It appears I have been greatly misled by my dad, who misunderstood a remark Grandpa made. What Grandpa said was that he might do Crowduck with just him and Grandma next year. What Dad failed to understand was that he meant a second trip: Everyone would go, and then maybe just Grandma and Grandpa would go a month or two later. So, Crowduck is on, and it was never off in the first place!
-I found out this much when I went to Oxford a couple days ago for Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa. I actually went on Christmas Eve and slept over. Uncle Joe was there, as he is every year, flying out from Oregon. Aunt Irene was also there; she (as I understand it) had come in to help Grandma and Grandpa around the house while and after Grandma was in the hospital with some sort of problem. Grandma is still a bit tender. I played a lot of pool with Uncle Joe, and, thanks to a quantity of beer, I actually gained a winning record (4-3) over him: unheard of! Christmas came. I had some stuff toward the stranger end of the spectrum this year, namely, from Grandma and Grandpa, a flashlight that you put on an elastic band over your head. However, in trying to think what possible use I could have for such a gift, I realized that it would make the perfect "headlight" for my biking forays in the dark. I also got a Swiss Army knife from Uncle Dan. And from Mom and Dad, I got The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, an exhaustive tool caddy (Mom got it wholesale from her job at The Hillman Group), a book called In a Far Country: The True Story of a Mission, a Marriage, a Murder, and the Remarkable Reindeer Rescue of 1898, and one other thing that I do not immediately recall. Oh yes, it was this year's 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said calendar. This year, the Grasshoppers passed to Uncle Dave. These things have been circulating in the family for about forty years. It's a little tin of Dutch Boy brand Fried Grasshoppers. Every year, the recipient gives them to someone else. I recall that when I gave them, I boxed them in a gradually enlarging series of boxes. I like to have a little fun.
-So now to get to the real meat of this post. I try to come up with at least thing to write about that, rather than just current events, is an opinion or something. Today I ask: What good are RPGs? Not Rocket-Propelled Grenades. I mean Role-Playing Games. My most immediate beef is with one that Micah plays. It's called RuneScape. I was surprised to learn that something called runes actually plays an important part in the game; I had figured, when he started playing, that they had found the word "rune" somewhere and decided it made a neat euphonious name for the game. Increasingly it's become clear to me, though, that whatever they're calling runes aren't really runes. I think a more accurate word would be "scrolls". That's not my point. My point is that RPGs are really an insidious thing. For one thing, they're not really games. A real game has a goal. The goal in RuneScape, as far as I can tell, is to "level up". Micah currently has about five characters, and the highest is at Level 59. The point of getting a higher Level is to be more powerful, I guess. There is no endpoint to the game, nothing you have to achieve other than stare at a computer screen and navigate a bad-graphics character (whose face you never really even get to see) around a bad-graphics medieval "world". The "world" resembles the constructs of a world you find in your dreams, where everything is scaled down except you, and you don't have a lot of motor control over yourself. I saw Micah's character wander across a "mountain range" whose tallest mountain was about fifty feet high and which was about an eighth of a mile long, but which was nevertheless covered in snow and inhabited by white wolves. It was enclosed by wooden fences at the borders of the property of a few farmers. Everything about the game is surreal. For example, unless you're in, as I gather, "The Wilderness", your character can walk right through any other character wandering around. The cities are guarded by large amounts of "guards", but what these guards are good for is anybody's guess, because not only do they just pointlessly wander (not guarding anything), but you can easily kill them and nobody even looks twice - not even the other guards. Once you've killed one, he instantaneously decomposes and youpick up his bones for some reason and bury them wherever you feel like: say, in a paved street, or in the floor of the Bank. That, as far as I can tell, is about all there is to the game. Amble aimlessly, kill guards and stuff, level up. And doing this, Micah spends at least three hours a day and usually more. (When I ask him how much RuneScape he's played in a day, he usually claims about two hours, but clocks hailing from the Real World beg to differ.) A game that has no explicitly stated goal. Seems to me a lot like this one thing I've heard of called "living". A game that simulates life! How grand! Well, the thing is, even if it were a good simulation, and it definitely isn't, it isn't life. All it is is a simulation. Our subject has transferred his time from the real world to this surreal 640×800 one. And he's so caught up in the excitement of having something to do there (level up) that he doesn't realize that the game is draining away his life. He feels successful, too, because he can quantify his results. "I leveled up! Now I'm at level 60!" Well, that's not success. It's nothing.
-This goes for every other RPG, too, because obviously they're all nothing.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Thank God Almighty, we're free at last!
I've ascended from a dive into the depths of a murky pond, and I'm now decompressing. I'm finally done with my college applications; I basically finished on the 13th. It's the first thing everyone asks me, so here is where I applied to: Miami, OU, Grinnell, Kenyon, and Carleton. Everyone says, "Why OU? It's just a party school." Well, for one, it's a safety, though I probably don't need one of those with my handsome record. For two, it has the prestigious E. W. Scripps School of Journalism, which could come in handy.
-Since coming up to the surface, I've finally had time for stuff that isn't colleges. The first fun thing I did was whittle a pawn. I've decided I'm going to whittle a whole chess set. This pawn might not be part of it, because I'm not sure that I like pine, which is what I carved it out of. I have a stick of holly, which feels like it should be good carving. I also have some oak, but that's most probably too hard.
-If I haven't mentioned, I've gotten pretty into chess. It's not like an all-consuming obsession, but I do tend to be very diligent in doing the things I like to do. Look at font designing, for example. I do it a lot. If not for hobbies, what would we fill our lives with? That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I play with Keith at lunch every day. We sit outside of the lunchroom on a concrete picnic table, even when it's cold (though we haven't had to worry much about that yet, about which more presently). Currently my record against him is 24-0-6 (6 draws). Keith and I went to Borders yesterday, because on Fridays, chess enthusiasts - and for some of them, "enthusiast" is clearly not a strong enough word, nor would "maniac" even possibly be - aggregate there and play each other. I beat Keith twice first, just to warm up. A guy stopped by our table, and Keith asked if he'd like to play me. He was about fifty or sixty, and looked like Dr White, or, if you're not currently attending Finneytown, imagine a slim version of the Gorton's fisherman. I played him twice, once as white and once as black. He beat me and made it look really easy. It was a little jarring to be on the other side of that for the first time in a while. I walked right into a knight fork with my rook and king, and I also gave him a pawn fork with my bishop and knight in both games. The second game was closer than the first, but not very much. He also beat Keith a couple times, just for fun. His name turned out to be Andy. After a while, a second guy came by. If you walked by him in any other context, you would never ever mark him as a chess player. He's a lean black guy who probably more than anything else looks like a hobo. I never did catch his name, but until I do I'm calling him Burma Jones, for which reference you should read the super and very funny book A Confederacy of Dunces. I came closer with him. I actually pulled off a couple nice moves, though he beat me in the end in both games. The second was no good, because I accidentally pulled off two illegal moves: moved my knight back two-over two, and somehow got both my bishops on white squares. Pretty embarrassing.
-I'm getting really frustrated with Cincinnati. Since I first decided that I like winter quite a bit, I've been paying attention to the kind of winters we've been having. Two years ago it was pretty good, but then last year's sucked almightily. I won't get into too many specifics, but I vividly remember sitting outside on a balmy day in January or February and seeing a fly calmly land on our bench outside. I figured this year we would surely be compensated, but thus far it's turning out even worse. We've had a total of two days this December below freezing, I believe, and about a half an inch of snow. There's not even going to be snow for Christmas. The typical day, has been about 50 or 60 degrees and quite often raining. Keith remarked as we were going home from Borders how much snow we would have if the temperature were below freezing. I told him we might as well say the same thing in Florida during hurricane season. Doesn't matter how much we could get if it were cold, only matters that it isn't cold and thus we're getting none, because Cincinnati is a tepid toilet bowl. Dad says it's going to end up being a really terrific winter, as soon as the weather takes a sudden turn toward the severe. He says last winter nothing happened because it just gracefully went from warm to coolish to warm, but this year we've got tension going on and that's what makes big weather. Well, we'll see, but ain't nothing going to assuage how much I hate having a green Christmas. (Chant: MinnesotaMinnesotaMinnesota)
-Today we went to, what is it, Dayton or Centerville? I can never remember which it is that Aunt Tami and Uncle Mike live in. Well, we went there and did Christmas. Nana and Papaw were there, and so were Travis and Jackie, and later, Uncle Jeff, Aunt Tanya (embarrassingly, I probably misspelled that), and my cousins Kyle, Katie, and Erica, and Erica's kids Emma (3) and Will (30 mo.), and Katie's boyfriend whose name I've already somehow managed to forget. Joshua? I think it was a J. We don't see this last bunch that often. In fact, I don't think I'd seen Erica for about ten years or something, and I don't believe I'd ever met Emma and Will. What are they? - they're my cousins once removed. I thought it was more exciting than that. I thought they made me an uncle or something. I think I should get at least some special term when I gain a generation under me. Well, in any case, they're cute kids. For Christmas I got some peanut butter fudge, a Borders gift card, and two Engrish shirts 1, 2. Also Micah and I got a communal sledding-type inner tube, which hopefully I'll be able to USE this year.
-That's about all I'm going to write for now. Because I now have free time, after the holidays I'm finally going to get around to writing about Crowduck. I understand that we may not be going this year. Hah! Not likely. I'm going to Crowduck, if I have to bike.
-Since coming up to the surface, I've finally had time for stuff that isn't colleges. The first fun thing I did was whittle a pawn. I've decided I'm going to whittle a whole chess set. This pawn might not be part of it, because I'm not sure that I like pine, which is what I carved it out of. I have a stick of holly, which feels like it should be good carving. I also have some oak, but that's most probably too hard.
-If I haven't mentioned, I've gotten pretty into chess. It's not like an all-consuming obsession, but I do tend to be very diligent in doing the things I like to do. Look at font designing, for example. I do it a lot. If not for hobbies, what would we fill our lives with? That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I play with Keith at lunch every day. We sit outside of the lunchroom on a concrete picnic table, even when it's cold (though we haven't had to worry much about that yet, about which more presently). Currently my record against him is 24-0-6 (6 draws). Keith and I went to Borders yesterday, because on Fridays, chess enthusiasts - and for some of them, "enthusiast" is clearly not a strong enough word, nor would "maniac" even possibly be - aggregate there and play each other. I beat Keith twice first, just to warm up. A guy stopped by our table, and Keith asked if he'd like to play me. He was about fifty or sixty, and looked like Dr White, or, if you're not currently attending Finneytown, imagine a slim version of the Gorton's fisherman. I played him twice, once as white and once as black. He beat me and made it look really easy. It was a little jarring to be on the other side of that for the first time in a while. I walked right into a knight fork with my rook and king, and I also gave him a pawn fork with my bishop and knight in both games. The second game was closer than the first, but not very much. He also beat Keith a couple times, just for fun. His name turned out to be Andy. After a while, a second guy came by. If you walked by him in any other context, you would never ever mark him as a chess player. He's a lean black guy who probably more than anything else looks like a hobo. I never did catch his name, but until I do I'm calling him Burma Jones, for which reference you should read the super and very funny book A Confederacy of Dunces. I came closer with him. I actually pulled off a couple nice moves, though he beat me in the end in both games. The second was no good, because I accidentally pulled off two illegal moves: moved my knight back two-over two, and somehow got both my bishops on white squares. Pretty embarrassing.
-I'm getting really frustrated with Cincinnati. Since I first decided that I like winter quite a bit, I've been paying attention to the kind of winters we've been having. Two years ago it was pretty good, but then last year's sucked almightily. I won't get into too many specifics, but I vividly remember sitting outside on a balmy day in January or February and seeing a fly calmly land on our bench outside. I figured this year we would surely be compensated, but thus far it's turning out even worse. We've had a total of two days this December below freezing, I believe, and about a half an inch of snow. There's not even going to be snow for Christmas. The typical day, has been about 50 or 60 degrees and quite often raining. Keith remarked as we were going home from Borders how much snow we would have if the temperature were below freezing. I told him we might as well say the same thing in Florida during hurricane season. Doesn't matter how much we could get if it were cold, only matters that it isn't cold and thus we're getting none, because Cincinnati is a tepid toilet bowl. Dad says it's going to end up being a really terrific winter, as soon as the weather takes a sudden turn toward the severe. He says last winter nothing happened because it just gracefully went from warm to coolish to warm, but this year we've got tension going on and that's what makes big weather. Well, we'll see, but ain't nothing going to assuage how much I hate having a green Christmas. (Chant: MinnesotaMinnesotaMinnesota)
-Today we went to, what is it, Dayton or Centerville? I can never remember which it is that Aunt Tami and Uncle Mike live in. Well, we went there and did Christmas. Nana and Papaw were there, and so were Travis and Jackie, and later, Uncle Jeff, Aunt Tanya (embarrassingly, I probably misspelled that), and my cousins Kyle, Katie, and Erica, and Erica's kids Emma (3) and Will (30 mo.), and Katie's boyfriend whose name I've already somehow managed to forget. Joshua? I think it was a J. We don't see this last bunch that often. In fact, I don't think I'd seen Erica for about ten years or something, and I don't believe I'd ever met Emma and Will. What are they? - they're my cousins once removed. I thought it was more exciting than that. I thought they made me an uncle or something. I think I should get at least some special term when I gain a generation under me. Well, in any case, they're cute kids. For Christmas I got some peanut butter fudge, a Borders gift card, and two Engrish shirts 1, 2. Also Micah and I got a communal sledding-type inner tube, which hopefully I'll be able to USE this year.
-That's about all I'm going to write for now. Because I now have free time, after the holidays I'm finally going to get around to writing about Crowduck. I understand that we may not be going this year. Hah! Not likely. I'm going to Crowduck, if I have to bike.
Saturday, December 9, 2006
Quick note
Just a quick post to tell you that I won't really be writing a post this weekend (chew on that paradox). Instead I'm finishing definitively my college stuff. I just did an essay about why Carleton and I go together well. It had a 2000-character limit. My essay, through no planning of my own, ended up at exactly 2000 characters. (Unfortunately, to achieve that, I ended up getting rid of the postscript at the end that said, "P.S. I also can't get enough of that Minnesota accent.") Look for me next weekend. As the Beatles said, "I'll be 'round." Those crazy circular Brits.
P.S. I hate my life: I just found out that the 2000-character limit was for Kenyon, and Carleton's was 400.
P.S. I hate my life: I just found out that the 2000-character limit was for Kenyon, and Carleton's was 400.
Monday, November 27, 2006
Montag
It is Monday. See, now, I've kept my word: an update every week or so. I couldn't do it on the weekend. I was too busy.
-I like Thanksgiving, definitely not least because it gets me out of school. A two-day week. Well, if they took out those two days, I guess Thanksgiving break would be on par with Christmas break, and we have to keep these things in perspective. Sometimes schools can be really dumb. Frequently, actually. Coming home today, I heard a girl on academic team (sorry, I'm horrendous with names) telling of how she went to elementary school at St Vivian's up the street. She says she once lost her recesses for a week for wiggling a loose tooth, and another girl (Lauren?) lost her recesses for a week for watching her wiggle her loose tooth. Also, if you had your homework in your locker there, but not physically with you, you would get a detention even though your locker might be less than one foot from your desk. Zero tolerance makes things really simple, but all too often the result is just nonsense. mp3 players are an example. Our school has a rule: no mp3 players are allowed out anytime. This is a good policy in dealing with academic classes, where they impair the ability of students to focus. But in study hall, enforcement of the policy is plainly dumb, because quite frequently there's nothing for a student to do, and filling the space with music hurts no one and keeps the student from wacking out. To the credit of Mr Nichols, the study hall teacher - no, "teacher" is much too strong a word, let's try "supervisor" - he doesn't penalize us for it, or maybe he's just spectacularly unobservant, because I haven't seen anyone get in trouble for a violation. But my brother got his mp3 player, Houston, confiscated for at least a month because he had it out in the lunchroom. See what I'm talking about, America? I'm sorry. I won't address questions to "America" anymore. That's Bernie Mac's domain.
-For Thanksgiving break we the family went up to West Virginia to meet up with other parts of the family. Every year we have a big family reunion for Thanksgiving. Of 65 people there this year (we counted off), I knew maybe ten. I have to take their word that these people are related to me. One guy was clearly Oriental, but I suppose he could have been related by marriage. It's held in a weird room. It's part of a church. It has office-style carpeting; there are gym mats lining the wall and a basketball hoop at one end, and at the other end there's a window let into the next room, a kitchen, so food can be passed through. On the wall above that window there's a reproduction of The Last Supper and another painting of Jesus, and on one of the other walls there are flags of various countries and States: West Virginia, Ohio, Russia, Uganda, and others. I have no idea how all these people know to congregate here. They're the backwoods type; I can't see them opening up an e-mailed invitation. I also don't know who would take the time to write a paper invitation to each of them and mailing them. My best theory is that either they say when it'll be the following year each year (easy for Thanksgiving, but I don't recall ever hearing when the other reunion - the one each year in the summer - is scheduled for the following year), or they have some sort of hillbilly Shining. "I'm picking up a vibe, Beth. It feels like Jim and Jackie. They - they're in trouble. They're stuck in the snow - no - no, wait - no, that's just static - Beth, turn off the TV. There we go. Jim and Jackie say the reunion is on June 15th at 3:00."
-After the reunion, we stayed over at Nana & Papaw's (they're Jackie and Jim, respectively) for a couple of days, with Aunt Tami and her kids Travis and Small Jackie. Uncle Mike had work. Dad, Travis, Micah, and I hunted deer. Nana & Papaw have a big hill to their name - I think they said something like 20 or 40 acres - and each year we hunt on it. This year Dad took me and Travis on Friday morning at maybe 0730. It was still below freezing out, and I wore gloves. Dad lent me his 30-30, and had me stick around at a tree growing on a mound. I had an expansive view of the hillside of the next hill over. The sun hadn't yet come up from behind it. I sat silently. The forest was more noisy. As the sun started coming up, I heard a noise of thousands of acorns falling into the leaf litter. They gradually became more frequent. It took me until I saw a water drop fall to the ground a few feet from me to realize that what I was really hearing was the forest melting as the temperature rose above 32. Then I started seeing: drops of water falling everywhere, catching the new light. It really is something terrific, you know. I didn't see any deer. In fact, after the sun came up sufficiently, which was by 0830, the entire hillside view I had was rendered hazy by a screen of light bouncing off the tree branches there, though I still kept watching intently. I heard noises - mice skittering around under the underbrush next to me, squirrels yelling things at other squirrels, and obviously birds on all sides. The most elegant symphony in quadraphonic sound still doesn't have that spark: something you can only get when you're outside in the middle of a giant space engulfing you on all three dimensions in, pretty simply put, life. Getting away from austere quadrilateral geometry and back to a place we all used to know. We all still do know it, I think, but most of us aren't aware that we do. It's like having a pen pal you never write to. It infused me with sanity and fresh air, and I feel recharged. I can take on stuff now. I can finish those bleeding college applications.
-Dad got a deer. Now, having just finished reading my praise of the forest, you might expect me to come up with some sort of sentiment about the sadness of it, taking a life. No, because I know that death is inextricably woven into the tapestry of the ecosystem. I don't feel more remorse killing a deer than a wolf does: well, actually, I do. I'm remembering the Indians who after all their kills would thank the spirit of the animal for providing them with their sustenance. That's something akin to what I'm doing. And I say that any meal prepared from this venison is both physically and ethically superior to beef, because the deer didn't have any constraints and was free to go, eat, and do whatever it wanted while it lived. I won't stop eating beef, now, in case you were jumping to some sort of conclusion like that, but the food that had a real life is better. Incidentally, Dad made a meatloaf out of some of it last night, and it was very good, but I could have done without the chopped-up sausage he added, which was kind of a weird touch.
-Academic team has started up again. Last game we soundly stomped Reading flat with our Varsity team, at a score of 36-13, but our reserve team lost by two points. Today we had another match, against Cincinnati Country Day (I still don't know what a "country day" school is supposed to mean), and we the varsity lost by two, whereas reserve lost by a handy 26-54. I think we might should reorganize our varsity. On school fronts, I'm finishing up college application types of things. I have several good essays, but I'm only really feeling a couple. The problem is that they're better because I was allowed more words for them (750 opposed to 500), and now porting them to another context that allows 2/3 as many words isn't going to be easy if I try to do it. Which I will try, anyhow. This weekend I hope to have everything finished up except for recommendation letters, which really are out of my hands. I've asked Ms Miller for one now, and left a message on Mrs Rudolph's answering machine asking for another. I got a pretty late start on asking for these. I was able to complete my Miami application because Mrs Browne wrote me a letter when I was completing my National Merit Scholar application. Today is the day I asked for the letters, whereas I should have done so probably sometime last month or before. But as long as I have them by the deadlines, I'm content. Actually, I think I'll ask Ms Miller and Mrs Rudolph if they can have mine ready a few days before Mrs Browne's deadline (13DEC), because OU requires all stuff in by 15DEC, and I don't want to put that much pressure on Mrs Browne. Alternatively, I suppose I could warn Mrs Browne that it'll be that type of close shave, and have everything in to her except the letters by the 13th, so she can get the ball rolling on transcript stuff. That's probably what I'll do, I think, because Ms Miller has a sort of "my own little world" pace that can't really be rushed.
-I like Thanksgiving, definitely not least because it gets me out of school. A two-day week. Well, if they took out those two days, I guess Thanksgiving break would be on par with Christmas break, and we have to keep these things in perspective. Sometimes schools can be really dumb. Frequently, actually. Coming home today, I heard a girl on academic team (sorry, I'm horrendous with names) telling of how she went to elementary school at St Vivian's up the street. She says she once lost her recesses for a week for wiggling a loose tooth, and another girl (Lauren?) lost her recesses for a week for watching her wiggle her loose tooth. Also, if you had your homework in your locker there, but not physically with you, you would get a detention even though your locker might be less than one foot from your desk. Zero tolerance makes things really simple, but all too often the result is just nonsense. mp3 players are an example. Our school has a rule: no mp3 players are allowed out anytime. This is a good policy in dealing with academic classes, where they impair the ability of students to focus. But in study hall, enforcement of the policy is plainly dumb, because quite frequently there's nothing for a student to do, and filling the space with music hurts no one and keeps the student from wacking out. To the credit of Mr Nichols, the study hall teacher - no, "teacher" is much too strong a word, let's try "supervisor" - he doesn't penalize us for it, or maybe he's just spectacularly unobservant, because I haven't seen anyone get in trouble for a violation. But my brother got his mp3 player, Houston, confiscated for at least a month because he had it out in the lunchroom. See what I'm talking about, America? I'm sorry. I won't address questions to "America" anymore. That's Bernie Mac's domain.
-For Thanksgiving break we the family went up to West Virginia to meet up with other parts of the family. Every year we have a big family reunion for Thanksgiving. Of 65 people there this year (we counted off), I knew maybe ten. I have to take their word that these people are related to me. One guy was clearly Oriental, but I suppose he could have been related by marriage. It's held in a weird room. It's part of a church. It has office-style carpeting; there are gym mats lining the wall and a basketball hoop at one end, and at the other end there's a window let into the next room, a kitchen, so food can be passed through. On the wall above that window there's a reproduction of The Last Supper and another painting of Jesus, and on one of the other walls there are flags of various countries and States: West Virginia, Ohio, Russia, Uganda, and others. I have no idea how all these people know to congregate here. They're the backwoods type; I can't see them opening up an e-mailed invitation. I also don't know who would take the time to write a paper invitation to each of them and mailing them. My best theory is that either they say when it'll be the following year each year (easy for Thanksgiving, but I don't recall ever hearing when the other reunion - the one each year in the summer - is scheduled for the following year), or they have some sort of hillbilly Shining. "I'm picking up a vibe, Beth. It feels like Jim and Jackie. They - they're in trouble. They're stuck in the snow - no - no, wait - no, that's just static - Beth, turn off the TV. There we go. Jim and Jackie say the reunion is on June 15th at 3:00."
-After the reunion, we stayed over at Nana & Papaw's (they're Jackie and Jim, respectively) for a couple of days, with Aunt Tami and her kids Travis and Small Jackie. Uncle Mike had work. Dad, Travis, Micah, and I hunted deer. Nana & Papaw have a big hill to their name - I think they said something like 20 or 40 acres - and each year we hunt on it. This year Dad took me and Travis on Friday morning at maybe 0730. It was still below freezing out, and I wore gloves. Dad lent me his 30-30, and had me stick around at a tree growing on a mound. I had an expansive view of the hillside of the next hill over. The sun hadn't yet come up from behind it. I sat silently. The forest was more noisy. As the sun started coming up, I heard a noise of thousands of acorns falling into the leaf litter. They gradually became more frequent. It took me until I saw a water drop fall to the ground a few feet from me to realize that what I was really hearing was the forest melting as the temperature rose above 32. Then I started seeing: drops of water falling everywhere, catching the new light. It really is something terrific, you know. I didn't see any deer. In fact, after the sun came up sufficiently, which was by 0830, the entire hillside view I had was rendered hazy by a screen of light bouncing off the tree branches there, though I still kept watching intently. I heard noises - mice skittering around under the underbrush next to me, squirrels yelling things at other squirrels, and obviously birds on all sides. The most elegant symphony in quadraphonic sound still doesn't have that spark: something you can only get when you're outside in the middle of a giant space engulfing you on all three dimensions in, pretty simply put, life. Getting away from austere quadrilateral geometry and back to a place we all used to know. We all still do know it, I think, but most of us aren't aware that we do. It's like having a pen pal you never write to. It infused me with sanity and fresh air, and I feel recharged. I can take on stuff now. I can finish those bleeding college applications.
-Dad got a deer. Now, having just finished reading my praise of the forest, you might expect me to come up with some sort of sentiment about the sadness of it, taking a life. No, because I know that death is inextricably woven into the tapestry of the ecosystem. I don't feel more remorse killing a deer than a wolf does: well, actually, I do. I'm remembering the Indians who after all their kills would thank the spirit of the animal for providing them with their sustenance. That's something akin to what I'm doing. And I say that any meal prepared from this venison is both physically and ethically superior to beef, because the deer didn't have any constraints and was free to go, eat, and do whatever it wanted while it lived. I won't stop eating beef, now, in case you were jumping to some sort of conclusion like that, but the food that had a real life is better. Incidentally, Dad made a meatloaf out of some of it last night, and it was very good, but I could have done without the chopped-up sausage he added, which was kind of a weird touch.
-Academic team has started up again. Last game we soundly stomped Reading flat with our Varsity team, at a score of 36-13, but our reserve team lost by two points. Today we had another match, against Cincinnati Country Day (I still don't know what a "country day" school is supposed to mean), and we the varsity lost by two, whereas reserve lost by a handy 26-54. I think we might should reorganize our varsity. On school fronts, I'm finishing up college application types of things. I have several good essays, but I'm only really feeling a couple. The problem is that they're better because I was allowed more words for them (750 opposed to 500), and now porting them to another context that allows 2/3 as many words isn't going to be easy if I try to do it. Which I will try, anyhow. This weekend I hope to have everything finished up except for recommendation letters, which really are out of my hands. I've asked Ms Miller for one now, and left a message on Mrs Rudolph's answering machine asking for another. I got a pretty late start on asking for these. I was able to complete my Miami application because Mrs Browne wrote me a letter when I was completing my National Merit Scholar application. Today is the day I asked for the letters, whereas I should have done so probably sometime last month or before. But as long as I have them by the deadlines, I'm content. Actually, I think I'll ask Ms Miller and Mrs Rudolph if they can have mine ready a few days before Mrs Browne's deadline (13DEC), because OU requires all stuff in by 15DEC, and I don't want to put that much pressure on Mrs Browne. Alternatively, I suppose I could warn Mrs Browne that it'll be that type of close shave, and have everything in to her except the letters by the 13th, so she can get the ball rolling on transcript stuff. That's probably what I'll do, I think, because Ms Miller has a sort of "my own little world" pace that can't really be rushed.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Let's see if I remember how to do this.
[Note: This is really long. Start when you have time to finish.]
I've been busy, but I can't really pretend that I've been too busy for two entire months to write something for you folks to digest. You must feel hopelessly deprived. Or annoyed, or possibly hostile. The real reason, I think, that I haven't written is that I didn't feel like it. And also I didn't really think about it. I want to tell you that I'm going to post weekly from now on, but I hesitate because there might be some weekends when I don't.
-School has sucked this year. Ironically, on 30OCT, we got senior treats - little bags of candy that they use to make us think the school is nicer than it is. They said, "Hope you're enjoying the best year of your life so far!" Yeah, right. For some people, I bet it is. But I'm taking five AP classes, so not for me. I also really hate college application stuff. I believe I've noted before that they cause me to be unable to enjoy my life. Whenever I have time free, I have to do some college thing or other, and if I put off doing it because it's something I severely don't want to do, such as write an essay, which it always is, I feel guilty later and I'm also one moment closer to the deadline without having done anything. That's why I've decided I'm going to just get it over and done with as soon as I can. What I have left to do is get a couple of teacher recommendations and write a really good essay. I finished one today that I think is pretty good, but it could be at least twice as good if I were allowed space to write all I want. Five hundred words sounds like a lot, until you realize it's about two thirds of a page. I can't say anything meaningful in a presentable way in 500 words. I've been conditioned by years of freedom in my journal each night to write as many words as I want, and losing that freedom has really crippled me. However, condensing the essay into only the indispensable points, I was able to get it down to about 560 words, and I think I'm going to leave it at that. I doubt very much that the admissions committee will deny me entrance because I used four more sentences than I was supposed to in my application essay. The next step is to reread it at a later time such as tomorrow and make sure it's the very best I can possibly write on that topic in that space. The topic, by the way, is that writing helps me think, and I've had a better life ever since I started writing in my journal each night, because I have to examine the things I've done each day, and through a process mildly reminiscent of natural selection, I've weeded out all the thing I do that are useless or simply waste time. I mentioned in there my commitment against TV. I think it's kind of neat because, at the start of the essay just after I introduced the topic "Writing helps me think," I said, "By the time I finish this essay, I'll probably have had some new insight that I've never had before," and I ended it saying that if I write in a journal and my life has become so much nicer because of it, I'm going to start advocating journal use amongst my peers, which is of course my insight. In following with that, I'm going to tell you right now: you ought to get a journal. A blog doesn't count. It has to be something you can keep private if you want to, and something that's concrete. I recommend the excellent "Leather-Look" journals from the Miquel Rius company; I use the version with 600 pages and I get them at Barnes & Noble. They've lasted me about two years apiece, and I write a lot. The paper is gridded, which I find terrific, but it may not be your thing, in which case you can look at the rest of the fine selection of empty books at your local bookstore. Write in it every night, about what you did, and what you think about whatever you happen to be thinking about. It really is something special. I especially like being able to flip through the pages I've already filled and read things and remember stuff I'd forgotten about.
-Things have happened this year. The most significant was the accident. I called up my friend Aaron a few Sundays ago to ask if he wanted to come play krokay. His mom answered and said he wasn't there but he'd have him call back. Then she said, "I presume you're calling about the accident?" I said no, what accident? It turned out that two guys I knew well, Bryce Walters and Andy Hughes, had gotten in a car wreck. Bryce was back at home, but Andy was still in the hospital. Over the coming days, Andy stayed there. Rumors circulated. He was dead, he was braindead and on life support, they were pulling the plug at nine o'clock, he was doing a lot better, he was in critical condition. It was impossible to become any better informed than if you knew nothing. Then on November 3rd, we heard it over the PA system. Andy had passed away the previous night.
-It's the polar opposite of fair. The other car was a big black SUV, with no headlights on, and the driver was drunk. Until these things happen, you never comprehend the scope of them. Even though I've never met his mother, I kept imagining her sitting on her bed with her head hung down. It was a sudden calamity. There was no time to prepare. There was nothing that could be done. It was a sudden ripping out of the heart, and it shouldn't have been, but it was. It makes me really sick.
-As the saying says, though, life goes on.
-I've recently become seduced by chess, after a sudden impulse drove me to make Mom find the book Chess for Dummies - she had previously removed it from its proper place in one of her mad cleaning sprees, and it ended up being in a garbage bag in the shed. Why does she do this? It's only hiding the problem. What Mom does isn't cleaning, it's hiding. True cleaning, I'll have to remember to emphasize to her, involves (1) throwing out stuff that needs to be thrown out - a subjective distinction that she always takes too far when it's other people's stuff but not nearly far enough when it's her own - and (2) putting the rest of stuff in its proper place (Mom puts everything in my room on top of my bed, rendering it useless for sleeping, and then leaves without completing the job by putting the stuff away). But I have strayed from my topic, which was chess. There's not really all that much to say. I've been reading Chess for Dummies, and it's a very good book, and as such I've gotten far better than I was, but I'm not going to be in a tournament anytime soon. I can beat Mom pretty consistently. I haven't played but one game with Dad, who's a tournament-level player (5th place in something about twenty years ago), and that game was a tutorial rather than a competition - he told me which of my moves were bad, and told me how to make them good. I carry around Dad's chess set at school to have something to do during lunch and the study hall bell every other day in the biology room, and on the whole I've probably lost more than won. These kids keep referring to chess learnings they've obtained that I never suspected. They know how to do it. But I've still won a few. I'm talking here about the kids who can actually play, not the kids who know the various ways the pieces move and nothing more (of who I've played, Gabby and Keith). I look forward to continuing improvement.
-On the krokay front, I've still been playing. I found a second site in Warder, within walking distance, and I've played a few games there, with Keith and Xinglai. Xinglai is an exchange student, and I bet you thought she was from China, but she's from Germany, and she's of Chinese descent. As all the exchange students tend to be (and as I figure I might be too if I were one) she's very nice and sort of standoffish. She was a bit idealistic about krokay the first time and wore some nice shoes, which unfortunately became wet with mudwater, but I lent her mine, cleaned off hers with what paper and such I could find, and went barefoot (I rather enjoy going barefoot actually, but I suppose to her it probably looked like a selfless sacrifice of comfort for her sake). Keith is the man who left the last comment on my previous post. DUTCHESS!! Dutchess is his pet bunny. Properly, "duchess" is spelled without a t, but Keith doesn't let that bother him; he spells it with a t regardless. It really doesn't matter, so I'm not going to write any more words about it. His other pet bunny is Mocha. MOCHA!! He loves to yell out DUTCHESS! and MOCHA! in school and pet people on the head as if they were his bunnies. We predict that by the end of school, everyone will know who Dutchess and Mocha are, and that's precisely why he's going to bring either one or both on the last day. We're going to have fun with our last day in school. I personally plan to arrive at school barefoot. Matt suggested there might be some disciplinary measures taken, but he hadn't really thought it through: it'll be the last day of school, it hurts nobody, it's against no laws (contrary to popular belief - the Health Department does not give a care whether you wear shoes, in a restaurant, in a store, or in school), and I'm a senior. Clearly, there's nothing to stop me. Keith and I have played; the last time, he got his contact lens caught on a branch, and after fruitlessly trying to put it aright in his eye and trying to have me do it (he kept blinking) and trying again to put it aright by looking at his reflection in, among other things, my eye, he hurried over to the house of a friend who lives just across the street from Warder. That was exhilarating. I hadn't had a class with Keith since eighth grade before this year, but now we're in psych together, and we're passing notes just like the old days. I make Chicklet cartoons, and he makes Chameleon Brothers cartoons, and we say odd stuff to each other, and every once in a while we write something coherent to pass on information of some sort. I love writing notes with Keith. He's unusually forthright sometimes and will openly admit to people (friends, teachers, passing strangers) that he loves them; at first it seems strange, but then if you're a certain type of person you realize that it's sort of strange that that sort of thing is frowned upon in our kulcher, and so I must remark that in addition to writing notes with Keith, I also love Keith.
-Katy, Katie, Kaiti - who knows how to spell it? Katy Coomer has a mad crush on me, and I think she might fancy that she's kept it a secret, but not really. I'm not sure what she sees. I'm relentlessly attractive, of course, but I'm also a bit esoteric, and until I have a long history with a person, I'm pretty awkward in conversation. I don't have much history with Katie, because she was in Wyoming (Wyoming, Ohio) schools for a few years and the only memories I have of her before that are (1) when she came to my bowling party on my birthday one year and I kept confusing her with [stepcousin] Leah, and (2) when she came over to my house when we were in grade school and accidentally let go a big cecropia moth Dad had captured at a McDonald's. She called me up today and asked if I wanted to hang out, and true to my nature I was extremely ineloquent and spoke in short and clipped phrases. But we agreed to play krokay tomorrow at 1300, and I think if nothing else I'll be less awkward in real life than on the phone. I don't know I'm ready for romance yet - I don't know I'm looking for it. It only feels strange. I think I'm entirely willing to have friends. It's nothing personal: I'm simply not a romantic guy at the moment. She seems to have high hopes. I worry about dashing them. She may yet convert me, perhaps, if she surprises me and I end up with an entirely new perspective.
-A lot more crazy and wild stuff has happened since my last post, but right now you're going to have to be satisfied with this, which I daresay you will be, since it's probably my longest post to date. The rest of the stuff, such as there is, will have to wait until the next weekly update, same bat-time, same bat-place, on Sunday at midnight, or on Saturday at 2000, or Friday at 0130, or on the following Thursday at 1622, or on Flag Day at 1159, or something like that.
I've been busy, but I can't really pretend that I've been too busy for two entire months to write something for you folks to digest. You must feel hopelessly deprived. Or annoyed, or possibly hostile. The real reason, I think, that I haven't written is that I didn't feel like it. And also I didn't really think about it. I want to tell you that I'm going to post weekly from now on, but I hesitate because there might be some weekends when I don't.
-School has sucked this year. Ironically, on 30OCT, we got senior treats - little bags of candy that they use to make us think the school is nicer than it is. They said, "Hope you're enjoying the best year of your life so far!" Yeah, right. For some people, I bet it is. But I'm taking five AP classes, so not for me. I also really hate college application stuff. I believe I've noted before that they cause me to be unable to enjoy my life. Whenever I have time free, I have to do some college thing or other, and if I put off doing it because it's something I severely don't want to do, such as write an essay, which it always is, I feel guilty later and I'm also one moment closer to the deadline without having done anything. That's why I've decided I'm going to just get it over and done with as soon as I can. What I have left to do is get a couple of teacher recommendations and write a really good essay. I finished one today that I think is pretty good, but it could be at least twice as good if I were allowed space to write all I want. Five hundred words sounds like a lot, until you realize it's about two thirds of a page. I can't say anything meaningful in a presentable way in 500 words. I've been conditioned by years of freedom in my journal each night to write as many words as I want, and losing that freedom has really crippled me. However, condensing the essay into only the indispensable points, I was able to get it down to about 560 words, and I think I'm going to leave it at that. I doubt very much that the admissions committee will deny me entrance because I used four more sentences than I was supposed to in my application essay. The next step is to reread it at a later time such as tomorrow and make sure it's the very best I can possibly write on that topic in that space. The topic, by the way, is that writing helps me think, and I've had a better life ever since I started writing in my journal each night, because I have to examine the things I've done each day, and through a process mildly reminiscent of natural selection, I've weeded out all the thing I do that are useless or simply waste time. I mentioned in there my commitment against TV. I think it's kind of neat because, at the start of the essay just after I introduced the topic "Writing helps me think," I said, "By the time I finish this essay, I'll probably have had some new insight that I've never had before," and I ended it saying that if I write in a journal and my life has become so much nicer because of it, I'm going to start advocating journal use amongst my peers, which is of course my insight. In following with that, I'm going to tell you right now: you ought to get a journal. A blog doesn't count. It has to be something you can keep private if you want to, and something that's concrete. I recommend the excellent "Leather-Look" journals from the Miquel Rius company; I use the version with 600 pages and I get them at Barnes & Noble. They've lasted me about two years apiece, and I write a lot. The paper is gridded, which I find terrific, but it may not be your thing, in which case you can look at the rest of the fine selection of empty books at your local bookstore. Write in it every night, about what you did, and what you think about whatever you happen to be thinking about. It really is something special. I especially like being able to flip through the pages I've already filled and read things and remember stuff I'd forgotten about.
-Things have happened this year. The most significant was the accident. I called up my friend Aaron a few Sundays ago to ask if he wanted to come play krokay. His mom answered and said he wasn't there but he'd have him call back. Then she said, "I presume you're calling about the accident?" I said no, what accident? It turned out that two guys I knew well, Bryce Walters and Andy Hughes, had gotten in a car wreck. Bryce was back at home, but Andy was still in the hospital. Over the coming days, Andy stayed there. Rumors circulated. He was dead, he was braindead and on life support, they were pulling the plug at nine o'clock, he was doing a lot better, he was in critical condition. It was impossible to become any better informed than if you knew nothing. Then on November 3rd, we heard it over the PA system. Andy had passed away the previous night.
-It's the polar opposite of fair. The other car was a big black SUV, with no headlights on, and the driver was drunk. Until these things happen, you never comprehend the scope of them. Even though I've never met his mother, I kept imagining her sitting on her bed with her head hung down. It was a sudden calamity. There was no time to prepare. There was nothing that could be done. It was a sudden ripping out of the heart, and it shouldn't have been, but it was. It makes me really sick.
-As the saying says, though, life goes on.
-I've recently become seduced by chess, after a sudden impulse drove me to make Mom find the book Chess for Dummies - she had previously removed it from its proper place in one of her mad cleaning sprees, and it ended up being in a garbage bag in the shed. Why does she do this? It's only hiding the problem. What Mom does isn't cleaning, it's hiding. True cleaning, I'll have to remember to emphasize to her, involves (1) throwing out stuff that needs to be thrown out - a subjective distinction that she always takes too far when it's other people's stuff but not nearly far enough when it's her own - and (2) putting the rest of stuff in its proper place (Mom puts everything in my room on top of my bed, rendering it useless for sleeping, and then leaves without completing the job by putting the stuff away). But I have strayed from my topic, which was chess. There's not really all that much to say. I've been reading Chess for Dummies, and it's a very good book, and as such I've gotten far better than I was, but I'm not going to be in a tournament anytime soon. I can beat Mom pretty consistently. I haven't played but one game with Dad, who's a tournament-level player (5th place in something about twenty years ago), and that game was a tutorial rather than a competition - he told me which of my moves were bad, and told me how to make them good. I carry around Dad's chess set at school to have something to do during lunch and the study hall bell every other day in the biology room, and on the whole I've probably lost more than won. These kids keep referring to chess learnings they've obtained that I never suspected. They know how to do it. But I've still won a few. I'm talking here about the kids who can actually play, not the kids who know the various ways the pieces move and nothing more (of who I've played, Gabby and Keith). I look forward to continuing improvement.
-On the krokay front, I've still been playing. I found a second site in Warder, within walking distance, and I've played a few games there, with Keith and Xinglai. Xinglai is an exchange student, and I bet you thought she was from China, but she's from Germany, and she's of Chinese descent. As all the exchange students tend to be (and as I figure I might be too if I were one) she's very nice and sort of standoffish. She was a bit idealistic about krokay the first time and wore some nice shoes, which unfortunately became wet with mudwater, but I lent her mine, cleaned off hers with what paper and such I could find, and went barefoot (I rather enjoy going barefoot actually, but I suppose to her it probably looked like a selfless sacrifice of comfort for her sake). Keith is the man who left the last comment on my previous post. DUTCHESS!! Dutchess is his pet bunny. Properly, "duchess" is spelled without a t, but Keith doesn't let that bother him; he spells it with a t regardless. It really doesn't matter, so I'm not going to write any more words about it. His other pet bunny is Mocha. MOCHA!! He loves to yell out DUTCHESS! and MOCHA! in school and pet people on the head as if they were his bunnies. We predict that by the end of school, everyone will know who Dutchess and Mocha are, and that's precisely why he's going to bring either one or both on the last day. We're going to have fun with our last day in school. I personally plan to arrive at school barefoot. Matt suggested there might be some disciplinary measures taken, but he hadn't really thought it through: it'll be the last day of school, it hurts nobody, it's against no laws (contrary to popular belief - the Health Department does not give a care whether you wear shoes, in a restaurant, in a store, or in school), and I'm a senior. Clearly, there's nothing to stop me. Keith and I have played; the last time, he got his contact lens caught on a branch, and after fruitlessly trying to put it aright in his eye and trying to have me do it (he kept blinking) and trying again to put it aright by looking at his reflection in, among other things, my eye, he hurried over to the house of a friend who lives just across the street from Warder. That was exhilarating. I hadn't had a class with Keith since eighth grade before this year, but now we're in psych together, and we're passing notes just like the old days. I make Chicklet cartoons, and he makes Chameleon Brothers cartoons, and we say odd stuff to each other, and every once in a while we write something coherent to pass on information of some sort. I love writing notes with Keith. He's unusually forthright sometimes and will openly admit to people (friends, teachers, passing strangers) that he loves them; at first it seems strange, but then if you're a certain type of person you realize that it's sort of strange that that sort of thing is frowned upon in our kulcher, and so I must remark that in addition to writing notes with Keith, I also love Keith.
-Katy, Katie, Kaiti - who knows how to spell it? Katy Coomer has a mad crush on me, and I think she might fancy that she's kept it a secret, but not really. I'm not sure what she sees. I'm relentlessly attractive, of course, but I'm also a bit esoteric, and until I have a long history with a person, I'm pretty awkward in conversation. I don't have much history with Katie, because she was in Wyoming (Wyoming, Ohio) schools for a few years and the only memories I have of her before that are (1) when she came to my bowling party on my birthday one year and I kept confusing her with [stepcousin] Leah, and (2) when she came over to my house when we were in grade school and accidentally let go a big cecropia moth Dad had captured at a McDonald's. She called me up today and asked if I wanted to hang out, and true to my nature I was extremely ineloquent and spoke in short and clipped phrases. But we agreed to play krokay tomorrow at 1300, and I think if nothing else I'll be less awkward in real life than on the phone. I don't know I'm ready for romance yet - I don't know I'm looking for it. It only feels strange. I think I'm entirely willing to have friends. It's nothing personal: I'm simply not a romantic guy at the moment. She seems to have high hopes. I worry about dashing them. She may yet convert me, perhaps, if she surprises me and I end up with an entirely new perspective.
-A lot more crazy and wild stuff has happened since my last post, but right now you're going to have to be satisfied with this, which I daresay you will be, since it's probably my longest post to date. The rest of the stuff, such as there is, will have to wait until the next weekly update, same bat-time, same bat-place, on Sunday at midnight, or on Saturday at 2000, or Friday at 0130, or on the following Thursday at 1622, or on Flag Day at 1159, or something like that.
Sunday, September 3, 2006
Whoa!
It has been about a month and a half since I last gave you pitiful people a precious update on what's happening in my life.
-Well, I have a lot of stuff I have to tell you then, don't I? Let's start off with band camp. Band camp was not as good as most years, and that's not something you just casually say. We have a really young and unruly band this year. There are no seniors in the pit or sousaphone section, and probably another one that Matt will note once I post this. In fact all the sousaphones are sophomore or below, I believe. This young band is not disposed to taking direction from some high-and-mighty baldo who thinks he should be able to tell them what to do just because he's taken several years of college courses on how to do so. I think most of the problem is with a lack of focus. Whenever there's a pause, the band exploits it to recount the latest stupid anecdote that has popped into their brain, or comment on how poorly they just did something, or whatever. And then Mr Canter has to get angry and tell them to stop talking. It happens every five or ten minutes: a waste of time. Or, the band doesn't really want to do anything, despite that it's the middle of a practice, so they just sort of walk around carelessly, don't march, and don't really try anything. This has strayed a bit from the topic of band camp, but it's still all to do with the last month and a half, and now I'm finished writing about band and it won't pop up again.
-Next let's move on to a bit more pleasant a subject: Crowduck. Actually, it's worth mentioning that on the way to Crowduck in Grandma & Grandpa's van, we put in a few prescheduled visits to colleges. First there was Grinnell. I was actually quite taken with Grinnell, which was a surprise because it's in the middle of Iowa with immediate access to a broad variety of exciting cornfields. I don't think I would too much mind being carted off there for a while. However, it lacks something that our next entry, Carleton, has: lakes and trees. People think I want to live in Minnesota just because it's snowy there, and at first this was true, but I've since come to realize that a great amount of what I want is also a place to forget about the century. I can't manage that in a cornfield, but if I get a kayak (something I intend to do someday, and which I would have done sooner, probably, if there were anything appreciable in Ohio to row in) and sit on the water, or I hike a few miles into the old growth trees and lie down, it's all but inevitable. I liked Carleton quite a bit too; however, it wasn't a surprise for me that I should, so until I realized that it seemed a bit muted. I was a little disappointed in the size of their lakes, Upper and Lower Lyman Lakes, which are more like ponds. If I remember accurately, I could probably have (with enough patience) skipped a stone across them. Or at least halfway, to the little island that's in the middle of one of the two. Maybe? In any case, the campus was very great and all that. We also visited Macalester, but I didn't much like that one. It seemed impersonal, unimaginative, and too urban. Though there is a good café called Blondie's nearby.
-For the first time we can remember, it rained while we were at the pickup point on Big Whiteshell, but what the heck? We soon found out that it hadn't rained all month and had been the driest July on record (following, incidentally, the wettest on record last year). But I've been requested to cover Crowduck like I did last year and I think I had better do it in a separate post, and also when I can formulate thoughts better, sometime like not 0200.
-School started up. I'm in five APs: psych, bio, English, Spanish, and math. So far they seem to be living up to the difficult reputation of APs. For English there was summer reading - Heart of Darkness and EITHER Pride and Prejudice OR Beloved. (I picked P&P.) As it turned out I needn't've stressed out about doing it, because though we were going to turn in reading logs on the first day, there were apparently some complaints that she assigned it too late for us to read it all. What kind of moron excuse is that? She gave us - hold on, let me check the date - rather more than a month of warning to get those read. Don't come in telling us that you were constantly engaged in cross-country running or soccer for more than a month. You can find a way to put aside six or seven hours to read some books. Try turning off your TV. The pretense is rife with dumbassedness. Well, as a result the test has been postponed all the way to Tuesday, when we could have been preparing for the AP test.
-This Monday (Labor Day) we've got a krokay game going on. The participants are Aaron, Keith, Rosie, me, and a German exchange girl of Chinese descent named Xinglai. Today I rode up to Winton Woods to look for a spare location, and though I was unable to find good ones, I may be close. The parcours trail seems like it should be near something. Also that trail above Kingfisher. For Monday, though, we'll just be going with the same tried and true spot. Hm. Or maybe Warder. Nope. I would have to go and visualize a layout first, and I didn't do that today. But next time, we will go to Warder. Anyhow, the old site will be new for all the participants except me and Aaron anyhow. I've been there twice, Aaron once. I went with BJ and Henry after a many-player game that I think was going to be Matt, BJ, Aaron, and me fell through and we had to go to a different day. Henry won twice. Strangely enough, I who spearheaded the krokay movement have yet to win a game.
-Tomorrow I'm going to the library to pick up a broad variety of books, and I'm also going to be the Designated Driver for when we go to see the WEBN fireworks. Wait, but is Mom going to be there? She would be the natural choice for DD. Whatever.
-I have to do several more things tonight, which I hope I can remember long enough to carry them through. First is e-mailing all Monday's participants. So here I go
-Well, I have a lot of stuff I have to tell you then, don't I? Let's start off with band camp. Band camp was not as good as most years, and that's not something you just casually say. We have a really young and unruly band this year. There are no seniors in the pit or sousaphone section, and probably another one that Matt will note once I post this. In fact all the sousaphones are sophomore or below, I believe. This young band is not disposed to taking direction from some high-and-mighty baldo who thinks he should be able to tell them what to do just because he's taken several years of college courses on how to do so. I think most of the problem is with a lack of focus. Whenever there's a pause, the band exploits it to recount the latest stupid anecdote that has popped into their brain, or comment on how poorly they just did something, or whatever. And then Mr Canter has to get angry and tell them to stop talking. It happens every five or ten minutes: a waste of time. Or, the band doesn't really want to do anything, despite that it's the middle of a practice, so they just sort of walk around carelessly, don't march, and don't really try anything. This has strayed a bit from the topic of band camp, but it's still all to do with the last month and a half, and now I'm finished writing about band and it won't pop up again.
-Next let's move on to a bit more pleasant a subject: Crowduck. Actually, it's worth mentioning that on the way to Crowduck in Grandma & Grandpa's van, we put in a few prescheduled visits to colleges. First there was Grinnell. I was actually quite taken with Grinnell, which was a surprise because it's in the middle of Iowa with immediate access to a broad variety of exciting cornfields. I don't think I would too much mind being carted off there for a while. However, it lacks something that our next entry, Carleton, has: lakes and trees. People think I want to live in Minnesota just because it's snowy there, and at first this was true, but I've since come to realize that a great amount of what I want is also a place to forget about the century. I can't manage that in a cornfield, but if I get a kayak (something I intend to do someday, and which I would have done sooner, probably, if there were anything appreciable in Ohio to row in) and sit on the water, or I hike a few miles into the old growth trees and lie down, it's all but inevitable. I liked Carleton quite a bit too; however, it wasn't a surprise for me that I should, so until I realized that it seemed a bit muted. I was a little disappointed in the size of their lakes, Upper and Lower Lyman Lakes, which are more like ponds. If I remember accurately, I could probably have (with enough patience) skipped a stone across them. Or at least halfway, to the little island that's in the middle of one of the two. Maybe? In any case, the campus was very great and all that. We also visited Macalester, but I didn't much like that one. It seemed impersonal, unimaginative, and too urban. Though there is a good café called Blondie's nearby.
-For the first time we can remember, it rained while we were at the pickup point on Big Whiteshell, but what the heck? We soon found out that it hadn't rained all month and had been the driest July on record (following, incidentally, the wettest on record last year). But I've been requested to cover Crowduck like I did last year and I think I had better do it in a separate post, and also when I can formulate thoughts better, sometime like not 0200.
-School started up. I'm in five APs: psych, bio, English, Spanish, and math. So far they seem to be living up to the difficult reputation of APs. For English there was summer reading - Heart of Darkness and EITHER Pride and Prejudice OR Beloved. (I picked P&P.) As it turned out I needn't've stressed out about doing it, because though we were going to turn in reading logs on the first day, there were apparently some complaints that she assigned it too late for us to read it all. What kind of moron excuse is that? She gave us - hold on, let me check the date - rather more than a month of warning to get those read. Don't come in telling us that you were constantly engaged in cross-country running or soccer for more than a month. You can find a way to put aside six or seven hours to read some books. Try turning off your TV. The pretense is rife with dumbassedness. Well, as a result the test has been postponed all the way to Tuesday, when we could have been preparing for the AP test.
-This Monday (Labor Day) we've got a krokay game going on. The participants are Aaron, Keith, Rosie, me, and a German exchange girl of Chinese descent named Xinglai. Today I rode up to Winton Woods to look for a spare location, and though I was unable to find good ones, I may be close. The parcours trail seems like it should be near something. Also that trail above Kingfisher. For Monday, though, we'll just be going with the same tried and true spot. Hm. Or maybe Warder. Nope. I would have to go and visualize a layout first, and I didn't do that today. But next time, we will go to Warder. Anyhow, the old site will be new for all the participants except me and Aaron anyhow. I've been there twice, Aaron once. I went with BJ and Henry after a many-player game that I think was going to be Matt, BJ, Aaron, and me fell through and we had to go to a different day. Henry won twice. Strangely enough, I who spearheaded the krokay movement have yet to win a game.
-Tomorrow I'm going to the library to pick up a broad variety of books, and I'm also going to be the Designated Driver for when we go to see the WEBN fireworks. Wait, but is Mom going to be there? She would be the natural choice for DD. Whatever.
-I have to do several more things tonight, which I hope I can remember long enough to carry them through. First is e-mailing all Monday's participants. So here I go
Monday, July 17, 2006
That was brief
It was eight days after I started working at Subway: that is, about two weeks ago, but I've been putting off writing about it, for no particular reason.
-That day I showed up at about 1000, I suppose. Sarah had me take some bread out of the interesting item that is called the "retarder" and put it in the proofer, which is where the bread rises for a while. I also chopped some tomatoes and made some sandwiches. Pretty uneventful. At about 1130 I suppose, Sarah looked in the proofer and told me with some disdain, "Common sense says you should season some of these, not just make all white and wheat." Seasoning is where you roll the bread in some stuff to make it a different type of bread, like for example Parmesan Oregano. She hadn't told me to season any bread, much less how many of each kind to season. But I apologized anyhow and she made an interesting gesture that was a combination of a shrug and "don't mention it". I clocked out at 1200, because it was going to be a slow day and she said I might as well go home. And then she said, "[Chuck], it's not going to work out."
-I was too jolted to say anything relevant. I just said, "What?"
-She said, "You're not getting it, I don't see you getting it..." and trailed off.
-I said, "So, do you--want me to come back tomorrow?" She shook her head no. She said I could bring my two Subway shirts and my apron and hat up to the store some other time and also pick up my paycheck. I did her one better and left her everything right then except for one shirt I had at home. I left her with the enigmatic and underconstructed thought, "I thought I had something there."
-So as quickly as I got into it, I'm back out of the working world. The next day I brought back my remaining shirt, but my paycheck hadn't come. Last Friday I went back and picked up the check, but it turned out to be the check for the week where I worked one day: $28.53. I went back today, and Sarah said the other check still hadn't come.
-In the week that I worked I was also reading The Trial, which I find sort of appropriate. Perhaps my fate wasn't quite as grim as Josef K.'s, but the process was similar (if not as lengthy). I was expected to catch on to the subtleties and unmentioned aspects of the operation far too quickly and with nobody really telling me. Sarah was always telling me things I needed to do that she had never told me to do but which I could see she thought it was obvious I should do. I was finally kind of starting to catch on, but then I got fired. I hadn't thought of that interesting parallel between the book I was reading and real life until just now.
-On Grandpa's suggestion, I also read The Templar Legacy, and afterward I started the process of reviewing books in my journal after I'm done with them, kind of on a whim. I'll paraphrase, because it was long, but my sentiments regarding The Templar Legacy were approximately this: it used as a climax what should have been an inciting incident; the first 400 pages could have been summed up in a fifteen-page prologue, but instead they just dragged on and on with no purpose but to make the book longer. The plot stuck around in one place too long, getting bogged down, and at the end of the "scavenger hunt" plot the payoff, rather than redeeming the rest of the book, is a weak attempt to be controversial, and also for author Steve Berry to profess his own religious view by deliberately attacking a different one. Bottom line: subdued "action" masquerading as something other than a waste of time. Also rife with typos.
-Currently I've got some other summer reading to do. I picked up a couple books at Borders the other day, and also found out that for AP English the required summer reading is Heart of Darkness and either Pride and Prejudice or Beloved.
-Band has also started up. Unless you are in band, you probably become very bored reading about band, and come to think of it even if you are in band, the case is probably the same. I'll be pithy. Leaders went in for two days of training from 1730 to 2100; then we taught some eight- and ninth-graders how to come to attention, do faces, march, turn, do flanks, &c. I don't know any of their names except one called Sally, one called Nicole, and one called Ricardo (who incidentally is our first male flute). Sally doesn't like me, but I also get the feeling that she doesn't really like anyone, and she always doesn't like them in a very peppy and cheerful way. Today we meet at 1730 again, and tomorrow we have the innovative Bonding Night, which is where we are ordered to have fun with the rest of our section. I assume we'll go out to eat.
-Also, yesterday Micah and Mom and I went to Grandma & Grandpa's, had Chinese food, and then drove to Uncle Dan's to pick beans out of his really big garden. We picked zucchinis and cucmbers and Swiss chard and onions as well.
-That day I showed up at about 1000, I suppose. Sarah had me take some bread out of the interesting item that is called the "retarder" and put it in the proofer, which is where the bread rises for a while. I also chopped some tomatoes and made some sandwiches. Pretty uneventful. At about 1130 I suppose, Sarah looked in the proofer and told me with some disdain, "Common sense says you should season some of these, not just make all white and wheat." Seasoning is where you roll the bread in some stuff to make it a different type of bread, like for example Parmesan Oregano. She hadn't told me to season any bread, much less how many of each kind to season. But I apologized anyhow and she made an interesting gesture that was a combination of a shrug and "don't mention it". I clocked out at 1200, because it was going to be a slow day and she said I might as well go home. And then she said, "[Chuck], it's not going to work out."
-I was too jolted to say anything relevant. I just said, "What?"
-She said, "You're not getting it, I don't see you getting it..." and trailed off.
-I said, "So, do you--want me to come back tomorrow?" She shook her head no. She said I could bring my two Subway shirts and my apron and hat up to the store some other time and also pick up my paycheck. I did her one better and left her everything right then except for one shirt I had at home. I left her with the enigmatic and underconstructed thought, "I thought I had something there."
-So as quickly as I got into it, I'm back out of the working world. The next day I brought back my remaining shirt, but my paycheck hadn't come. Last Friday I went back and picked up the check, but it turned out to be the check for the week where I worked one day: $28.53. I went back today, and Sarah said the other check still hadn't come.
-In the week that I worked I was also reading The Trial, which I find sort of appropriate. Perhaps my fate wasn't quite as grim as Josef K.'s, but the process was similar (if not as lengthy). I was expected to catch on to the subtleties and unmentioned aspects of the operation far too quickly and with nobody really telling me. Sarah was always telling me things I needed to do that she had never told me to do but which I could see she thought it was obvious I should do. I was finally kind of starting to catch on, but then I got fired. I hadn't thought of that interesting parallel between the book I was reading and real life until just now.
-On Grandpa's suggestion, I also read The Templar Legacy, and afterward I started the process of reviewing books in my journal after I'm done with them, kind of on a whim. I'll paraphrase, because it was long, but my sentiments regarding The Templar Legacy were approximately this: it used as a climax what should have been an inciting incident; the first 400 pages could have been summed up in a fifteen-page prologue, but instead they just dragged on and on with no purpose but to make the book longer. The plot stuck around in one place too long, getting bogged down, and at the end of the "scavenger hunt" plot the payoff, rather than redeeming the rest of the book, is a weak attempt to be controversial, and also for author Steve Berry to profess his own religious view by deliberately attacking a different one. Bottom line: subdued "action" masquerading as something other than a waste of time. Also rife with typos.
-Currently I've got some other summer reading to do. I picked up a couple books at Borders the other day, and also found out that for AP English the required summer reading is Heart of Darkness and either Pride and Prejudice or Beloved.
-Band has also started up. Unless you are in band, you probably become very bored reading about band, and come to think of it even if you are in band, the case is probably the same. I'll be pithy. Leaders went in for two days of training from 1730 to 2100; then we taught some eight- and ninth-graders how to come to attention, do faces, march, turn, do flanks, &c. I don't know any of their names except one called Sally, one called Nicole, and one called Ricardo (who incidentally is our first male flute). Sally doesn't like me, but I also get the feeling that she doesn't really like anyone, and she always doesn't like them in a very peppy and cheerful way. Today we meet at 1730 again, and tomorrow we have the innovative Bonding Night, which is where we are ordered to have fun with the rest of our section. I assume we'll go out to eat.
-Also, yesterday Micah and Mom and I went to Grandma & Grandpa's, had Chinese food, and then drove to Uncle Dan's to pick beans out of his really big garden. We picked zucchinis and cucmbers and Swiss chard and onions as well.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Never would have expected
You're not used to getting two posts in a row, so I will note that there's another one underneath this one, in which I acquire gainful employment.
-It surprises me how much work work is. Today I got up at 0800 and biked up to Subway at 0855 or so. I guess that clock was off from my watch, which showed when I got there that I was five minutes ahead of time. Initiative! Behh. Sarah let me in at 0858. She took me into the back room and showed me various things: first, how to clock in. Then, she gave me a sort of grand tour, and showed me how to do the bread: coat it with seasonings, and score it, and put it in the proofer (where it expands), and then bake it (which I didn't do yet because I was doing something else by then). And she showed me cookies. They come frozen in big bags and they're only vaguely round. But I stuck those on a pan and stuck the pan in the oven. Later, two other employees came in: Jake and Mike. She says Mike is the only guy who's been there since she started, which was six months ago. He's kind of lean, whereas Jake is of a wider persuasion. I learned how to slice tomatoes (core them, and then use this super-nifty slicing gizmo called imaginatively the "slicer") and then I assembled some of those Tuscan Chicken traylet kind of things. (There's not a lot of stress on terminology.) Then I made some sandwiches for some people, under Jake's guidance. Now I know that a Club has two turkey, two roast beef, and one ham. Or is that a Cold Cut Trio? All will become clear. Hopefully. It went pretty well, except this one part where I was helping this black lady with a shirt that said "I.D. Please / It's the Law", and I had just left to Jake this lady with a small daughter, but Jake went into the back room for some reason and I went blank. The I.D. lady asked a question and I didn't know the answer and I was looking back and forth between the two of them, and she said, "Well you asked me could you help me," and I told her sorry, it's my first day, and then Jake came back and all was well again. As I was clocking off Sarah talked about that for a moment, more to confirm a point she had made earlier - that 99.9% of the rude customers were for some reason black people, not to be racist or anything - than to tell me off. I clocked out and took my bike out the back door at 1233 and went home wearing my two green Subway shirts and carrying in my pocket my hat and an apron she gave me that isn't really an apron. I can't tell what it is. It kind of works as an apron. I didn't wear it today, because I never put it on and nobody noticed (including me). I worked 3.47 hours (not 3h 47m, but 3.47 hours; the clock calculates it like that) and made $21.6875, which I'm not sure if they round or truncate. I think she said paychecks come every other week, but Subway weeks start on Wednesday and end on Tuesday, so I might get a check for just this week, which would include just today, and would be kind of weird.
-Throughout this week I work hours that are kind of thrown around as if on a dartboard, including another open and two closes and one that's neither. I work 'til 2200 on July 4th, so no fireworks, but what's a fireworks show anyways? Stuff blowing up? Well, okay, it's cool, but I just watched a fireworks show a couple weeks ago for the St Vivian's festival. Whatever.
-By the way, a thing I forgot to mention last time: I've been working on another font, called Salamander, but I'm going to have to find another name because that one's in fact already taken.
-It surprises me how much work work is. Today I got up at 0800 and biked up to Subway at 0855 or so. I guess that clock was off from my watch, which showed when I got there that I was five minutes ahead of time. Initiative! Behh. Sarah let me in at 0858. She took me into the back room and showed me various things: first, how to clock in. Then, she gave me a sort of grand tour, and showed me how to do the bread: coat it with seasonings, and score it, and put it in the proofer (where it expands), and then bake it (which I didn't do yet because I was doing something else by then). And she showed me cookies. They come frozen in big bags and they're only vaguely round. But I stuck those on a pan and stuck the pan in the oven. Later, two other employees came in: Jake and Mike. She says Mike is the only guy who's been there since she started, which was six months ago. He's kind of lean, whereas Jake is of a wider persuasion. I learned how to slice tomatoes (core them, and then use this super-nifty slicing gizmo called imaginatively the "slicer") and then I assembled some of those Tuscan Chicken traylet kind of things. (There's not a lot of stress on terminology.) Then I made some sandwiches for some people, under Jake's guidance. Now I know that a Club has two turkey, two roast beef, and one ham. Or is that a Cold Cut Trio? All will become clear. Hopefully. It went pretty well, except this one part where I was helping this black lady with a shirt that said "I.D. Please / It's the Law", and I had just left to Jake this lady with a small daughter, but Jake went into the back room for some reason and I went blank. The I.D. lady asked a question and I didn't know the answer and I was looking back and forth between the two of them, and she said, "Well you asked me could you help me," and I told her sorry, it's my first day, and then Jake came back and all was well again. As I was clocking off Sarah talked about that for a moment, more to confirm a point she had made earlier - that 99.9% of the rude customers were for some reason black people, not to be racist or anything - than to tell me off. I clocked out and took my bike out the back door at 1233 and went home wearing my two green Subway shirts and carrying in my pocket my hat and an apron she gave me that isn't really an apron. I can't tell what it is. It kind of works as an apron. I didn't wear it today, because I never put it on and nobody noticed (including me). I worked 3.47 hours (not 3h 47m, but 3.47 hours; the clock calculates it like that) and made $21.6875, which I'm not sure if they round or truncate. I think she said paychecks come every other week, but Subway weeks start on Wednesday and end on Tuesday, so I might get a check for just this week, which would include just today, and would be kind of weird.
-Throughout this week I work hours that are kind of thrown around as if on a dartboard, including another open and two closes and one that's neither. I work 'til 2200 on July 4th, so no fireworks, but what's a fireworks show anyways? Stuff blowing up? Well, okay, it's cool, but I just watched a fireworks show a couple weeks ago for the St Vivian's festival. Whatever.
-By the way, a thing I forgot to mention last time: I've been working on another font, called Salamander, but I'm going to have to find another name because that one's in fact already taken.
Monday, June 26, 2006
change of pace
School ended. I was exempt from all but my photography exam, as I may have noted; I got an A on that. (I found all this out later when I got my report card in the mail, which revealed that I have all semester A's, except in AP US history, where they're both B's. So that's good.) On June 3rd, I took the SAT at a place known as "Harmony Community School". This time, rather than finishing mid-sentence, I nailed the essay, writing as fast as I could to get all the words I wanted to write (I later read that longer essays get more points, on average). In fact, I had been considering what kind of questions they might use for the essay. They would need something suitably vague, but also very broad, so anyone could answer it. Last time it was whether people should change their ideas. This time I thought a good vague one might be technology; while sitting in the waiting room just before the test I thought what I might use to write an essay about technology. And I got in and the essay was about whether a strong focus on technology caused a culture to neglect standard of living. Ha! I am psychic.
-And on June 10th I took the ACT too. It was different. I don't know, I think I liked the SAT better. The essay on that was an out-of-nowhere one about whether fast food restaurants should be required to serve healthy foods. Nonetheless, I think I did quite well on that too.
-I've been having a fun time out of school. Occasionally people will ask me, "Happy to be out of school?" Now honestly, what kind of question is that? "No, I'd much rather be getting up at 0630 every single morning and immediately biking a mile and a half to a gulag to sit on hard chairs for seven or eight hours." I've been reading books. Mostly I've read Tom Brown's Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking. The thing is, it's not just a book; it requires a commitment, and every time I want to do something to improve my skills per the book, I have that annoying collegiate itch that tells me I need to do college stuff instead. So in fact I have been doing college stuff. I figured out and wrote down the other day what I want from a college. Only thing is, it's not quantifiable, and it's highly subjective. I need help with the process, so I will solicit some from BJ, sometime when he's on AIM. BJ, I'm shamelessly requiring you to give me help.
-In other college news, I'm going to go visit Grinnell, Carleton, and possibly Macalester on my way to Crowduck this year. Aunt Irene's coming too, and she's a Grinnell alumna, so that will be good. That's going to be around July 30 or 31. Grinnell is on August 1, and the Minnesotan one or two are on August 2. We spend all day on the road on the 3rd to get to Kenora, and we sleep there and go to Crowduck on the 4th. We're going late this year because Uncle Dave (who's been having a rough year and deserves to go) couldn't go the first week of July like it usually is. If it were the first week of July, we would be about to go: I just thought of that. I could be packing my clothes right now. Tomorrow I would go up to Grandma and Grandpa's house and get in the van and they would drive me to Iowa. On the way they would treat me to great restaurants, because they're Grandma and Grandpa. We'd pick up Aunt Irene at some point, and visit the colleges, and then move on up to Kenora, past all the dark blue Minnesota lakes and evergreen forest. I wonder if the Whispering Pines motel is open, or if they're permanently closed? Last year they were closed. I like that motel. It has an ice cream parlor built in. We'd take a refreshing trip to the Safeway and get all our groceries and then drive to the drop-off point and then load all our stuff in the boats and cross Whiteshell and take the Limo on up to the camp and we'd be in Crowduck. This year, Bill's going to have the rest of the cabins remodeled - last year 5 and 6 were still waiting on it. Ah, and I've gotten a comment from someone else who goes to Crowduck! It hadn't occurred to me, actually, to meet other people who go to Crowduck. When we're there, the rest of the people there are generally old guys on a Fishing Trip with the Guys, and we normally don't really socialize with the people in the other cabins, I suppose because they look like they've got enough socializing amongst themselves, and because we've also got quite enough to get on with with our own large family. Plus we're fishing a lot of the time. I did search for Crowduck one time, but I just got this guy Sam Minter (who calls himself Abulsme Noibatno Itramne - obviously an anagram of "Samuel 'Abobanation' Minter"), and he didn't go to the camp, just somewhere near the lake. I'm intrigued. Where do you live? How much stuff do you take? Because we always take way too much. What week are you going this year? This is interesting!
-A couple of other large items have happened. One is that while Grandma and Grandpa were away in Greece, their basement flooded with two feet of water, and wasn't discovered for a week (after which time it had drained and left mold on all the walls). Dad and Dan and Dave and I all helped them clear out all the soaked and irretrievable stuff. Then we came back the following Tuesday and totally tore down the basement - took it to bare concrete. I was given the job of garbage hauler; I picked up big armloads of drywall, or bins of drywall that was too flimsy to hold shape, or big boards, or really old National Geographics, and dumped it in a big rollout dumpster in the front yard. Fun fact: after being aged several decades and then soaked, National Geographics give off a potent smell similar to that of a pile of fish that have been rotting for two weeks. Anyhow, I worked and worked and worked, and I did get paid, which was good. And we had a good dinner.
-And the other thing is that just today, I biked up to Subway for an interview. The interview went like this:
-"I'm Sarah. Your name is?"
-"[Chuck]."
-"All right, [Chuck], I'm going to hire you."
-[Note to those new to my blog: Chuck Masterson is my pseudonym, which I use for my blog for no discernible reason.] She then gave me a big old packet full of written standards of how to work, and told me to come back at 0900 tomorrow with it filled out. The packet is of varying degrees of coherence; toward the lower end of the spectrum, you have things like this: "After the meats you will then add to the bottom of the bread a generous portion of our topping's in which are routinely placed on each six-inch or footlong sandwich, unless requested otherwise by the customer." However, I could make out almost all of it. I have a job! And about time, too! I plan to keep this job, too. However, I do still need to confide to Sarah about the three straight week's in which are I'll be gone (due to band camp and then college visits plus Crowduck). I hope she understands, too. She hasn't, technically, hired me yet, I don't think: just given me a fat packet of stuff. Nevertheless, Mom's taking me clothes shopping tonight so I can get some black or kakhi [sic] pants with no pockets down the side or shorts made of cotton or polyester or cotton/polyester blend that are neatly tailored, which is what I need according to the book. In the meantime, I'm hungry.
-By the way, what's up with the Brothers Chaps not putting up a new cartoon of any sort for over a month at homestarrunner.com?
-And on June 10th I took the ACT too. It was different. I don't know, I think I liked the SAT better. The essay on that was an out-of-nowhere one about whether fast food restaurants should be required to serve healthy foods. Nonetheless, I think I did quite well on that too.
-I've been having a fun time out of school. Occasionally people will ask me, "Happy to be out of school?" Now honestly, what kind of question is that? "No, I'd much rather be getting up at 0630 every single morning and immediately biking a mile and a half to a gulag to sit on hard chairs for seven or eight hours." I've been reading books. Mostly I've read Tom Brown's Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking. The thing is, it's not just a book; it requires a commitment, and every time I want to do something to improve my skills per the book, I have that annoying collegiate itch that tells me I need to do college stuff instead. So in fact I have been doing college stuff. I figured out and wrote down the other day what I want from a college. Only thing is, it's not quantifiable, and it's highly subjective. I need help with the process, so I will solicit some from BJ, sometime when he's on AIM. BJ, I'm shamelessly requiring you to give me help.
-In other college news, I'm going to go visit Grinnell, Carleton, and possibly Macalester on my way to Crowduck this year. Aunt Irene's coming too, and she's a Grinnell alumna, so that will be good. That's going to be around July 30 or 31. Grinnell is on August 1, and the Minnesotan one or two are on August 2. We spend all day on the road on the 3rd to get to Kenora, and we sleep there and go to Crowduck on the 4th. We're going late this year because Uncle Dave (who's been having a rough year and deserves to go) couldn't go the first week of July like it usually is. If it were the first week of July, we would be about to go: I just thought of that. I could be packing my clothes right now. Tomorrow I would go up to Grandma and Grandpa's house and get in the van and they would drive me to Iowa. On the way they would treat me to great restaurants, because they're Grandma and Grandpa. We'd pick up Aunt Irene at some point, and visit the colleges, and then move on up to Kenora, past all the dark blue Minnesota lakes and evergreen forest. I wonder if the Whispering Pines motel is open, or if they're permanently closed? Last year they were closed. I like that motel. It has an ice cream parlor built in. We'd take a refreshing trip to the Safeway and get all our groceries and then drive to the drop-off point and then load all our stuff in the boats and cross Whiteshell and take the Limo on up to the camp and we'd be in Crowduck. This year, Bill's going to have the rest of the cabins remodeled - last year 5 and 6 were still waiting on it. Ah, and I've gotten a comment from someone else who goes to Crowduck! It hadn't occurred to me, actually, to meet other people who go to Crowduck. When we're there, the rest of the people there are generally old guys on a Fishing Trip with the Guys, and we normally don't really socialize with the people in the other cabins, I suppose because they look like they've got enough socializing amongst themselves, and because we've also got quite enough to get on with with our own large family. Plus we're fishing a lot of the time. I did search for Crowduck one time, but I just got this guy Sam Minter (who calls himself Abulsme Noibatno Itramne - obviously an anagram of "Samuel 'Abobanation' Minter"), and he didn't go to the camp, just somewhere near the lake. I'm intrigued. Where do you live? How much stuff do you take? Because we always take way too much. What week are you going this year? This is interesting!
-A couple of other large items have happened. One is that while Grandma and Grandpa were away in Greece, their basement flooded with two feet of water, and wasn't discovered for a week (after which time it had drained and left mold on all the walls). Dad and Dan and Dave and I all helped them clear out all the soaked and irretrievable stuff. Then we came back the following Tuesday and totally tore down the basement - took it to bare concrete. I was given the job of garbage hauler; I picked up big armloads of drywall, or bins of drywall that was too flimsy to hold shape, or big boards, or really old National Geographics, and dumped it in a big rollout dumpster in the front yard. Fun fact: after being aged several decades and then soaked, National Geographics give off a potent smell similar to that of a pile of fish that have been rotting for two weeks. Anyhow, I worked and worked and worked, and I did get paid, which was good. And we had a good dinner.
-And the other thing is that just today, I biked up to Subway for an interview. The interview went like this:
-"I'm Sarah. Your name is?"
-"[Chuck]."
-"All right, [Chuck], I'm going to hire you."
-[Note to those new to my blog: Chuck Masterson is my pseudonym, which I use for my blog for no discernible reason.] She then gave me a big old packet full of written standards of how to work, and told me to come back at 0900 tomorrow with it filled out. The packet is of varying degrees of coherence; toward the lower end of the spectrum, you have things like this: "After the meats you will then add to the bottom of the bread a generous portion of our topping's in which are routinely placed on each six-inch or footlong sandwich, unless requested otherwise by the customer." However, I could make out almost all of it. I have a job! And about time, too! I plan to keep this job, too. However, I do still need to confide to Sarah about the three straight week's in which are I'll be gone (due to band camp and then college visits plus Crowduck). I hope she understands, too. She hasn't, technically, hired me yet, I don't think: just given me a fat packet of stuff. Nevertheless, Mom's taking me clothes shopping tonight so I can get some black or kakhi [sic] pants with no pockets down the side or shorts made of cotton or polyester or cotton/polyester blend that are neatly tailored, which is what I need according to the book. In the meantime, I'm hungry.
-By the way, what's up with the Brothers Chaps not putting up a new cartoon of any sort for over a month at homestarrunner.com?
Friday, May 26, 2006
Tomorrow
Yes, it's not really tomorrow, is it? I said I would write the rest of it tomorrow, but it's been done gone a week. And it's about to be do go another one. I found out that I am indeed exempt from all my exams except for photography. Photography is because Mr Hubbard is ridiculous. He expects that you're already an expert at what he's just taught you, and he expects that you can work with the speed of lightning. He vaguely explains five assignments and says they're due whenever, but there's not enough time to do them because when we're starting to make a dent there are all of a sudden three or four more projects. On top of that, there's the special "Secret Project", which is top secret until information of it leaks out somehow and we all have to up the pace even more to get all this crap done by the end of the school year. I think I got it all finished, but really I can't be sure. I got a B third quarter (it's a semester class), so I don't have any hope for exemption. I heard the exam is another project, and it takes about fifteen minutes, and the rest of the time you just sit around. I'll bring a good book.
-In two short hours I'm leaving to go to the band room. The current time is 0047. We're assembling for the trip to Washington, DC to march in the National Memorial Day Parade on Monday. Ah, what fun! Ah, what good times! Why in the hell did I ever sign up for this trip? I'm going to be in a cramped bus with probably a minimalist approach to air conditioning, and I'll be unable to stand up for upwards of nine hours at a time. On Monday at about noon we all get to march for what according to Mr Canter is a mile, but according to Matt (who has Google Earth) 1.3 miles. If you've never marched in a parade before, I don't know if I can describe the pain that comes with roll-stepping unceasingly on hard pavement. It comes in your calf muscles, like hot irons left to glow red inside your leg. Then it spreads, into your shins. Then you're walking through a thousand-degree fire for the rest of the parade, everything below your knees left to smolder. I believe I've mentioned how much I hate it when it's hot outside, and down in the South it's supposed to be a high of 84°. Temperatures are measured with the thermometer in the shade. We will be in the hot sun in the middle of a street with long-sleeve thick-cloth uniforms and Triple-Itch™ Brand long black pants.
-It's summer now. We had a nice delay with that two-week rainstorm system, but it's summer now. When it's cold outside you can layer yourself against it. When it's hot there are no air-conditioned clothes. If you're outside there's no escape. I put on the least I can find--shorts, T-shirt--but I still get hot and sweaty and my clothes stick to me and I'm miserable. I need to get out of here. Yes, it's true: St Paul has a forecast high of 91°. But that's not usual. The next day, the high is a lot lower, and then there's a lightning storm predicted. Moreover, Minnesota has lakes. In Finneytown there are only swimming pools. I don't much care for swimming pools. They are full of chlorine and the urine of little kids and they are small and rectangular and they have absurd sets of regimented rules and nothing to offer once you get in except a chance to submerge yourself. The submersion is the only benefit. A few days ago I took a drysuit class in the indoor pool at the Y, and while I was drifting around underneath the surface in the process of increasing the indeliblity of the acrid chlorine smell I realized what swimming in a pool is like: it's like being able to fly, but only while confined in a small, featureless room.
-But I have to take what I can get. And, this year Crowduck isn't until August. Plus, I have to do all this college crap this summer. The time span between now and next December is shrinking at an extremely worrying speed. I don't know how anyone manages to pick out one single college before the deadline. I'm going to have to concentrate and take it one step at a time. Meanwhile I won't be able to enjoy the summer with no responsibilities like I like to do. No matter what I'm doing, I'll always have that nagging voice at the back of my head: "You should be working on college stuff." And what's more is the voice will always be correct, until I narrow the field down to ten candidates. It seems impossible. How do I eliminate 2990 colleges across the entire country NAY the entire country PLUS Canada (I'm looking into the Canuck factor)? What could be the possible problem with all of them? That they're in the South? That's one. But beyond that, how am I qualified to make a decision on their credentials when here I am, some dumb junior-going-on-senior, knowing so little about this higher education stuff? But I have no choice. I have to do it.
-Well, with that, I'm going to go take care of a few things before we leave to the band room.
-In two short hours I'm leaving to go to the band room. The current time is 0047. We're assembling for the trip to Washington, DC to march in the National Memorial Day Parade on Monday. Ah, what fun! Ah, what good times! Why in the hell did I ever sign up for this trip? I'm going to be in a cramped bus with probably a minimalist approach to air conditioning, and I'll be unable to stand up for upwards of nine hours at a time. On Monday at about noon we all get to march for what according to Mr Canter is a mile, but according to Matt (who has Google Earth) 1.3 miles. If you've never marched in a parade before, I don't know if I can describe the pain that comes with roll-stepping unceasingly on hard pavement. It comes in your calf muscles, like hot irons left to glow red inside your leg. Then it spreads, into your shins. Then you're walking through a thousand-degree fire for the rest of the parade, everything below your knees left to smolder. I believe I've mentioned how much I hate it when it's hot outside, and down in the South it's supposed to be a high of 84°. Temperatures are measured with the thermometer in the shade. We will be in the hot sun in the middle of a street with long-sleeve thick-cloth uniforms and Triple-Itch™ Brand long black pants.
-It's summer now. We had a nice delay with that two-week rainstorm system, but it's summer now. When it's cold outside you can layer yourself against it. When it's hot there are no air-conditioned clothes. If you're outside there's no escape. I put on the least I can find--shorts, T-shirt--but I still get hot and sweaty and my clothes stick to me and I'm miserable. I need to get out of here. Yes, it's true: St Paul has a forecast high of 91°. But that's not usual. The next day, the high is a lot lower, and then there's a lightning storm predicted. Moreover, Minnesota has lakes. In Finneytown there are only swimming pools. I don't much care for swimming pools. They are full of chlorine and the urine of little kids and they are small and rectangular and they have absurd sets of regimented rules and nothing to offer once you get in except a chance to submerge yourself. The submersion is the only benefit. A few days ago I took a drysuit class in the indoor pool at the Y, and while I was drifting around underneath the surface in the process of increasing the indeliblity of the acrid chlorine smell I realized what swimming in a pool is like: it's like being able to fly, but only while confined in a small, featureless room.
-But I have to take what I can get. And, this year Crowduck isn't until August. Plus, I have to do all this college crap this summer. The time span between now and next December is shrinking at an extremely worrying speed. I don't know how anyone manages to pick out one single college before the deadline. I'm going to have to concentrate and take it one step at a time. Meanwhile I won't be able to enjoy the summer with no responsibilities like I like to do. No matter what I'm doing, I'll always have that nagging voice at the back of my head: "You should be working on college stuff." And what's more is the voice will always be correct, until I narrow the field down to ten candidates. It seems impossible. How do I eliminate 2990 colleges across the entire country NAY the entire country PLUS Canada (I'm looking into the Canuck factor)? What could be the possible problem with all of them? That they're in the South? That's one. But beyond that, how am I qualified to make a decision on their credentials when here I am, some dumb junior-going-on-senior, knowing so little about this higher education stuff? But I have no choice. I have to do it.
-Well, with that, I'm going to go take care of a few things before we leave to the band room.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Month and some
What is there to say when someone dies? Everyone stops their life because someone else's life stopped. Very often, this is good. It helps to step back from where you've been and think about it: to pull off the road and look back from where you and everyone else came. On April 4th, a sophomore named Chevis Jackson was at home in the Galbraith Pointe family of condominiums, and some guys came over and got in a fight with him and shot him. He died. I found out about it the next day in school. That day, we were silent. In first bell nobody did anything: we all sat and stared at the wall, or at our desks. I knew Chevis from photography, which was second bell. He was the guy who always turned his iPod up way too loud and sang with it even louder. That day in second bell, people were crying, and some of them were guys. Some people were hugging each other and people were just losing it. Throughout the rest of the day we learned to talk again, but it was a day with a shadow over it.
I am glad that I'm going to be going to college someplace far away from Finneytown. Earlier this year, another student from my school, Derwin Murphy, was walking home from Kroger when (I think this is correct) he got mugged and shot in the leg. He survived, but it's clear that we're not living in a safe place when two students from my school have gotten shot within one year. And it doesn't speak very favorably to society in general. What kind of species are we that we kill our own when they've done nothing to merit it and can do nothing to defend themselves? Animals kill to stay alive, or (in pack systems) to avenge treachery. Humans kill for fun or out of rage. Sometimes I don't feel very proud to be a human.
Recently AP tests were the story of the day, every day, for several weeks. I only had AP history, so I got off fairly light, but next year I have five nationally-administered AP exams. History is a very hard one. It's not solid fact that you can arrive at by logic, like calculus, but there again it's not a field composed of opinions like psychology is, so you can't just BS your way through the test. We had four after-school study sessions, and I went to the last two, because (1) I needed to study and (2) there was pizza. The test was on May 5th, in the library. It was hard. There are 80 multiple choice questions, and Mr Volz has advocated leaving about ten of them blank, because the test is created so that no one can get all the answers. The knowledge is just too obscure. The good news is that under Mr Volz's excellent coaching, Finneytown is well above the national average for how many pass the test; the average is about half, though I don't recall our figure. I think I did quite well on it. I don't know if hoping for a 5 (highest) is too ambitious, but a 4 is well within expectations.
-Hm, let me browse my journal to see what else has happened recently.
-Oh yes: the band went to State contest. Of note is that just like the Marching Band State Contest, this was in Columbus, so we had an invigorating two-and-a-half hour drive in buses that produced an incessant 80 or 90 decibels, without even counting the 40 or 50 kids jammed on each one and contributing an extra 20 or so to the average. I hate buses. I also hate staying in large crowds or crowded places for a long time. Whenever I do, the words of Agent Smith come back to me:
"I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer. It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it."
We got in the building, which was the colossal Gahanna Lincoln High School. I'm going to be frankly honest here: we weren't ready to be at State competition. But we got into some sort of groove, or at least kind of felt like we did, when we were in the warm-up hall (a gym). Then we got on stage and did what we could.
-Fun fact: our State concert program was 27 minutes long, and was followed by the sight reading thing, which was an additional, like, six. The sight reading judge was weird. He was a last-minute replacement and he reminded me of a priest. He said all these vague emotional things like "So just make that note come up and... hold the next note's hand." He talked at us for about ten minutes, and then we left that room too.
-Back in the rooms where we left all our cases, Mr Canter broke from tradition and told us not that our performance was totally perfect, but that he heard some intonation problems where he was. He did think our sight reading was the best we had ever done, but he also said that with the way Father Bandjudge was talking and all the esoteric stuff he was criticizing, he expected a III from him. Anyhow we went back to the cafeteria. We waited, and then we got our rating. It was an overall III. An overall III. Like I said, we weren't ready to be at State competition.
-Now, we are a resilient band. We got over it pretty quickly, though I think Mr Canter took a lot longer. We were having fun on the ride home. (By "we" I mean everyone else, because I hated it on the bus, for two and a half hours.) Then back in Finneytown Mr Canter let off a lot of steam by yelling at people for being rowdy on the buses, and then we went to our respective homes.
I have other stuff to write, but it's coming up on three o'clock, so I'm going to go to bed and tell you about it tomorrow.
I am glad that I'm going to be going to college someplace far away from Finneytown. Earlier this year, another student from my school, Derwin Murphy, was walking home from Kroger when (I think this is correct) he got mugged and shot in the leg. He survived, but it's clear that we're not living in a safe place when two students from my school have gotten shot within one year. And it doesn't speak very favorably to society in general. What kind of species are we that we kill our own when they've done nothing to merit it and can do nothing to defend themselves? Animals kill to stay alive, or (in pack systems) to avenge treachery. Humans kill for fun or out of rage. Sometimes I don't feel very proud to be a human.
Recently AP tests were the story of the day, every day, for several weeks. I only had AP history, so I got off fairly light, but next year I have five nationally-administered AP exams. History is a very hard one. It's not solid fact that you can arrive at by logic, like calculus, but there again it's not a field composed of opinions like psychology is, so you can't just BS your way through the test. We had four after-school study sessions, and I went to the last two, because (1) I needed to study and (2) there was pizza. The test was on May 5th, in the library. It was hard. There are 80 multiple choice questions, and Mr Volz has advocated leaving about ten of them blank, because the test is created so that no one can get all the answers. The knowledge is just too obscure. The good news is that under Mr Volz's excellent coaching, Finneytown is well above the national average for how many pass the test; the average is about half, though I don't recall our figure. I think I did quite well on it. I don't know if hoping for a 5 (highest) is too ambitious, but a 4 is well within expectations.
-Hm, let me browse my journal to see what else has happened recently.
-Oh yes: the band went to State contest. Of note is that just like the Marching Band State Contest, this was in Columbus, so we had an invigorating two-and-a-half hour drive in buses that produced an incessant 80 or 90 decibels, without even counting the 40 or 50 kids jammed on each one and contributing an extra 20 or so to the average. I hate buses. I also hate staying in large crowds or crowded places for a long time. Whenever I do, the words of Agent Smith come back to me:
"I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer. It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it."
We got in the building, which was the colossal Gahanna Lincoln High School. I'm going to be frankly honest here: we weren't ready to be at State competition. But we got into some sort of groove, or at least kind of felt like we did, when we were in the warm-up hall (a gym). Then we got on stage and did what we could.
-Fun fact: our State concert program was 27 minutes long, and was followed by the sight reading thing, which was an additional, like, six. The sight reading judge was weird. He was a last-minute replacement and he reminded me of a priest. He said all these vague emotional things like "So just make that note come up and... hold the next note's hand." He talked at us for about ten minutes, and then we left that room too.
-Back in the rooms where we left all our cases, Mr Canter broke from tradition and told us not that our performance was totally perfect, but that he heard some intonation problems where he was. He did think our sight reading was the best we had ever done, but he also said that with the way Father Bandjudge was talking and all the esoteric stuff he was criticizing, he expected a III from him. Anyhow we went back to the cafeteria. We waited, and then we got our rating. It was an overall III. An overall III. Like I said, we weren't ready to be at State competition.
-Now, we are a resilient band. We got over it pretty quickly, though I think Mr Canter took a lot longer. We were having fun on the ride home. (By "we" I mean everyone else, because I hated it on the bus, for two and a half hours.) Then back in Finneytown Mr Canter let off a lot of steam by yelling at people for being rowdy on the buses, and then we went to our respective homes.
I have other stuff to write, but it's coming up on three o'clock, so I'm going to go to bed and tell you about it tomorrow.
Sunday, April 2, 2006
Information Age
I have entered the world of technology. Yesterday, unexpectedly, my dad tossed a bag from RadioShack at me and told me, "Merry birthday." I looked inside. It was an mp3 player: a SanDisk sansa. I'm naming it Gregor. Catch the pun? (No?) I finished playing a game of Egyptian Ratscrew with Micah and then loaded some stuff onto it. Some Grieg stuff. What I need now is a way to put CD stuff on--we just used a trial version of a thing Dad downloaded, and it expires on Thursday. Also I want a file that converts RealPlayer files into mp3s. A lot of my favorite music comes from the internet, and everything is Real there. Hmm. Gregor complicates my life a little. Now I can do more than one thing at once, so I'm more prone to trying to multitask. This might have repercussions at some point, like decreased productivity. I'll try to control things. Also I have to move around less to keep the earbuds from falling out. Hmm.
-My watch is in for repairs; the crown was stripped. I'm using an old pocketwatch in the interim. It's nice, but it gains about a minute per day. It only gives a sort of notion of what time it is. I'm anxious to have my watch back.
-Its getting spring out there. We've had a very wet year so far. It's rained a whole lot. We had six straight days of rain in March, and then about 50% of the rest of the month was also rainy, and so far in April we've already had a very enthusiastic storm, which is still going on right now. It seems like thunderstorms now that I'm older are always farther off and more lethargic than when I was young. I used to sit at the living room window and watch the lightning have an animated conversation with the ground just beyond the trees. Now, I look and listen, but the lightning is always somewhere in the next town, and the thunder only occasionally happens at all. The only exception is those storms that are really loud and wake me up at about 0300. Those ones are always really excited, but I generally have to go back to sleep, and I have no time to sit at the window and watch it. I wish the storms would come back. Incidentally, the best thunderstorms I've seen were at Crowduck last year. The one produced the beginnings of a tornado, which chased a couple of our boats onto the shore. The other one was the last night. I was sitting on the screen porch. The storm came in from around Whiteshell. It was really talking. The sky was lit up more often than not, and it was silhouetting the pine forest with an erratic strobe. The thunder came in the sharp cracks that let you know it's happening close by; there was one of these about once every two seconds, and the rest of the time was filled up with the low, grumbling reverberation through the dense forest.
-I ought to get to bed.
-My watch is in for repairs; the crown was stripped. I'm using an old pocketwatch in the interim. It's nice, but it gains about a minute per day. It only gives a sort of notion of what time it is. I'm anxious to have my watch back.
-Its getting spring out there. We've had a very wet year so far. It's rained a whole lot. We had six straight days of rain in March, and then about 50% of the rest of the month was also rainy, and so far in April we've already had a very enthusiastic storm, which is still going on right now. It seems like thunderstorms now that I'm older are always farther off and more lethargic than when I was young. I used to sit at the living room window and watch the lightning have an animated conversation with the ground just beyond the trees. Now, I look and listen, but the lightning is always somewhere in the next town, and the thunder only occasionally happens at all. The only exception is those storms that are really loud and wake me up at about 0300. Those ones are always really excited, but I generally have to go back to sleep, and I have no time to sit at the window and watch it. I wish the storms would come back. Incidentally, the best thunderstorms I've seen were at Crowduck last year. The one produced the beginnings of a tornado, which chased a couple of our boats onto the shore. The other one was the last night. I was sitting on the screen porch. The storm came in from around Whiteshell. It was really talking. The sky was lit up more often than not, and it was silhouetting the pine forest with an erratic strobe. The thunder came in the sharp cracks that let you know it's happening close by; there was one of these about once every two seconds, and the rest of the time was filled up with the low, grumbling reverberation through the dense forest.
-I ought to get to bed.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
the Umpqua Squeegee Inquisition
Oh, man. Isn't that a great title? Obviously it's completely irrelevant, but isn't it great?
I had a birthday this Friday. I'd say several factors contributed to it being the best birthday I've had in several years. First, during band, Matt Rebman and Jess Scholl surprised me with a blue mylar balloon, festooned with permanent marker renditions of drawings from shirts from my store (visit it, www.cafepress.com/permanentmarker . BUY STUFF) and "Happy Birthday". I tied it to my wrist. Later I found out they had decorated my locker too. Isn't it great? In history we read out of some old books, but on a whim I decided to achieve neutral buoyancy with my balloon by tying stuff to it. I soon found about the right balance of pencils and rubber bands to keep it hovering in the air, not sinking and not rising. By the time I got it, a lot of people were watching me, including Mr Volz. (I also that bell mentioned I was in the process of creating a shirt with a picture of Alan Greenspan really digging it on a wicked electric guitar, but I sucked at drawing guitars, and he drew some for me.) In math we had a test, but it was only a slight blemish because the stuff was easy and I feel reasonably confident I got a 100% on it. Afterwards I worked toward neutral buoyancy again, with more precision. Gradually everyone became riveted by the process. I tied a receipt to the string with the rest of the ballast and tore off little bits of it at a time. Once, I thought I had gotten it, but then Cait Pantano, sounding tragedy-stricken, said, "No, it's going down!" and I had to tear a little more off. Finally I tore off what seemed like a little too much--it almost imperceptibly started rising--but declared it a victory after it also started falling, a little later, and attributed the variations to air currents. I really had an audience, and they were enthralled. Thanks, Matt and Jess, for the balloon.
-I rode home with it on my bike, which was interesting, and then had chips and salsa until my mom came home and took me to Fuddrucker's. Nobody else came, because Dad was getting home late, and Micah's suspension deal has morphed into a kind of home-schooling thing because they won't let him back in, and we dumped him on Dad's parents in West Virginia for a week. Now, the only thing is, Fuddrucker's has kind of gone down in quality. They still have the World's Greatest Hamburgers, but they don't put that sprinkling of spices on the fries anymore, and that was what made them so great. They also were out of root beer that day. But still, subbing in Dr Pepper, I had a great and also very fulfilling dinner. I opened my presents from Mom: two CDs (Bernstein and Pachelbel/others) and five books. The books were Ethan Frome, Oliver Twist, Night, The Grapes of Wrath, and Moby-Dick. Mom knows I'm trying to get my foot into the classics. Right now I've read about 80 pages of Oliver Twist. After dinner the I found out the staff was calling out trivia questions over the loudspeaker. I got one right--the answer was "Polyester"--and they gave me a free card good for a half-pound burger. Just before we left, I got another one right ("depression") and they gave me another. Finally, to close out a great day, at home I loitered around the Internet long past curfew and went to bed for a long time.
-The thread on the screw-down crown of my watch has been deteriorating for a long time, but today it finally became officially stripped, as in I can't screw it down anymore. I'm going to have to take it up to some watch expert's place, like at the mall I guess, and have them overhaul it. Dad says they'll also want to do a cleaning, and it'll set me back about $50. That's too much. But it's cheaper than buying a new one. I paid $200 for this. Maybe it's under warranty, though. I'll see if I can find my thingy. Warranty sheet, or whatever.
-Third quarter's over. I'd say I did well. I hope I did well.
-Oh! Plus, this last week, we had a freak March snow day! It was great. About three inches of snow came down. The roads were more or less totally clear, so I didn't even check to see if we had anything, but Mom was listening to the radio that morning and shouted we had a two-hour delay. I went back to sleep, and when I woke up I checked the WLW SchoolWatch and it was a snow day. The roads were still pretty much clear, and I realized the staff had wanted a snow day just as much as I did, so they just used this as an excuse. That's the one good thing the administration has done for me this year.
-I'm thirsty. I'm going to get a glass of milk. I sure do hope I'm cleared of any wrongdoing involving those squeegees.
I had a birthday this Friday. I'd say several factors contributed to it being the best birthday I've had in several years. First, during band, Matt Rebman and Jess Scholl surprised me with a blue mylar balloon, festooned with permanent marker renditions of drawings from shirts from my store (visit it, www.cafepress.com/permanentmarker . BUY STUFF) and "Happy Birthday". I tied it to my wrist. Later I found out they had decorated my locker too. Isn't it great? In history we read out of some old books, but on a whim I decided to achieve neutral buoyancy with my balloon by tying stuff to it. I soon found about the right balance of pencils and rubber bands to keep it hovering in the air, not sinking and not rising. By the time I got it, a lot of people were watching me, including Mr Volz. (I also that bell mentioned I was in the process of creating a shirt with a picture of Alan Greenspan really digging it on a wicked electric guitar, but I sucked at drawing guitars, and he drew some for me.) In math we had a test, but it was only a slight blemish because the stuff was easy and I feel reasonably confident I got a 100% on it. Afterwards I worked toward neutral buoyancy again, with more precision. Gradually everyone became riveted by the process. I tied a receipt to the string with the rest of the ballast and tore off little bits of it at a time. Once, I thought I had gotten it, but then Cait Pantano, sounding tragedy-stricken, said, "No, it's going down!" and I had to tear a little more off. Finally I tore off what seemed like a little too much--it almost imperceptibly started rising--but declared it a victory after it also started falling, a little later, and attributed the variations to air currents. I really had an audience, and they were enthralled. Thanks, Matt and Jess, for the balloon.
-I rode home with it on my bike, which was interesting, and then had chips and salsa until my mom came home and took me to Fuddrucker's. Nobody else came, because Dad was getting home late, and Micah's suspension deal has morphed into a kind of home-schooling thing because they won't let him back in, and we dumped him on Dad's parents in West Virginia for a week. Now, the only thing is, Fuddrucker's has kind of gone down in quality. They still have the World's Greatest Hamburgers, but they don't put that sprinkling of spices on the fries anymore, and that was what made them so great. They also were out of root beer that day. But still, subbing in Dr Pepper, I had a great and also very fulfilling dinner. I opened my presents from Mom: two CDs (Bernstein and Pachelbel/others) and five books. The books were Ethan Frome, Oliver Twist, Night, The Grapes of Wrath, and Moby-Dick. Mom knows I'm trying to get my foot into the classics. Right now I've read about 80 pages of Oliver Twist. After dinner the I found out the staff was calling out trivia questions over the loudspeaker. I got one right--the answer was "Polyester"--and they gave me a free card good for a half-pound burger. Just before we left, I got another one right ("depression") and they gave me another. Finally, to close out a great day, at home I loitered around the Internet long past curfew and went to bed for a long time.
-The thread on the screw-down crown of my watch has been deteriorating for a long time, but today it finally became officially stripped, as in I can't screw it down anymore. I'm going to have to take it up to some watch expert's place, like at the mall I guess, and have them overhaul it. Dad says they'll also want to do a cleaning, and it'll set me back about $50. That's too much. But it's cheaper than buying a new one. I paid $200 for this. Maybe it's under warranty, though. I'll see if I can find my thingy. Warranty sheet, or whatever.
-Third quarter's over. I'd say I did well. I hope I did well.
-Oh! Plus, this last week, we had a freak March snow day! It was great. About three inches of snow came down. The roads were more or less totally clear, so I didn't even check to see if we had anything, but Mom was listening to the radio that morning and shouted we had a two-hour delay. I went back to sleep, and when I woke up I checked the WLW SchoolWatch and it was a snow day. The roads were still pretty much clear, and I realized the staff had wanted a snow day just as much as I did, so they just used this as an excuse. That's the one good thing the administration has done for me this year.
-I'm thirsty. I'm going to get a glass of milk. I sure do hope I'm cleared of any wrongdoing involving those squeegees.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Buy now while supplies
Last time I updated, it seems, was in January. Well. I, uh, I guess I don't really have an excuse to give you. I mean, I could think one up, but--well, actually...
-After school all days of the week until late at night I had to go to my special apprenticeship to Trent Lott. I was thus unable to update my blog.
Well, now that that's settled, let's get down to buisness. Here in Cincinnati our crappy start to the winter led directly into a crappy end to the winter, making for an all-around crappy winter. I think we got maybe five inches of snow the whole time. Sometimes people ask me why I like snow and cold weather. I can't really say why. I suppose part of it is that I really hate being hot; every summer, lulled into complacency by an idyllic period of temperate weather, I realize again with renewed feeling how much I hate it. When you're hot, there's no escape unless you have the air conditioning up really high (thus spending money better usable elsewhere) or you're willing to go all the way to an air-conditioned restaurant or the pool. Another part is that I like it when there's snow on the ground. I mean, I don't know; I just like it. A lot of this is going to be personal taste. Ooh, here's another one: I'm a night person, and winter has longer nights. Of course, Minnesota has summers too, with long days, but they have good winters, unlike here. I think another reason is that, though summers aren't too bad and they certainly offer some good opportunities for recreation, they need to be balanced out by a winter. A good winter. I'm just kind of rambling here, though.
-In band we just kept on playing that music. We got it quite good. There was this one day that Mr Canter realized we were all really just burnt out on band, so he gave us Friday off of X-Period in exchange for a promise that we'd all practice 20 minutes that weekend. Finally, last Saturday, we took two buses on down to Winton Woods High School, which I discovered is actually about as close to Winton Woods as Finneytown is, and did our contest performance. The stage there was really crowded. I performed pretty much right on it, I suppose. I gave it some punch, anyhow. The three pieces we did were New Dawn, The Awakening, and National Emblem. I think I like New Dawn or maybe National Emblem best. Anyhow, then we went on to the sight-reading room (their library) and played Whispers of the Wind, which was about on a seventh-grade level. We shuffled off to the cafeteria and, directly, found out we got a I. Huzzah! They say it's the first time in history we Finneytowners have gotten a I in Class A. Okay!
-So anyhow, the end result is we're now going to State and we've retired The Awakening and National Emblem in favor of something called Loudoun Praises, and something else TBA.
-On other fronts, I wrote an article for the newspaper about why watching TV is bad. A lot of my source material was this, which, though in need of some aggressive editing, has some good material. I encourage you to read it some time. I have sworn off TV except for shows like Jeopardy! and the occasional dose of something else like The Simpsons, which can at times be just as interesting as a book, or, if not, at least has a lot more comedic value. For this reason I also enjoy Dave Letterman, though I'm rarely up that late. Sounds like a lot of exceptions, but, then again, think of how many shows you watch. Oh, you say you don't even have time to watch TV, so you don't. Well, that's because you're a high school/college student, in which case you probably watch a fair amount nevertheless. If you aren't a student and you still say that you're most likely a liar.
-I guess that qualifies as a rant. But it's a very civilized and abbreviated one.
-Today in math we were working on probability; we were doing a problem about phone numbers. It had to do with how many possibilities there are for each group of numbers ((aaa) bbb-cccc) when figuring in given restrictions (such as: in the area code the first digit can't be 1 or 0, and the second digit has to be either 1 or 0). Well, for the last four digits, the restriction was that at least one of them has to be something other than 0. How many possible four-digit combinations are there in that system? The way the class has learned to work it, you multiply 10 × 10 × 10 × 9 and get 9000, because one of them has to be restricted to nine digits. If you're a thinking person, this will immediately jump out at you as incorrect. The correct way to figure it is to realize that by requiring that at least one digit not be zero, the only combination they have excluded is 0000, which is one of 10,000 possibilities. This leaves 9999 viable combinations, which is considerably more than 9000. However, Mrs Otten didn't object at all when someone wrote it on the board the other way, and neither did anyone else in the class. Just having realized they were doing this problem at the board (I'm prone to bouts of apathy in math, wherein I just doodle on a sheet of paper), I raised my hand to tell her the way I did it, but, because I had made a comment about just excluding 0000 earlier while I was only listening and not watching--a comment that apparently went unheard except by Mrs Otten--she told me, "I knew you were going to say that," and then gave me the "wait a second" sign, meaning she'd come back to it later. She didn't; she just kept on doing the problem until it was done, wrong, with the answers all about ten percent off. I raised my hand again. She came over and squatted down next to my desk and told me in a confidential voice that, yes, technically that was the correct way, but the simple way gave an answer that wasn't all that far off and anyhow this kind of situation didn't come up that often, so she had made a decision that she wasn't going to bother teaching the right way to get the answer. Then she walked away and I chewed on that for a while. Gradually I started getting more and more righteously incensed by this deliberate miseducation. Toward the end of class I raised my hand again. I came over and told her, "I've been thinking about this--", but she instantly cut me off and started getting defensive and angry and told me that she had made the decision to let this mistake ride because it didn't really come up that often and if I wanted to debate her on it we could do it in private. I started to make the argument that none of the other stuff we learned in math class came up that often, or, indeed, ever, and the fact that there was even a real-life example of this should give it some special consideration, but she wouldn't give me the chance. It was the end of the bell, so I stopped arguing and got ready to leave. Later I realized that I shouldn't have given in to her: I was clearly in the right; in fact, I was mathematically proven to be in the right, so I should have kept on arguing it with her until she was forced to concede, and not just let her change reality because she gets paid to illuminate it to us! I realized this while I was walking to my next class. Later, I thought: how much has Mrs Otten been miseducating us about? Who else has been lying to us? Why now should I trust any of the faculty? I've had my feelings that the staff around here was a bit dubious: problems with discipline, unquestioning acceptance of totalitarian regulations. Usually I've been able to overlook it and figure that I simply misunderstood or didn't well enough understand the situation. Perhaps that guy's swearing and slurring wasn't actually against the rules severely enough to warrant action, even though it seemed to be. Or, maybe there's a good reason that the main entrance to the high school is still blocked by mud and construction fence more than four months after the water main was replaced. Dr Tracy was willing to give reasons for things that seemed illogical. I figured usually these reasons at least had a hint of reason in them, somewhere, or he wouldn't give them. (There were exceptions to this, such as when I noted, "Isn't it funny how the cheerleaders' uniforms are so against the dress code?" and he said, "I don't know which parts of the dress code you would be talking about...".) But now I'm disillusioned. If there's corruption that's this outright, then I really have no reason to trust anything a staff member says again. I'm now thrilled by the revelation that this school is a place where lying is commonplace and not really frowned on at all! It explains so much! Why do we have to tuck in our shirts? No reason; they're just lying because they thought it would create "common decency" and they don't want to admit it did nothing but seriously make students mad at them. Why is that construction project still unfinished? When I asked Dr Tracy, he said it was because the winter wasn't a good time of the year to plant grass, and they wanted to do the whole thing at once. At first I thought that was just a true reason that happened to be absolutely ridiculous; now I realize that it was total bull. The thing it doesn't explain is: Why am I letting this group of people take charge of my learning, my intellect, and my future?
-That's a rant.
-After school all days of the week until late at night I had to go to my special apprenticeship to Trent Lott. I was thus unable to update my blog.
Well, now that that's settled, let's get down to buisness. Here in Cincinnati our crappy start to the winter led directly into a crappy end to the winter, making for an all-around crappy winter. I think we got maybe five inches of snow the whole time. Sometimes people ask me why I like snow and cold weather. I can't really say why. I suppose part of it is that I really hate being hot; every summer, lulled into complacency by an idyllic period of temperate weather, I realize again with renewed feeling how much I hate it. When you're hot, there's no escape unless you have the air conditioning up really high (thus spending money better usable elsewhere) or you're willing to go all the way to an air-conditioned restaurant or the pool. Another part is that I like it when there's snow on the ground. I mean, I don't know; I just like it. A lot of this is going to be personal taste. Ooh, here's another one: I'm a night person, and winter has longer nights. Of course, Minnesota has summers too, with long days, but they have good winters, unlike here. I think another reason is that, though summers aren't too bad and they certainly offer some good opportunities for recreation, they need to be balanced out by a winter. A good winter. I'm just kind of rambling here, though.
-In band we just kept on playing that music. We got it quite good. There was this one day that Mr Canter realized we were all really just burnt out on band, so he gave us Friday off of X-Period in exchange for a promise that we'd all practice 20 minutes that weekend. Finally, last Saturday, we took two buses on down to Winton Woods High School, which I discovered is actually about as close to Winton Woods as Finneytown is, and did our contest performance. The stage there was really crowded. I performed pretty much right on it, I suppose. I gave it some punch, anyhow. The three pieces we did were New Dawn, The Awakening, and National Emblem. I think I like New Dawn or maybe National Emblem best. Anyhow, then we went on to the sight-reading room (their library) and played Whispers of the Wind, which was about on a seventh-grade level. We shuffled off to the cafeteria and, directly, found out we got a I. Huzzah! They say it's the first time in history we Finneytowners have gotten a I in Class A. Okay!
-So anyhow, the end result is we're now going to State and we've retired The Awakening and National Emblem in favor of something called Loudoun Praises, and something else TBA.
-On other fronts, I wrote an article for the newspaper about why watching TV is bad. A lot of my source material was this, which, though in need of some aggressive editing, has some good material. I encourage you to read it some time. I have sworn off TV except for shows like Jeopardy! and the occasional dose of something else like The Simpsons, which can at times be just as interesting as a book, or, if not, at least has a lot more comedic value. For this reason I also enjoy Dave Letterman, though I'm rarely up that late. Sounds like a lot of exceptions, but, then again, think of how many shows you watch. Oh, you say you don't even have time to watch TV, so you don't. Well, that's because you're a high school/college student, in which case you probably watch a fair amount nevertheless. If you aren't a student and you still say that you're most likely a liar.
-I guess that qualifies as a rant. But it's a very civilized and abbreviated one.
-Today in math we were working on probability; we were doing a problem about phone numbers. It had to do with how many possibilities there are for each group of numbers ((aaa) bbb-cccc) when figuring in given restrictions (such as: in the area code the first digit can't be 1 or 0, and the second digit has to be either 1 or 0). Well, for the last four digits, the restriction was that at least one of them has to be something other than 0. How many possible four-digit combinations are there in that system? The way the class has learned to work it, you multiply 10 × 10 × 10 × 9 and get 9000, because one of them has to be restricted to nine digits. If you're a thinking person, this will immediately jump out at you as incorrect. The correct way to figure it is to realize that by requiring that at least one digit not be zero, the only combination they have excluded is 0000, which is one of 10,000 possibilities. This leaves 9999 viable combinations, which is considerably more than 9000. However, Mrs Otten didn't object at all when someone wrote it on the board the other way, and neither did anyone else in the class. Just having realized they were doing this problem at the board (I'm prone to bouts of apathy in math, wherein I just doodle on a sheet of paper), I raised my hand to tell her the way I did it, but, because I had made a comment about just excluding 0000 earlier while I was only listening and not watching--a comment that apparently went unheard except by Mrs Otten--she told me, "I knew you were going to say that," and then gave me the "wait a second" sign, meaning she'd come back to it later. She didn't; she just kept on doing the problem until it was done, wrong, with the answers all about ten percent off. I raised my hand again. She came over and squatted down next to my desk and told me in a confidential voice that, yes, technically that was the correct way, but the simple way gave an answer that wasn't all that far off and anyhow this kind of situation didn't come up that often, so she had made a decision that she wasn't going to bother teaching the right way to get the answer. Then she walked away and I chewed on that for a while. Gradually I started getting more and more righteously incensed by this deliberate miseducation. Toward the end of class I raised my hand again. I came over and told her, "I've been thinking about this--", but she instantly cut me off and started getting defensive and angry and told me that she had made the decision to let this mistake ride because it didn't really come up that often and if I wanted to debate her on it we could do it in private. I started to make the argument that none of the other stuff we learned in math class came up that often, or, indeed, ever, and the fact that there was even a real-life example of this should give it some special consideration, but she wouldn't give me the chance. It was the end of the bell, so I stopped arguing and got ready to leave. Later I realized that I shouldn't have given in to her: I was clearly in the right; in fact, I was mathematically proven to be in the right, so I should have kept on arguing it with her until she was forced to concede, and not just let her change reality because she gets paid to illuminate it to us! I realized this while I was walking to my next class. Later, I thought: how much has Mrs Otten been miseducating us about? Who else has been lying to us? Why now should I trust any of the faculty? I've had my feelings that the staff around here was a bit dubious: problems with discipline, unquestioning acceptance of totalitarian regulations. Usually I've been able to overlook it and figure that I simply misunderstood or didn't well enough understand the situation. Perhaps that guy's swearing and slurring wasn't actually against the rules severely enough to warrant action, even though it seemed to be. Or, maybe there's a good reason that the main entrance to the high school is still blocked by mud and construction fence more than four months after the water main was replaced. Dr Tracy was willing to give reasons for things that seemed illogical. I figured usually these reasons at least had a hint of reason in them, somewhere, or he wouldn't give them. (There were exceptions to this, such as when I noted, "Isn't it funny how the cheerleaders' uniforms are so against the dress code?" and he said, "I don't know which parts of the dress code you would be talking about...".) But now I'm disillusioned. If there's corruption that's this outright, then I really have no reason to trust anything a staff member says again. I'm now thrilled by the revelation that this school is a place where lying is commonplace and not really frowned on at all! It explains so much! Why do we have to tuck in our shirts? No reason; they're just lying because they thought it would create "common decency" and they don't want to admit it did nothing but seriously make students mad at them. Why is that construction project still unfinished? When I asked Dr Tracy, he said it was because the winter wasn't a good time of the year to plant grass, and they wanted to do the whole thing at once. At first I thought that was just a true reason that happened to be absolutely ridiculous; now I realize that it was total bull. The thing it doesn't explain is: Why am I letting this group of people take charge of my learning, my intellect, and my future?
-That's a rant.
What?
Honestly, I don't know why you bother coming back here to keep checking if I don't write anything. Hold on, because I've got to switch to the computer in my room. This one is outfitted with The Virtually Indestructible Keyboard, which is a great idea but the absolute worst computer keyboard as far as typing ergonomics goes. It rates only a step above manual typewriter, and it's considerably below an electric one.
Sunday, January 15, 2006
Honest Excuse
I have an honest excuse for not updating my blog. My computer has come up with a very successful new way to irritate me: about fifteen minutes after I turn it on, it abruptly and with no warning whatsoever switches off. I didn't want to go through starting an entry just to have it disappear to the Land of Lost Data. Fortunately, we've discovered that the problem doesn't happen under my Mom's username; unfortunately (since my font-making program is under my name), I can't work on Cyril until it's fixed. I do have the italic for it somewhat finished, but I don't have any numbers done.
-Well. First, the holidays. Boy, it's a stretch thinking back that far. First, we went on up to Dayton or wherever--Middletown, Centerville, one of those--and did Christmas on my Dad's side of the family. I got some good socks like I asked for, one of those neat Magnetic Induction Principle flashlights, uh, some other things, and of course peanut butter fudge. Nana's peanut butter fudge is sublime. And since it's made with sugar, it keeps for a long time, enabling me to eat just one piece a day and savor it for weeks. I think I have seven pieces left.
-A few days later (on Christmas Eve--for tactical reasons, Christmas is never allowed to be on Christmas now), we had Christmas in Oxford with my Mom's side of the family. There I got a few books, also as I asked, and a fishing lure, and a tackle box, and a lava lamp ( I still don't know why), and some incense I haven't seen since, and, uh, some other stuff. Also, I got seventy-five bucks: seventy from Grandpa, and five from Uncle Joe. I have to say: if you can manage it, being Grandpa's grandson can be pretty profitable. Ha, ha, ha. Just kidding, Grandpa. (Kind of!)
-The next year, school started back up. Pfaugh. And so did January. Now, I read somewhere that Cincinnati has never had a snowless January, but, if it weren't for some kind of freaking little flurry or something that happened in the very early days, we may be on our way to the first. We have had just slightly above zero snowfall this whole month so far. There are not words for the contempt I feel for this January. If there were something concrete I could blame it on--say, some machine--a good word would be hostility. If there were something to blame, I could get really involved, probably to a criminal extent, in absolutely ravaging whatever it was until it was torn apart into unrecognizable bits. This has been the suckiest winter I've experienced as far back as I can remember. All season, we've had one snowstorm! And then about four weeks of fifty-degree weather! As soon as humanly possible, I'm getting out of this backward, oil-slicked, dark gray town, this town that's covered tangibly with a thick layer of tedium, where there are no positive aspects or attractions, where the center of town is a Taco Bell, and of course where the school system has been perverted by soulless board members who don't even consider what the students think and whose goal looks to be to turn Finneytown into Big Brother's first outpost, just to give a totalitarian kick to the new millennium. I may or may not go to college somewhere in New England (see below post), but wherever I do, I'm going to move to Minnesota afterwards. As soon as I can, I'll buy a shoreline cabin on a forgotten lake wrapped in dark green pine forest and stretching out far enough to get lost in. During the nights, the only sound will be the occasional thunderstorm every week or so and maybe distant cars on a highway that only exists as part of a world I don't belong to. During the days, there will be the interweaving songs of all the different birds on shore, and the splash of my kayak's paddles and the whiz of my reel as I go out into a distant bay to catch fish for dinner, and maybe the thrum of a mayfly's wings just before it lands on my hand. On vacations, I'll go out paddling, straying for days down a string of interconnected lakes into places where they haven't yet gotten the news that the human race was invented, and then stopping in a distant lake, turning around, and pointing my kayak back to home whenever I decide I want to. Maybe I'll remember those days when I was in a distant land of truck exhaust, police sirens, and the afterglow of city lights electrifying the smog to taint the night sky from black to a sickly purple. Then I'll just shake my head and jump into the water.
Exams were last week. I'm embarrassed to admit I had to take English: I got a B first quarter, because I failed to turn in one assignment. It was the Puritanism and Neoclassicism notes that we had to turn in alongside the test on the test day. I hadn't taken notes in class, because I'm not a take-notes kind of guy, and I never heard her tell us to, and so I stayed up 'til after midnight the night before to work on them. Then, on the test day, there was no exact time when someone said, "Okay, turn your notes in now to this place," and so I didn't. I suppose we were just supposed to staple them to the test. So, I didn't turn them in, and they were worth (whoa!) twenty points, and I got a B for the quarter. Mom, shut up! Yes, it is too late to do anything about it, and yes, I almost ceratinly have an A for the semester anyhow! But I had to take the exam. Otherwise, the ones that you can't get exempt from were math, history, Spanish, and physics. The only hard one among these was history, but boy was it a bear. Fortunately, Mr Volz grades on a curve. He says only one person has ever gotten an uncurved A on his midterm, and she was the person who, when they were reviewing things in class, would say, "Oh, yeah, that's question 18 on test 7," or something like that. On the day I took physics and history, there were three exams scheduled, but there's obviously no exam for study hall, so I had a free bell between them, and it lasted two and a half hours. The exam schedule said students were expected to stay off campus when they didn't have an exam, but just to be sure, I checked in with Mrs Flick to see what I was supposed to do. She said I had to stay on campus! So: not only is the school moronic for making me stay when I had nothing to do, it's also misleading and inconsistent! Well, Aaron invited me to stay in Mrs Lawyer's room to waste time while he finished up some sort of webpage design project for her, so I did.
The forecast calls for warmer-than-average weather, with rain two days next week, and a possiblity of a little bit of snow that will melt anyhow.
This is the first of two new posts. The other is just underneath this one.
-Well. First, the holidays. Boy, it's a stretch thinking back that far. First, we went on up to Dayton or wherever--Middletown, Centerville, one of those--and did Christmas on my Dad's side of the family. I got some good socks like I asked for, one of those neat Magnetic Induction Principle flashlights, uh, some other things, and of course peanut butter fudge. Nana's peanut butter fudge is sublime. And since it's made with sugar, it keeps for a long time, enabling me to eat just one piece a day and savor it for weeks. I think I have seven pieces left.
-A few days later (on Christmas Eve--for tactical reasons, Christmas is never allowed to be on Christmas now), we had Christmas in Oxford with my Mom's side of the family. There I got a few books, also as I asked, and a fishing lure, and a tackle box, and a lava lamp ( I still don't know why), and some incense I haven't seen since, and, uh, some other stuff. Also, I got seventy-five bucks: seventy from Grandpa, and five from Uncle Joe. I have to say: if you can manage it, being Grandpa's grandson can be pretty profitable. Ha, ha, ha. Just kidding, Grandpa. (Kind of!)
-The next year, school started back up. Pfaugh. And so did January. Now, I read somewhere that Cincinnati has never had a snowless January, but, if it weren't for some kind of freaking little flurry or something that happened in the very early days, we may be on our way to the first. We have had just slightly above zero snowfall this whole month so far. There are not words for the contempt I feel for this January. If there were something concrete I could blame it on--say, some machine--a good word would be hostility. If there were something to blame, I could get really involved, probably to a criminal extent, in absolutely ravaging whatever it was until it was torn apart into unrecognizable bits. This has been the suckiest winter I've experienced as far back as I can remember. All season, we've had one snowstorm! And then about four weeks of fifty-degree weather! As soon as humanly possible, I'm getting out of this backward, oil-slicked, dark gray town, this town that's covered tangibly with a thick layer of tedium, where there are no positive aspects or attractions, where the center of town is a Taco Bell, and of course where the school system has been perverted by soulless board members who don't even consider what the students think and whose goal looks to be to turn Finneytown into Big Brother's first outpost, just to give a totalitarian kick to the new millennium. I may or may not go to college somewhere in New England (see below post), but wherever I do, I'm going to move to Minnesota afterwards. As soon as I can, I'll buy a shoreline cabin on a forgotten lake wrapped in dark green pine forest and stretching out far enough to get lost in. During the nights, the only sound will be the occasional thunderstorm every week or so and maybe distant cars on a highway that only exists as part of a world I don't belong to. During the days, there will be the interweaving songs of all the different birds on shore, and the splash of my kayak's paddles and the whiz of my reel as I go out into a distant bay to catch fish for dinner, and maybe the thrum of a mayfly's wings just before it lands on my hand. On vacations, I'll go out paddling, straying for days down a string of interconnected lakes into places where they haven't yet gotten the news that the human race was invented, and then stopping in a distant lake, turning around, and pointing my kayak back to home whenever I decide I want to. Maybe I'll remember those days when I was in a distant land of truck exhaust, police sirens, and the afterglow of city lights electrifying the smog to taint the night sky from black to a sickly purple. Then I'll just shake my head and jump into the water.
Exams were last week. I'm embarrassed to admit I had to take English: I got a B first quarter, because I failed to turn in one assignment. It was the Puritanism and Neoclassicism notes that we had to turn in alongside the test on the test day. I hadn't taken notes in class, because I'm not a take-notes kind of guy, and I never heard her tell us to, and so I stayed up 'til after midnight the night before to work on them. Then, on the test day, there was no exact time when someone said, "Okay, turn your notes in now to this place," and so I didn't. I suppose we were just supposed to staple them to the test. So, I didn't turn them in, and they were worth (whoa!) twenty points, and I got a B for the quarter. Mom, shut up! Yes, it is too late to do anything about it, and yes, I almost ceratinly have an A for the semester anyhow! But I had to take the exam. Otherwise, the ones that you can't get exempt from were math, history, Spanish, and physics. The only hard one among these was history, but boy was it a bear. Fortunately, Mr Volz grades on a curve. He says only one person has ever gotten an uncurved A on his midterm, and she was the person who, when they were reviewing things in class, would say, "Oh, yeah, that's question 18 on test 7," or something like that. On the day I took physics and history, there were three exams scheduled, but there's obviously no exam for study hall, so I had a free bell between them, and it lasted two and a half hours. The exam schedule said students were expected to stay off campus when they didn't have an exam, but just to be sure, I checked in with Mrs Flick to see what I was supposed to do. She said I had to stay on campus! So: not only is the school moronic for making me stay when I had nothing to do, it's also misleading and inconsistent! Well, Aaron invited me to stay in Mrs Lawyer's room to waste time while he finished up some sort of webpage design project for her, so I did.
The forecast calls for warmer-than-average weather, with rain two days next week, and a possiblity of a little bit of snow that will melt anyhow.
This is the first of two new posts. The other is just underneath this one.
Oh, something else
I just reread the comments on my last post, and I noticed they had a distinct collegiate bent.
-I haven't even come close to deciding what college I'm going to go to. A few days ago, BJ was around on his semester break, and I had a nice long talk with him about colleges. He suggested one called Amherst in Massachusetts, and some other one in Minnesota that I forgot. He says pick one I like. Well, I won't try to contradict that advice. But he also says I ought to pick out one with a good reputation for its English department if I want to be an editor. This begs the question, BJ: How am I supposed to know what a college's reputation is? What I really need around now is a big list that says what assorted colleges are known for, and how well they're known for it. Is there such a list? Where do I get it? There probably isn't. So, how do I know?
-Another thing I need to know is how much colleges give for a National Merit Scholarship. It's different with each college. So how do I know what it is for each college? Like, say, does Amherst tell somewhere on their website how much they're going to give me because I'm a Scholar? And if not, how am I supposed to tastefully find out--from each college I'm thinking about? Or am I supposed to just navigate in the dark? And more than just how much they'll give me, here's another question. Where does it say what the tuition is for a college? That at least is probably on the website somewhere.
-Those are the questions I keep asking. Now I've actually asked them of someone.
-I haven't even come close to deciding what college I'm going to go to. A few days ago, BJ was around on his semester break, and I had a nice long talk with him about colleges. He suggested one called Amherst in Massachusetts, and some other one in Minnesota that I forgot. He says pick one I like. Well, I won't try to contradict that advice. But he also says I ought to pick out one with a good reputation for its English department if I want to be an editor. This begs the question, BJ: How am I supposed to know what a college's reputation is? What I really need around now is a big list that says what assorted colleges are known for, and how well they're known for it. Is there such a list? Where do I get it? There probably isn't. So, how do I know?
-Another thing I need to know is how much colleges give for a National Merit Scholarship. It's different with each college. So how do I know what it is for each college? Like, say, does Amherst tell somewhere on their website how much they're going to give me because I'm a Scholar? And if not, how am I supposed to tastefully find out--from each college I'm thinking about? Or am I supposed to just navigate in the dark? And more than just how much they'll give me, here's another question. Where does it say what the tuition is for a college? That at least is probably on the website somewhere.
-Those are the questions I keep asking. Now I've actually asked them of someone.
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