I have learned my lesson.

This is really not something that I'm proud to blog about. But I need to blog about it otherwise I would never get over it.

Everything began with my noticing my 90 for the Lit MP1 grade is somehow lowered to an 89. Seriously, I'm not even kidding, if I were not a senior I would have never cared about this because 1) 89 and 90 numerically does not make any difference; 2) quarter grades won't show on transcript anyway and an one point really isn't going to affect my final grade that much--so if I were not a senior, I would have never cared to bother Mrs. Etra for some trivial stupid thing like this. But I did, because I'm a senior and I want to have a presentable midyear report, after all, 89 and 90 IS a matter of difference between an B+ and a A-. So I emailed her quite a while ago, she said she made a mistake and changed it. But I just found out recently that the grade change is not reflected in the "grading", which is what is going to be sent out as report cards and what is going to count for the GPA. So I emailed her a few days ago, asking her to fix it again. But, what happened is that, when I check it again, I realized that my MP2 (previously seen as B+ because I got an 88) became an A- as well. I considered the possibility that it was just her being nice but I mean, if there had been so many "mistakes", or whatever, it's totally possible that this is just another one. So I asked her to fix it again, and the main reason is that I don't want to be hypocritical--I've been bothering her all these times about a one point difference I don't want to all of a sudden be quiet when a "mistake" is favorable to me. But it turns out that it WAS her being nice and she wrote the longest email I've ever seen her write and ended that email with "Please trust me and stop giving me reminders." I'm not exaggerating when I say I'm kind of scarred for life. I can understand that I was being annoying (because it's senior year) and I show a general distrust of her ability, but all I have done was acting on my conscience and principles. Besides, I didn't know that she does subjective grading like Arod as well considering that my first marking period grade was strictly following the genesis grade. So this is another misunderstanding due to lack of information. Anyway, I can't believe my uprightness is actually seen as an annoyance, although I can see how the process of being so is indeed annoying. I try to put myself into her shoes and I still can't figure out why she would ever find it annoying so explicitly. If I were her and she were me, I would have just laughed it off and explained it without that last line. Actually, I wouldn't know. So never mind. My point is, I've learned my lesson:

I will never question the authority unless it is unfavorable to me to not do so.
When money suddenly falls down from the sky, take it, do not care about who it belongs or whether or not you deserve it.

John Lee Incident.

I have to admit that in newspaper I'm quite bossy and controlling; that's probably why I can't work with John Lee, ever--because he is so much like how I am.

Yesterday he asked me to do the layout for his page, I accepted. Well, because, frankly speaking, his aesthetic sense in layout did not impressed me much last year. I rather do it myself. Today we ran into a problem with a long comic (a vertical column strip). The comic was very detailed and look very impressive so I don't want to risk the quality by over stretching it although it would look much nicer if it's really big (maybe). I admit that I'm not too sure with how much exactly can a picture be stretched so I try to go with the comic's dimension as displayed in photoshop (6in) and try not to stretch it beyond 6 in long. John Lee, on the other hand, seems to have some unusual faith in the resolution of this particular jpeg image and believed that we can stretch it to fit almost the entire length of the tabloid paper without losing quality. I told him that I'm not going to do it because the artist spent A LOT of time on this I don't want to ruin it. His response was:
"hmm...ok. Can I change it then [after I do my layout]? I think I'm going to change it."

At this point I exploded and yelled at him. The underlying text is obviously "ok do whatever you want but I'm going to change it based on my opinion at the end anyway."

How am I supposed to continue working on this particular page if the editor implies that he's going to undermine my work anyway at the end? I was giving my "professional" opinion because HE ASKED me to do his page. I assumed that he gave me trust--and I was pretty surprised. But obviously he did not give me ANY trust. All he showed was skepticism and distrust. I can see how I'm trying to have things my way too, aka being a control freak, but I just don't understand how he can be so obnoxious like this.

Finally. Now I'm going to put this behind me.