French

I am doing hell of wonderful work in my French class. Basically I am doing "excellent" in everything except oral conversation. In conversation, I am subsatisfactory for fluency, and only satisfactory for accuracy, pronunciation, and comprehending conversation. Also I am not quite excellent with the fluidity of my writing. The actual comments are quite positive, and basically say "wow Matt you are doing great except that you never talk; talk more."

In short, nothing I don't know, but it's nice to know that my teachers agree with me on how I am doing in the class. It shows that I am right.

Also I did really fucking well on the reading comprehension (24.5/25). Heh, I am doing so much better now that I am actually putting some effort into it. In my writing class I am getting A's on everything, and in math, well, I hate that class because it is so easy.

I got a phone call from a church today, and apparently I am going to give a talk to some high schoolers about Buddhism. This should prove fun. I do enjoy doing this. I guess I need to start thinking about the kinds of things to say. I find that the best talks start off with basic debunking and fun facts, then some interesting stuff that is unexplained, and then a long period for questions. Thanks to part one, people have learned basic stuff. Thanks to part two, people have things to ask during part three. Thanks to that, people get warmed up and have an easier time asking questions they actually want the answers to.

I hate it when it's like, "so any questions?" and nobody has any, because the entire thing has been explained. Whereas, if you cleverly lay down some questions in the talk, listeners have something to go on. I will let you know how this works. You never know, I may well be laying down the foundation for how all great talks will be organised.

I just gave a bunch of my music lower more accurate ratings. I now have 551 songs that have 3 stars (awesome) or higher (4=outstanding, 5=favourite ever). I have 105 4-stars and 5 5 stars. Now I have a better base to build on for future ratings. Earlier, I knew this was my rating system, but I would still rate stuff one or two stars too high just because 2 stars would seem too low, even though it means "very good song." One day I will go through my 508 2-star songs and sort out the ones that should be one star, but that is a task for another day. (I will actually have to listen to them, because I don't know most of them by title like I do with the 3+ stars).

GOODBYE! MATT!