Week 5 (Boys Golf Regionals and Updates)

 It's been another week so that means another post. I wish that I could write more about myself but so far everything I've done is kind of boring. You can expect more when clubs start up with competitions and when I have some more free time. I plan to start programming and starting projects to post on this website (inspiration from stuffbydavid.com). I may not be as good as a programmer to make full on games, but I want to work on some basic skills and maybe start a game once I get more experience. It will start as maybe simple programs like flipping or colorizing text, or making cool faces or symbols with java. With calculator programs, it's not much new to me, but I will go back to making helpful programs for school, especially for those that are struggling with it. Since I understand computer science logic a bit better, I feel that these will be improved more. Well, with the general information and future plans out of the way, I'll start on what happened this week.

On Wednesday, we had a golf tournament for regionals, coming in the top 3 would allow us to go into sectionals and past that is state. I ended up missing school again and playing in it at Orchard Valley. At this point in the year, I don't feel like I'm playing my best and the stress of Junior year is catching up to me, but I still managed to make a score that was close to counting for our team. We ended up tying for second place with Naperville Central, and Neuqa coming first. However, I'm not playing at sectionals since I'm not making much of an impact for the team right now. This may seem like a bad thing for me, but it is perfectly fine for me. I've missed school so much that I am very behind. I've missed many tests and have had to catch up on lessons and homework after getting home late. I feel like that not going is in one way a blessing that I don't have to worry about schoolwork. I can finally catch up on work that I need to get done and I don't need to worry about missing any more. This was a pretty hard point in my life that I got through, and because I got through it, I feel more ready for the rest of the year since it feels like the hardest part of the year is over. On a side note, there was also a math competition I could've attended on Wednesday. There were only 2 juniors that went out of 5 people that could've gone. We came second despite this challenge, and since there are many others that can go that are very skilled, I feel like math club is going to be in our favor this year. 

Coming up, there is the SAT and PSAT to look forward to. I feel like I can finally start studying for them since there is not that much going on. I really want to do well on these tests so I don't have to worry about doing SAT later and maybe getting a good PSAT score. As a side note, anyone who wants help in SAT math, please ask me, since being able to teach something means that I understand it more, so it's a win win for both sides. On the other hand, if someone excels at the Reading section, please send some tips because that's the main section I'm worried about. Also, it's crazy to me that we have to think about colleges and scholarships now. I have a couple in mind including National Merit (of course because of PSAT). There's a couple more that I've started looking into because of my extracurriculars as well. 

As a mental health update since I've mentioned it quite a lot in the last post, I'm definitely doing better since golf is mostly out of the picture now. There's still just one more challenge which is recording videos for ILMEA (Illinois Music Educator Association) to get into the district festival and hopefully the state one. Even though it's not as taxing as golf, it still requires a lot of effort since I really need to try and get them as perfect as I can to improve my chances of getting in. After this, violin and golf aren't major stressors on me, however I will still do both activities, just not as much as I would now or previously. This allows me time to figure out what I want to do with this and allow me to study more for finals. So to be honest, I'm quite looking forward to next week and see how different life would be and get a nice change of pace. 

Many of you guys have contacted me about doing this and I'm so glad I'm in a community that gives me so much support. I also want to cater to your wants, so please let me know what I should add to this, music choices, other clubs, outside of school activities, what I do during downtime, etc. etc. Feel free to let me know via Instagram or Snapchat (charlie.xliu), or maybe I'll make an anonymous poll so people feel more inclined to participate without being outed. This all depends on how everything goes with the initial reactions. Also, it has been week 5 and there are almost 300 views total on this. That means for every week/post there's been almost 60 views which may not seem like much to big influencers and celebrities. But considering that it's only been 5 weeks, that's just insane that there are that many people on here. Again, thanks so much for the support that I've received, it means a lot, even if I say it too much.

See you next post,

-Charlie