorrow, but i should spend more time studying on some topics like trig limits which makes more sense now. we got our books today in ap calc and i’m glad:) thanks for being very encouraging saying love will win b/c i have gone through half of my classes and the inner bully hasn’t even spoken a word:D also my special friend understood that i was busy yesterday and asked if i was okay today, he seemed quite happy and we had fun talking about nature. my former lunch buddy helped me with ap calc questions and they are getting more fun to do and my brain is building up in knowledge.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by Janus.