Whoa, it is time for a break! Everyone who reads this unfortunately gets to know what I do when I'm not with friends, working out, reading, or babysitting. Today, I was doing the strange, mysterious thing I do when I disappear into my room for many relentless hours. Well, I'll start off by explaining that I have an obsession with math. I love math. I realized that I did after elementary school, when all we did were the boring, stupid regular day calculations. I mean, seriously. How much fun is adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing? For crying out loud, it's practically mechanical. You just follow simple instructions on what to do to get to the answer, and do it. No thought. No mental power going into it whatsoever. And I know that sounds nice to most, but I like using my brain. I mean, come on. If I wanted to do mechanical crap, I'd work in a freaking assembly line. I like the stuff that requires trial and error, and lots of thought. Something that you can plug away at in grueling anticipation to get an answer that you can be proud of. Man, I write a lot of fragmented sentences. Oops. I guess I should work on my writing skills. Anyway, sixth grade was the first year that we got to do that stuff. Ms. Rewald gave us these awesome things called POWs, problems of the week. And they were all problems that were really tough, and required a ton of thought. She didn't expect us to get them right, because they were difficult. For each one, we would write up an explanation on our approach to the problems, and the reasoning we used to get the answers we came up with. I got them right A LOT and she liked my answers. I spent a lot of time on them. I enjoyed this type of math I'd never done before, the problems that required extensive amounts of logic. I soon found myself writing out my own special POWs in my spare time just for fun. I loved stuff like that. It was so much fun! When seventh grade came around, we got to do pre-algebra. Let me tell you...I LOVE ALGEBRA! It's so fun! I LOVE logical math, that's why. But after I grasped the concept quickly, I realized how slowly the class moved. I needed more challenging stuff where I could stay up late giving myself brain-cramps to arrive at the answer. Those types of problems are hard to find. One day, we had a sub, and she gave us this busy-work worksheet, with a bunch of questions that were like this: 10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1=? Now, this was stupid. This was mechanical. Addition. How fun is that? I decided to make a game out of it, though. There had to be an easier way of doing this. It reminded me of pyramids. You know? A 2D pyramid is what these basically were. There had to be...an easier way! I thought about it awhile, and thought, and thought. And I thought it would take longer than it did. It was rather simple, actually. All one had to do in order to shortcut these answers was to take the starting number, multiply it by half itself, and then add half of itself to the result. The equation would be like this: answer= n x 1/2n + 1/2n. I know this has been discovered before, as it is an easy thing to discover, so I went on to other things afterward. I figured out many things before they were taught to me. I studied the concept of cell division, and other numeric puzzles that took brainpower to figure out. Yes, I know I am a nerd. But I have found one of my passions. I love math, adore it. I enjoy figuring things out as much as many bums enjoy getting high on weed. Recently, however, I have taken on a much more difficult project than I have ever taken on before. I had this awesome teacher last semester named Mr. Hardy. He and I totally clicked, and I hope he's my teacher again next year. Anyway, I'd never shown my math teachers my findings before. I was afraid of what would happen. The only time I had ever told a teacher my findings, I had told my seventh grade math teacher, Miss Trent, what I discovered with the 2D pyramids. She snapped at me that it had been discovered before, made me feel stupid, and went on with her teaching. However, when we were studying area of trapezoids, and I was in one of those moods where I just kept opening my mouth and wouldn't shut up, I suggested to Mr. Hardy and my class that there was another way to calculate the area. Mind you, it was far less simple than the common way, but I like to be different. I showed Mr. Hardy a new formula that I decided to create on the spot, and it shocked him that I had been able to do it. He showed it to other math teachers to show them my mathematical ability. I felt like I could open myself up to Mr. Hardy, and show him the things I worked on. So I did. We had fun, he and I. He would often point out mistakes in my approaches when I was doing something and hadn't quite arrived at the answer yet. But I brought in a project that puzzled even him. The square pyramid. I know it is a simple matter calculating the volume of a perfect pyramid. All you do is multiply the area of the base by the height, and divide the result by three. However, there are situations I might mention where that wasn't entirely the equation needed to construct an enormous pyramid. What comes to mind at first is the Egyptians. They built humongous pyramids, and they built them with cube-shaped rocks. The method of which they did this was like this: if they were building a pyramid with a base that had a side of ten bricks, then the base was 10 squared, the next row was 9 squared, the row after that was 8 squared, and so on. Thus, I assigned myself the project of discovering what shortcut equation might help someone arrive at what amount of bricks one will need to use if they are constructing a three-dimensional pyramid so long as they know the amount of bricks they will be using on the base. I thought: oh, this is something I can deal with easily. One day, a couple at the most. What a joke! I found out just how complex squares are, just how difficult it is to figure out an equation like this. It sounds so simple, but in order to figure out something like this, one must tackle several other concepts as well: Several other concepts that each by themselves are more complex than the n x 1/2n + 1/2n. I am almost there. I just have to do several trials and errors and then do a megaload of calculations to test my hypothesis, but by logic, I am getting closer. However, I have put at least twenty hours into this thus far. Key words there: at least. Perhaps the way I'm going about this is a little more time-consuming, but I need to get it. I will not relax, will not be at peace, until I get it. But I will. I know I will. Oh yeah, I was going to talk about Mr. Hardy. I brought in my at the time current findings to Mr. Hardy, and asked him if he knew the answer to this. He was a math major, has a master's degree in mathematics, and he's never seen an answer before. He said that most of the math that we know now has been discovered by mathmaticians in the past hundred years. There is so much yet to be discovered, and it's an open field right now. Likely the ancienct Egyptians, who were very advanced and had a need for it, had this equation, but our current society does not. Now: what might they need it for? I have no idea. But you might be surprised how much people use math, and how important of a role it plays in every-day life for all of us. But I will find it! I will find it! I am a nerd, and I will find it!

Wow, it's been a week since my last entry. I can't say that I've been non-stop doing things, but I have been rather busy. I've been hanging with friends, practicing piano, and such. Saturday night, Dustin, Sarah, Garrett, Kim and I went mini golfing, went to Dustin's room to watch music videos, then went canoeing in our canoe on the Bow Mar lake. It was really fun! They are a fun bunch, for sure. Oh yeah...I forgot to mention we went to Dairy Queen, where I had a small Cherry Cheesecake Blizzard. That was fun too. I wish Caroline could have come with us, though, but she had nose surgery a couple weeks earlier, finally got the stupid stents out of her nasal passage, and then got stomach flu. That didn't sound like too much fun. Poor Caroline! And Caroline is one of those girls who is always running around, is always radiant and energetic, so when you see someone like her worn down, it's rather shocking. But yesterday, Annie, Sasha and I were hanging out. And we found Caroline, all fine and well at the beach. So we brought her over to Annie's house. And at Annie's house, we just hung awhile.I actually connect with Caroline, so it was kind of fun. When Annie and I are alone, we connect, but when Sasha is there, Annie closes up. So it was kind of discombobulating being around the both of them. But I luv them both, so no hard feelings...anyway, guess I'll go eat breakfast now; I'm starving!