I'm going to get straight to the point: I'm currently in the worst condition mathematically since before AMSP.

I got 0 on the most recent Interm PO (got 14 on PO1). I haven't visited Lemmas for quite a long time and I can't recall a lot of the configurations I've studied one or two months ago. I want to shoot myself for not getting full score twice on our school's AMC-8 level contest (ASMA). For some reason, I can't even chase angles now. I haven't touched the famous olympiad dropbox collection for a month now. 2 months ago, I was scouring through articles on Lifting the Exponent and cyclotomic polynomials and functional equations every free time I had. Now, I can't find the motivation to touch Binomial-Theorem's Olympiad NT article or my AMSP notes. 102, 104, 105, 108, 109, which I was doing problems from all the time, are now gathering dust on my bookshelf. Just recently on the OMO, I wasn't able to make any significant contribution for our team, which by the way did really well (22).

Words can't describe my disappointment in myself. I know I should be averaging 12-13 on modern-difficulty AIMEs. I know I'm capable of solving at least one to two problems per recent USAMO. But the mental stamina and aggressiveness just isn't there. The best analogy to how I'm feeling is like that of a star basketball player playing with a sandbag forcibly latched onto his feet.

When I get home from school, my to-do list and agenda is filled with homework assignments and preparation for assessments. School, I've realized, has essentially become a measure of what extent you're willing to hustle for loose balls. IMO, there's little skill attached to being able to maintain a high GPA. It's all about the pure-effort hustle plays, the diving for loose balls, the (not pragmatic) system of effort -> reward conversion.

As said in the previous post, by the time I've finally grinded through the intensive day of tasks which is expected of a junior taking 4 APs + Multivariable, my tank has long been emptied, and whatever juice my brain has left to spare automatically goes to thinking about tomorrow's tasks, tutor appointments, projects, etc. I'm still trying to squeeze as much time as I can for math - reading PFTB, doing WOOT problems, but the overall efficiency is drastically low, and usually my training ends up with me passively intaking information, solving zero problems.

The semester is winding down quick. On one hand, the concepts are interesting - chemical bonding theory (AP C), animations in Javascript (AP CS), random variables (AP Stats), partial derivatives (Multiv), ...newton's laws (AP Phys), Malcolm Gladwell (English), but my GPA is once again on the line - the end-of-semester single number that so many students attach their self-worth to really kills the point of the whole thing.

Worse, the first major school competition (Canadian Senior Math Competition) is in 9 days and the last thing I want is to not get a perfect on it (the hardest problem is about an easy JMO 1/4). Annoyingly, the problems are often extremely bashy and logic-oriented as opposed to tricks/techniques-orientated - aka requires a lot of brain juice.

I wish I can say more, but recently it's all about efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. Procrastination is the cyanide pill of a junior year student, so this post will end here.