School's Picking Up

My German friends in NRW began their two-week fall vacation today. Though we don't get the same opportunities here in the US, we are taking full advantage of their first holiday weekend by organizing a time to meet and chat together online. I haven't had instantaneous contact with most of them since June. You can imagine how ecstatic I am about it.
They'll probably rub in the fact that they have a two-week break ahead of them. We've only been in session for three weeks, and most of my peers and I already could use a break like that. Today we had an English essay test on epics, the first timed English essay I've had in a long, long time. I think my long absence from translating abstract ideas into ink on paper showed. I also had a calculus test, which was very simple. The last question Ms. Jarnagin put on the paper was just a survey question, asking how we felt we did on her test. My answer: "I feel confident. Any error is a stupid mistake." I wish I felt so confident about my English or Civics work.
Actually, calculus will probably be more boring than I thought it would be this year. I imagined it as being a challenging course full of new, difficult concepts. Then the teacher showed some of the more difficult problems we'd do in class (just to show off how simple the class actually is), and I discovered that a lot of it is stuff that I did in my German math class. I never realized that those problems were calculus. They were introduced so gradually and slowly that I never even realized thtat the concepts were new. Remember how bored I was in that class? Well, this course will be faster paced, but the exact same concepts. And if that's what the hardest problems are going to be this semester, then I don't have much to look forward to.
Tonights away game was fun. Pacifica football slaughtered Rancho's. Pacifica pep band left Rancho's in the dust. We need to work on being more disciplined, though. People (mainly brass) keep on playing when we're not playing songs together, and it makes us look (and sound) unprofessional. They're louder than they think they are. Otherwise, the game was great. I got to hang out and chat with awesome people. Football games are basically social time with the altos and flutes and occassional brass player.
Cow Chip Bingo is tomorrow, and I might go just for the BBQ and hang out with the band folks. Later Miguel is holding a bonfire down at the pier with a friend of his from Cal State Fullerton, and Irene and I are going to that. I'm looking forward to that, too, because I haven't seen Miguel in awhile, and he's one of my best friends. He's maturing really fast, handling his life independently and responsibly. I've found myself looking up to him a lot in the last few weeks. I'm sad that our lives have branched apart and we don't have a lot of time to chat these days (we knew this was inevitable), but I'm glad that he's been finding himself, and that we're still pretty good friends, even if time has made our lives more distant.
Will I ever find time around all these awesome weekend activities with friends to get homework done? I sure hope so.