hey
Hello! Nice to see you again. You spoke so quickly, I see your response before the CCC prompt. (I just realized I haven't read the prompt to speak in, um, many turns.) Do most people talk about the prompt? Maybe I'm just strange, but I find it a little . . . boring, to be honest. Most of them, at least. Not that the prompts are bad! I think they're rather clever, being frank. But I suppose I've never liked having a predefined pattern for the conversation to follow. It's nice when you feel like you're ACTUALLY talking to somebody else instead of following a script someone else made, you know? And I think part of the reason that I love to be on here so much is that I DON'T feel required to fit a mold. They just want chatting, right? Well, I can chat. Heh, I can chat a LOT, apparently. And, more than that . . . I'm kinda determined to win. I think someone else is as determined as I am, which makes it difficult, but what do you do? I'm going to be off later today, which, um, is probably going to be problematic. Man. I have things I need to do, I just realized. Nothing too crazy, but I DO have to set up a schedule for math tutoring. It shouldn't be too hard; just time consuming. I'm thinking it shouldn't take me longer than, like, three hours at most. (I'm trying to be pessimistic with my time so that I'm not frequently surprised by how long things - take. I've been consistently wrong about how long things take.) But, the problem is, unless I want to be up until midnight tonight, I can't get started on it at all. Or, hang on, let me phrase that in a way that makes sense. I don't want to do the schedule right now because I'm worried that I'm going to lose my ranking. I've invested a lot of time into here. A LOT. Trust me on that. I think I'm nearing, what . . . fifteen hours? . . . which, okay, isn't that much. But it's still pretty consistent. Actually, if we go on the higher bounds of scoring and say that I earn 100,000 in a single hour, then with my 5.7 million points, that's . . . 57 hours? Uhhhhh, I don't think I've put in THAT much time. That's a lot. That's really a lot. And if we go on the flipside and say that I earned 300,000 in an hour, then at 5.7 million, that's still . . .  18 hours. Ooof. I have less of a life than I'd thought. There are two solutions to this, then. I either up my typing speed, or I spend more time chatting. Or both. Regardless, I'm not throwing 20+ hours down the drain because I wasn't willing to suck it up a few more days. Puh-leaze. I can handle a few more days. I worked a fast food job for a bit, and I would've gotten the same amount of hours in four days of work. I'm not ecstatic about having to babysit my score, no, but it's something I'm certainly willing to do. I . . . want to prove to myself that I can do it. I very very nearly quit early on. He was 1.5 million points ahead of me, and I just . . . oooh, I very nearly quit right then. 1.5 million points is, what, seven hours of talking? Maybe 10? He was so far ahead--and he continued to climb. The funny thing was (I may have told you already, so bear with me), I was planning on doing the same thing to him: get so far ahead that he loses hope of winning at stops - trying. It's a good tactic, apparently. *and Well, I asked myself if I really wanted to win, if it was worth it. I wanted an iPad, sure, but it was more . . . it was more that I'd told myself I was winning that iPad. If I couldn't do this, something that's relatively simple, how on earth am I supposed to keep my bigger commitments? *was I And when I was looking at that 1.5 million spread, something that looked bleak and hopeless, I had to choose. Do I fight my way back up, knowing it may be fruitless and that I'll lose every hour I invested into this? Or do I quit now? Because what's the point of investing time and energy and hope into something that was bound to fail, anyway? That last one was critical to me. I didn't want to hope for something I thought was impossible. Time and energy are something I had in abundance (though, I have arguably less now, for some reason). I didn't care all the much of I lost what I'd put into it already. *all that much if No, it . . . it was more the fact that I could . . . do it. That I, myself, could do it. That there would be a single winner, and that winner would be me. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for the prize; that much is true. No point in investing myself into something that's not going to pay. But . . . I also wouldn't be here if I didn't think I could win. I wouldn't be here if I didn't have a small fire within me that's calling me to do it. It's a very strange sensation. I've never been an ambitious person. It's not that I never did well in school or anything. I did. But . . . I didn't have my sights set very high. No reason to. I was content with being good with where I was, and there wasn't more to that. Well . . . I ran into a classmate a while back. I knew him, of course, but I'd never really gotten the chance to talk to him. I'm not even sure what changed. I knew he had internships to places, but . . . I don't know. One day, he came back talking about how he got this internship at Vanguard, and I asked him about his past and whatnot, where I found out that he'd already had four summer - internships, starting when he was sixteen. He was talking about graduate school and various other places, and then, get this, he started talking about Google. Yes, as in THE Google. One of the top five tech places to work. He landed a few interviews with them, and now he's just waiting the call back to see if he made it. (Technically, he has one interview left to complete, but he finishes this - week.) Somewhere along the way . . . somewhere, I think I gained a small ambition. Me, who's never been ambitious for anything aside from getting into BYU, suddenly had her eyes opened to a new world. A world where you can achieve so much if you set your heart to it. If the sacrifice is worth it, if the struggle is worth it, if the pain is worth it, you can go out and touch your dreams. Oh, whoops! I forgot this was still open. I got sidetracked. Well, ah, if you're not here by now, you probably won't be later. Hope I see you again, Pito! Uh, hey?