I came down with something on Saturday. That night it snowed. So on Sunday I was too sick to properly enjoy it finally. Coincidence or cosmic irony? You decide. However, I did enjoy it - just not to the fullest extent possible. There were about three inches and six kids. I have no idea who most of them are. They just aggregated in our backyard,because we have the best sledding hill in the neighborhood. That's one thing that can be said for our house here in Finneytown: come winter, it's a good one to have around. Our backyard is a hill with a generous incline. At the bottom is a long level spot, and then it inclines again, even steeper, and just for a couple yards before dumping into brushy trees. It is my eternal goal to be able to work up enough momentum to clear the level area and plunge all the way into the trees. I've only ever been able to do it by pushing along with my arms for half the flat part.
-Besides sledding, I threw snowballs at everyone. Didn't matter who they were. I think they were gradually switching out kids. Some of them were bitter fighters, especially the small ones. Needless to say, I was the best. However, I was sick, so periodically I needed to take time out to rest. I need to have more snowball fights, because I'm now feeling the burn in my legs - apparently it's more taxing than you realize at the time. And I've decided that I want to get more in shape. In fact, I've been doing sit-ups every night. The goal is to eventually have a six-pack. Because when has being fit and smoking hot ever been a bad thing? Well, probably during accidental forays into the gay section of town, but I doubt that really happens all that often. And, as far as I know, Cincinnati doesn't have an apportioned gay section. This has gone on too long. Next paragraph.
-Let's see. Got straight A's for the semester and exams. So that's good.
-Did that tutoring today, in the library after school. Patrice, unlike, for example, Micah, is teachable. I think the class just moves right past her. Now, bear in mind, we've only been acquainted for forty minutes. At the start, I did a pretty awkward job teaching, but toward the end, I had a better handle on it. And I gave her a good amount of sample problems so we could make sure she had it down. Boy, if we had just stopped at the end of the homework, the session might as well have not happened, because there were only about five problems, and each using a different principle, so that she barely got exposed to any of them. At the end she handed me $15, but since it had only been two thirds of an hour, I gave one of them back. Probably I should have kept it all, since I'm the poor one, not her mom (who's the one doing the paying, of course), but this way (a) I don't have a guilty conscience at all and (b) her mom will see that I'm quite the Honest John, and be more likely to schedule more sessions. Five dollars back. She won't even be expecting that. Like a bolt of kindness zapped down uponto her. I'm awesome. You can't even follow that.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Monday, January 15, 2007
My quest
I decided a while ago that what I was going to do was read a book by each Nobel Prize winner in literature. This has met with some criticism. Mom says everything I read shouldn't be determined by some Swedish group I don't even know. Rosie says the Nobel committee is a bunch of hoity-toities who just read books and see which one has the best-hidden symbolism, and it's just a nerd-off contest. Well, here's what I say.
-I like to read. However, I'm not that great at picking random books off the shelf. That strategy led me to pay something like twenty-five dollars for, and read all the way through, The Ethical Assassin, which turned out to be not a very good book at all, and a vegetarian manifesto to boot. So a little guidance couldn't hurt in my selection process. And the Nobel committee is a group I put a good amount of stock in, because it's composed of such lettered people, and because it's been doing this for quite a while. Besides, what are my alternatives? The New York Times? Oprah? No thanks. And, I'm not reading only Nobel laureates. For example, I'm currently reading the excellent Walden. The other day at Borders I saw a book on the shelf that I thought would be pretty good, from the summary on the back - Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis. I was considering buying it, and then I read on the back that Sinclair Lewis got a Nobel, so I reasoned that I was going to come around to him eventually anyhow, so I'd buy the book, which I had thought looked good anyhow.
-So far, here's a list of what I've read.
--Lord of the Flies by William Golding - read it for class, then found out Golding was a laureate.
--Blindness by José Saramago
--Approximately 2/3 of Independent People by Halldór Laxness. Then I lost the book, so I had to order another from amazon.com. The original was a library book, so I'll end up paying for that one too.
--The Old Man and the Sea and A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway- I just now found out Hemingway was a laureate.
--some The Jungle Book stuff - Rudyard Kipling too, huh. I'll probably read some other stuff by him.
-Things I plan to read include The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, Cien Años de Soledad por Gabriel García Márquez, Enemies, a Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, and of course Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis.
-So there you go. What else has happened? Not much. Pit practice for the musical starts today despite our day off of school. The musical is South Pacific. Micah's now a level 60 in RunEscape. It's rained a lot. Rain, a lot of it. Every day, seems like. We've got prodigious puddles in our front yard. It's impossible to walk in Warder without getting your feet wet (unless you stay exclusively on the semi-paved trail, which isn't an option for me). A weatherman said that if this had all fallen as snow we'd be up to our waists. That's probably understated. But the fact remains that it didn't fall as snow. I don't think we're even going to have winter this year. Just fall followed by spring. Not my fault but it affects me anyhow. It really burns me. Also worth noting is that my waterproof shoes are no longer waterproof. Whatever.
AAAAAAAAAARHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGG
-I like to read. However, I'm not that great at picking random books off the shelf. That strategy led me to pay something like twenty-five dollars for, and read all the way through, The Ethical Assassin, which turned out to be not a very good book at all, and a vegetarian manifesto to boot. So a little guidance couldn't hurt in my selection process. And the Nobel committee is a group I put a good amount of stock in, because it's composed of such lettered people, and because it's been doing this for quite a while. Besides, what are my alternatives? The New York Times? Oprah? No thanks. And, I'm not reading only Nobel laureates. For example, I'm currently reading the excellent Walden. The other day at Borders I saw a book on the shelf that I thought would be pretty good, from the summary on the back - Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis. I was considering buying it, and then I read on the back that Sinclair Lewis got a Nobel, so I reasoned that I was going to come around to him eventually anyhow, so I'd buy the book, which I had thought looked good anyhow.
-So far, here's a list of what I've read.
--Lord of the Flies by William Golding - read it for class, then found out Golding was a laureate.
--Blindness by José Saramago
--Approximately 2/3 of Independent People by Halldór Laxness. Then I lost the book, so I had to order another from amazon.com. The original was a library book, so I'll end up paying for that one too.
--The Old Man and the Sea and A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway- I just now found out Hemingway was a laureate.
--some The Jungle Book stuff - Rudyard Kipling too, huh. I'll probably read some other stuff by him.
-Things I plan to read include The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, Cien Años de Soledad por Gabriel García Márquez, Enemies, a Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, and of course Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis.
-So there you go. What else has happened? Not much. Pit practice for the musical starts today despite our day off of school. The musical is South Pacific. Micah's now a level 60 in RunEscape. It's rained a lot. Rain, a lot of it. Every day, seems like. We've got prodigious puddles in our front yard. It's impossible to walk in Warder without getting your feet wet (unless you stay exclusively on the semi-paved trail, which isn't an option for me). A weatherman said that if this had all fallen as snow we'd be up to our waists. That's probably understated. But the fact remains that it didn't fall as snow. I don't think we're even going to have winter this year. Just fall followed by spring. Not my fault but it affects me anyhow. It really burns me. Also worth noting is that my waterproof shoes are no longer waterproof. Whatever.
AAAAAAAAAARHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGG
Friday, January 12, 2007
Kind of weird
I discovered love the other day. Turned out it was inside me the whole time. Weird.
-Here's a summary of what happened. It was December 30th in the evening. Christmas Break had been on for a while. Dad was in the garage playing vbdaleks. Micah was in his room with Brian playing RunEscape (I like to write it that way, for no really good reason). Mom was at work or something. I had been reading Blindness for about six hours that day to get finished with it. I was sitting on the recliner in the living room. I had nothing to do. It was already dark outside, or I would've probably taken a walk. From my room the internet was calling: "I'm an easy way to waste several hours until you feel tired enough to go to bed." I ignored its plaintive cry; I take great care to do something with my time besides waste it. I was understandably burnt out on reading, so I didn't pick up my Walden. So here I was on the recliner. I started throwing loose change at the garage door and Micah's door, for no reason that I could have explained. Having exhausted any potential for fun in that, I sat back down on the recliner. Suddenly it struck me that what I had on my hands here was an overpowering sense of loneliness. I don't remember whether I said it aloud: "I need a girlfriend."
-I never would have believed it. I never really pictured myself as the romantic type; in fact, you may recall words I wrote to that effect right here a while ago. I never thought I needed any people. I was a happy introvert. But now here I was confronted with an undeniable truth I'd just pulled out of somewhere inside of me. It was a bit unsettling. Sitting there, I started to understand all these things that people say. "Love makes the world go 'round." "All you need is love." I wondered if I would start liking all those songs by new bands that have no interesting rhythms but rather a mellow person playing guitar and singing calmly about love, but then I concluded that most probably I will always hate those songs. However, the simple fact remains that I "need somebody to love," as it was said by, apparently, "Jefferson Airplane". I still have yet to take decisive action. But now I know I will.
-So, now that I've briefly gone all emo on you, let's get back to my gruff and callous exterior demeanor and talk about something else, shall we? For example, why I've let you down and not posted? Well, mostly it's because this has been midterm week. This didn't worry me so much as it did my friends. Bryce and Aaron both rented me as a tutor for math, because they've been slacking in a way heretofore inconceivable to man. I helped Bryce on the weekend; taught him how to do all that fun stuff: derivatives of trigonometric functions, logarithmic differentiation, implicit differentiation, and the like. I earned the handsome sum of $20. I went to Aaron's yesterday and showed him all that and also more, because he's been slacking for a little while longer than Bryce and thus needed to start as far back as the chain rule. But he seemed to be getting a pretty good handle on it. I mentioned that Bryce paid me $20 for my help. He pointed out, correctly, that I hadn't told him I wanted money. However, I never told Bryce either, and he paid out of the goodness of his heart, without my even having thought of asking. Dear Abby: how do I politely tell my friend that I want money? Second question: I put my name out through the school to do math tutoring, and today Mrs Counts from the school gave me the name and number of a girl who wants help, and told me I should call her mom. She said I would most probably make money off the deal. How do I phrase my request, and what's a reasonable price? The $20 Bryce gave me seems rather generous to set as a standard.
-Exam week went fine, by the way, but the math exam had clearly too many questions. Luckily Mr Rahn didn't care that we stayed after the exam time was over. There was some stuff on there that we haven't touched on for a long time, and I bet Bryce and Aaron probably didn't get those questions, because it's old slacking, and we didn't cover it. Though, who knows? They aren't, in fact, incompetent, so they may have done it. They didn't seem too unconfident when turning the exams in.
-You've had enough of listening to my problems and questions and stuff. I can tell by the strand of drool running down your chin - aght, it just fell off onto your shirt. You can go do whatever else you were going to do now. Make yourself a dessert. Check your e-mail. Pour yourself a tall boy. Whatever.
P.S. If you want to play vbdaleks, you'll probably need to get a few .dll's from www.dll-files.com. That's just the way it seems to go.
-Here's a summary of what happened. It was December 30th in the evening. Christmas Break had been on for a while. Dad was in the garage playing vbdaleks. Micah was in his room with Brian playing RunEscape (I like to write it that way, for no really good reason). Mom was at work or something. I had been reading Blindness for about six hours that day to get finished with it. I was sitting on the recliner in the living room. I had nothing to do. It was already dark outside, or I would've probably taken a walk. From my room the internet was calling: "I'm an easy way to waste several hours until you feel tired enough to go to bed." I ignored its plaintive cry; I take great care to do something with my time besides waste it. I was understandably burnt out on reading, so I didn't pick up my Walden. So here I was on the recliner. I started throwing loose change at the garage door and Micah's door, for no reason that I could have explained. Having exhausted any potential for fun in that, I sat back down on the recliner. Suddenly it struck me that what I had on my hands here was an overpowering sense of loneliness. I don't remember whether I said it aloud: "I need a girlfriend."
-I never would have believed it. I never really pictured myself as the romantic type; in fact, you may recall words I wrote to that effect right here a while ago. I never thought I needed any people. I was a happy introvert. But now here I was confronted with an undeniable truth I'd just pulled out of somewhere inside of me. It was a bit unsettling. Sitting there, I started to understand all these things that people say. "Love makes the world go 'round." "All you need is love." I wondered if I would start liking all those songs by new bands that have no interesting rhythms but rather a mellow person playing guitar and singing calmly about love, but then I concluded that most probably I will always hate those songs. However, the simple fact remains that I "need somebody to love," as it was said by, apparently, "Jefferson Airplane". I still have yet to take decisive action. But now I know I will.
-So, now that I've briefly gone all emo on you, let's get back to my gruff and callous exterior demeanor and talk about something else, shall we? For example, why I've let you down and not posted? Well, mostly it's because this has been midterm week. This didn't worry me so much as it did my friends. Bryce and Aaron both rented me as a tutor for math, because they've been slacking in a way heretofore inconceivable to man. I helped Bryce on the weekend; taught him how to do all that fun stuff: derivatives of trigonometric functions, logarithmic differentiation, implicit differentiation, and the like. I earned the handsome sum of $20. I went to Aaron's yesterday and showed him all that and also more, because he's been slacking for a little while longer than Bryce and thus needed to start as far back as the chain rule. But he seemed to be getting a pretty good handle on it. I mentioned that Bryce paid me $20 for my help. He pointed out, correctly, that I hadn't told him I wanted money. However, I never told Bryce either, and he paid out of the goodness of his heart, without my even having thought of asking. Dear Abby: how do I politely tell my friend that I want money? Second question: I put my name out through the school to do math tutoring, and today Mrs Counts from the school gave me the name and number of a girl who wants help, and told me I should call her mom. She said I would most probably make money off the deal. How do I phrase my request, and what's a reasonable price? The $20 Bryce gave me seems rather generous to set as a standard.
-Exam week went fine, by the way, but the math exam had clearly too many questions. Luckily Mr Rahn didn't care that we stayed after the exam time was over. There was some stuff on there that we haven't touched on for a long time, and I bet Bryce and Aaron probably didn't get those questions, because it's old slacking, and we didn't cover it. Though, who knows? They aren't, in fact, incompetent, so they may have done it. They didn't seem too unconfident when turning the exams in.
-You've had enough of listening to my problems and questions and stuff. I can tell by the strand of drool running down your chin - aght, it just fell off onto your shirt. You can go do whatever else you were going to do now. Make yourself a dessert. Check your e-mail. Pour yourself a tall boy. Whatever.
P.S. If you want to play vbdaleks, you'll probably need to get a few .dll's from www.dll-files.com. That's just the way it seems to go.
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