If you didn't know that I've deciding between two colleges, now you know. Grinnell and Miami. My decision was due postmarked on May 1st, so I actually had to decide by today or (really, best) yesterday. I visited Grinnell on the 20th through 21st, and Miami on the 23rd. Then I started mulling it over.
-Here is a sample of my thoughts.
Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami Grinnell Miami
-I needed my decision by Saturday night to make it easiest to turn in the forms. At various times I made decisions, but they were all only waiting for the next decision to kick them into the past. On Saturday I spent all my waking time thinking about which college. Think about that. Involved in thought for an entire day. The consequence determines where I spend my next four years. How happy or miserable I'll be. How I'll spend all my time, excluding summers and a few breaks. Where I'll be geographically, whether I can go back home. What kind of environment, physically and in respect to the attitudes of the people around me. Thinking nonstop. Weighing the two options. My brain slowly decomposed. Melted into a gray gel. I kept having to push it back into my head. During the day I thought Grinnell would be better. At the end of the day, I attempted to give a decision. But, on their way to my mouth, the two names Collided with each other. They had a violent running-in and after socking the snot out of each other - this being inside my head, which didn't feel really hot - eventually decided that, since both couldn't go, neither would, and Miami shut off the lights behind them when I went to bed.
-Sunday, now. I got up and thought more. We went to church. Mom sought Pastor Curry's advice and prayer. I continued thinking. Grinnell and Miami battling it out at the exit ramp. Miami gained a foothold. I ate breakfast distractedly, and went home and thought and talked with Mom while thinking and thought. Then I walked up to Warder (barefoot, by the way) and climbed up a pine tree that Micah and I know. We call it the Ivory Tower. I hadn't been in it since last year. I realized that the ice storm we had this February really did a number on it. At least five really formidable branches had snapped off - branches six, seven inches in diameter. Sap was oozing prolifically from the nubs of the former branches. I climbed up to the top, which was slightly more difficult now, and several times stickier. Then I thought. I believe I sat in the Ivory Tower for at least two hours. Miami and Grinnell pushed and shoved. No holds barred. I didn't climb down all at once; rather, I came down a branch at a time whenever I was getting tired of the branch I was on. Ultimately, I jumped off the lowest branch in a pro-Grinnell mood. I visited some websites. The GORP website (Grinnell Outdoor Recreation Program), on the GOOP (Grinnell Outdoor Orientation Program) page. Greyhound's website. Something that started with R, something that started with C. RateMyProfessor.com, which is a very good resource. I went to bed having kept Mom up until 0130. At that time I finally told her Grinnell, but qualified it by telling her to keep her ears open the next morning in case I changed my mind again. My brain was now somewhere past fried. Charred, maybe.
-I thought until I got to sleep and then woke up at 0630 and I was struck by an overwhelming sense of dread at leaving home so far and for so long, being way the hell off in Iowa, and I thought about this too. I told Mom, "Now I want to go to Miami." And she said, "Okay, so do you want to make it Miami?" It was 0705. I leave for school at 0700 each day. I leaned my head down, let it suck into itself like a black hole, then tried to coax it to decompress; made a desperate rattling moaning noise, and forced out an inhuman: "Yeah." Then, "And no turning back."
-I biked to school. First band. We're playing a great song called Vesuvius, which is loud and in 9/8 time, and another one called October, which is possibly the smoothest and most beautiful concert band piece that a high school band can play, and another one called Duke Ellington in Concert, which I don't care for. Strictly speaking, Vesuvius isn't really in 9/8. It's in 4/4, 3/4, 9/8, 8/8, 1/4, 2/4, and 11/8. But the action part is in 9/8. After band, I went to psych, and Keith and I did notes. This is something we've been doing since we first had classes together back in 6th grade. Cartoons, recent things we've done, total nonsense, whatever. It all goes on the notes we pass back and forth.
-I had a vague inkling, which by the time psych was over had grown into a fully-fledged thought - "Ah no, not another thought!" - and I took it with me into bio 2nd bell. The thought was: "What am I doing? Miami? Why Miami? Grinnell! Grinnell is way better!" But this time, there was no warring. I just knew it, and though I can't pretend I had absolutely zero doubt, what doubt there was got swept away. Grinnell. It was really clear. I needed to call Mom at work and tell her.
-I had to try in between several different classes before I finally got a hold of her at the end of 5th bell. And then I was done. It turned out that all I needed to do in order to get an unconflicted thought was to stop thinking, which band and psych certainly made me do.
Now I will, as I've promised some of you, tell you how I decided what I decided.
Let me first off say that Miami and Grinnell are both excellent. It's not as if I decided on Grinnell because Miami is terrible and I suddenly realized it. If that were the case, I'd be a frickinidiot for putting myself into so much agony for so long. Plus, I was accepted into the Honors program at Miami. Here are some things Miami had going for it.
-It's close to home.
-It has more classes to choose from.
-I was in the Honors program. and I would be able to live in an Honors dorm.
-It has a 44-foot rock wall and an ice rink and (in Peffer Park) a giant sledding hill.
-There's also a big forest (Hueston Woods), something Iowa doesn't have a lot of.
But, here's some stuff it had in the minus column.
-There are drunkards everywhere.
-It's impersonal.
-It's probably harder to get into programs like the student newspaper, because they're really large.
-http://hs.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2200501989 (I don't know if you can get into this without a facebook account, but give it a try)
-Class requirements. This is a big one. There are 36 required credit-hours that you have to take in order to graduate, disributed nitpickingly across several different disciplines. On top of that, to graduate With Honors, you have to take ten Honors courses. I think these can overlap at least partially if not wholly with the required credit-hours, but they still limit the class choices that much more. By the time I got done with all my required classes, I would have been there for two years. When I realized this, I realized the Honors program is more of a hindrance then a help. Honors students are also required to keep a 3.5 gpa, and strongly encouraged to write a thesis.
Meanwhile, Grinnell was sitting there all like, "I've got these benefits."
-Really, really smart students and professors.
-Quiet small size.
-A rip-roarin' winter.
-I can elect (and have elected) to stay in a sub-free - substance-free - dorm.
-The open curriculum. There's only one class that's required for graduation, and I would take it if it weren't - the First-Year Tutorial. This isn't in a traditional subject like English or math, but rather it's something where you get to pick from a list of like 30 really fascinating and exhaustive subjects. Here's a list of them from last year, but they're totally different each year.
-Way more personal. The professor who teaches you the Tutorial becomes your advisor for the rest of your time there, and you get well acquainted with them. And everyone's nice*, and the professors are accessible. *generalization, but true from everything I've seen
But what kept me from it? Here are disadvantages.
-It is, as I say, way the hell out there in Iowa, and there are cornfields all around for like a thousand miles. There's a park, Rock Creek State Park, which has a nice lake, but it's not very well forested - just a few scrubby trees along the banks. Also, I'll be 400 miles from home.
-I think it's a bit more expensive.
-It has great classes, but not quite as many of them to choose from.
-Because it's small, there are fewer fine honeys to choose from.
However, I will finish with more of its benefits.
-I'm guranteed a job somewhere on campus to help pay for my Education.
-Most of Miami's broad selection of fine honeys are total airheads anyhow, and I'd have to be careful to get one that wasn't lousy.
-The classes are way better.
-I found a good amount of forests around, after doing some searching; there's the Conard Environmental Research Area (CERA), which has a 40-acre (1/4-mile square) oak forest; there's actually more forest in Rock Creek than I thought; there are other areas of forest around. And I can go to exotic (read: domestic) places with GORP, like perhaps Minnesota (I don't know this one for sure though), or the caves of Iowa (these apparently really exist), or Wisconsin (where GOOP is).
Sure, I'll probably get homesick. But this is the Information Age, you stupids. I'll open up a special private email account just for talking to home. I imagine I'll get frequent phone calls. Plus, the winter break is like four weeks long, and I can use that to take advantage of the hill in Peffer Park and catch up with the family and all that stuff. And of course I'll continue blogging until the end of time.
Now, who'll take this Miami t-shirt and Miami window cling that I got when I visited?
Monday, April 30, 2007
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Now this is something
Well, GRINNELL LET ME IN! I got a hefty, cheerful packet today in the mail, and they say they won't be so embarrassed if I show my face around campus for a few years. They're even offering to throw $25,800 at me. This means that (1) I'm not totally worthless after all, and (2) I have options now! So, what I'm going to have to do is take an extensive tour, and maybe sleepover if it's offering, of both Grinnell and Miami. However, I don't know if Grandma and Grandpa will be available to take me.
-Grandpa had to go to the emergency room the other day, and he's still there. He had it all - the total package. They got him through the initial stuff, which we'll just not mention, but now he's got kidney failure and congestive heart failure to deal with. They say that he'll make it, but once he's out he'll have to make some drastic lifestyle changes. Every aspect of his diet will be carefully regulated, is one thing I know. Maybe he'll also have to give up strenuous activities, or a variety of other medical concerns like that. Everyone is pretty antsy around now. It's a nervewracking development, no doubt about that. Kidney failure and congestive heart failure seldom aren't. I believe Mom is taking me to go visit him in the hospital there tonight.
-It's spring break, by the way. I forgot to mention that. I've already plowed through about five days of it without really doing anything. Well, yesterday, Micah and I went on a comprehensive bike ride, and I read a book (The Road by Cormac McCarthy) but other than that I've done very little. What should I do? What I'd really like to do is get started working on that book I want to write, but I still need to create a coherent plot for it before I start writing. And I need to figure out how to make it interesting. People do read boring books, but I don't want mine to be one of them. I'm considering making it a story with two parallel main characters, one of whom is less focused on. That won't make it more interesting - I'm just saying it, is all. I have a good feeling about it, but I can't seem to assemble it. And of course I'll work on that. That's what I'll do with the rest of this break. Something useful. Or I could work on my snake cage. That thing is almost a joke. It's been sitting in the exact same spot in my room for about five or six years and I haven't done a thing with it. Mostly that's because I need a sheet of Plexiglas for the front door. But shoot, I could build the framework of the door, I suppose. So, with my remaining three days (starting tomorrow), I'm doing one of those two things. Yes! It's good to have a plan worked out.
-Grandpa had to go to the emergency room the other day, and he's still there. He had it all - the total package. They got him through the initial stuff, which we'll just not mention, but now he's got kidney failure and congestive heart failure to deal with. They say that he'll make it, but once he's out he'll have to make some drastic lifestyle changes. Every aspect of his diet will be carefully regulated, is one thing I know. Maybe he'll also have to give up strenuous activities, or a variety of other medical concerns like that. Everyone is pretty antsy around now. It's a nervewracking development, no doubt about that. Kidney failure and congestive heart failure seldom aren't. I believe Mom is taking me to go visit him in the hospital there tonight.
-It's spring break, by the way. I forgot to mention that. I've already plowed through about five days of it without really doing anything. Well, yesterday, Micah and I went on a comprehensive bike ride, and I read a book (The Road by Cormac McCarthy) but other than that I've done very little. What should I do? What I'd really like to do is get started working on that book I want to write, but I still need to create a coherent plot for it before I start writing. And I need to figure out how to make it interesting. People do read boring books, but I don't want mine to be one of them. I'm considering making it a story with two parallel main characters, one of whom is less focused on. That won't make it more interesting - I'm just saying it, is all. I have a good feeling about it, but I can't seem to assemble it. And of course I'll work on that. That's what I'll do with the rest of this break. Something useful. Or I could work on my snake cage. That thing is almost a joke. It's been sitting in the exact same spot in my room for about five or six years and I haven't done a thing with it. Mostly that's because I need a sheet of Plexiglas for the front door. But shoot, I could build the framework of the door, I suppose. So, with my remaining three days (starting tomorrow), I'm doing one of those two things. Yes! It's good to have a plan worked out.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Politix Xtreme
Okay, it's time for me to say something. We both know that it's very seldom that I make any sort of political comment. In fact, I think this will be the first time I make one here.
-I saw An Inconvenient Truth in biology class. It struck me as rather astoundingly good and I figured that one of the main reasons people are doing so little about global warming is that they know so little about it and they think it might not even be happening or that it's a trivial little thing (1.7°C - it sounds so meaningless!), and then I figured that if people watch this movie they'll finally be educated, and that's the first step to solving the problem. That's what Al Gore was thinking when he made it.
-So I encouraged Mom and Dad to watch it. The results were less than spectacular, but enlightening in a couple different ways. To begin, Mom rented it as a one-night rental at about 2300. Dad refused to let us use the living room TV on the pretense that he was currently watching Romancing the Stone (which, not more than half an hour earlier, he had called a "throwaway movie"). I plugged the external DVD player in anyway and it started playing. He said: "Unplug the fucking thing and let me watch the movie. Now." Mom, Micah, and I watched it in Micah's room on a small television in a cramped space.
-Over the next few days after the viewing, Mom and Dad did all they could to refute all of Al's points. Dad was the most diligent at it. He pointed me to a slideshow (to see: click on "view slideshow"). In the interest of impartiality, I'll tell you a few things the slideshow got right:
-It admitted that global warming is happening.
-It pointed out a couple graphs that Al Gore cut off before 1947, making them misleading.
-It noted that the international science community says Al is overstating things a bit. (This does not mean that it is a trivial problem. It means that Al overstated it a bit to make it even bigger. It's possible to overstate even very large problems: for example, I could say, "Global warming will cause the earth to collapse in upon itself and become a black hole, and any spacecraft escaping from the planet will not be able to get far enough away and will be sucked in and destroyed.")
But, let me quote myself here. When I finished reading the slideshow, I told Dad: "There were two or three good points, and the rest was BS." He said, "Yes!" trimphantly. I had to inform him, "I was talking about the slideshow, not the movie." Here are some problems.
-Right off the bat, it suggests that global warming is actually a good thing! Think of how much better all our trees will grow with all the extra carbon dioxide in the air! This completely misses the point that there's more carbon dioxide because (partially) there are too few trees to use it! And it reminds me of the premise for the Colbert Report's "The Convenientest Truth", although I didn't watch that (I read what the premise was online).
-It misses the point: "There has been no increase in the rate of warming since the mid-1970s." But there is warming!
-It tries to make things that are bad sound less bad. It criticizes Al for describing a breaking ice shelf as being "the size of Rhode Island" because it sounds scary, and then says that's only 1/246 the size of the sheet it's part of. 1/246 is rather a lot, all things considered, and that is one heck of a big ice sheet that broke off.
-On page 40 (my favorite page) it forecasts doom and death for the whole world if the United States isn't allowed to burn fossil fuels like crazy, by implying that our carbon dioxide emissions are the only thing that enables us to be a force of good in the world. "Without our CO2 emissions, the world would be poorer, sicker, and less free."
-It ascribes scientists' viewpoints solely to their desire for money (on page 42).
-It's overall almost totally inconclusive, picking on little bits of the movie and failing to discount the main point.
I've taken the time out to criticize this to show how much some people - in this case, Dad - will seek out and believe in the name of politics. Let the record show that I believe as much as the next person that Al Gore is something of a joke. Look at his personal emissions, for instance; he uses I think 30 times more energy than the average American. But this does not mean that he's wrong about everything; just that he's hypocritical there. Dad thinks it does mean he's wrong about everything. Actually, he thinks Al Gore is wrong about everything because he's a Democrat. And that is the point of this story.
-Why do politics turn people against each other so viciously? Dad now won't hear a word said in defense of anything Al Gore says or does. Gore is a godless, nonscientific Democrat. Dad has a deep loathing of Democrats as people, as far as I can tell. He's not the only one. I was recently in his truck and got the treat of listening to talk radio spouted forth by Rush Limbaugh. Talk about a man who can't stand Democrats. Anything a Democrat says, for him, is instantly wrong; his callers who try to tell him something from an opposing viewpoint are "idiots" (though it doesn't help that many of them actually are, such as the woman who called in to protest clubbing baby seals and then admitted to wearing leather and couldn't, despite all efforts, be made to see the conflict of interests). What must it be like to be so deeply prejudiced, have such an all-consuming hatred, for something like half of America? How can he walk in public - is he afraid he'll breathe air that Democrats have breathed? Is it like being a member of the KKK? Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, George W. Bush, and an extensive list of others. It's incredible, to me. It's incredible how blind a person can be if there's an opposition of principles, even if the principles are irrelevant to the issue at hand. It's incredible how nitpicking differences in principles can drive two sane people to hate each other so completely. I will not join a political party. George Washington knew the dangers of parties, but nobody wanted to listen. I will, at least.
-Let's leave that melancholy subject and go on to a different one. I turned 18. And it was great.
-Mom and Dad and Micah and I and (I tried to stop it, but still) Micah's friend Tyler went up to Oxford. Grandma took us to Hueston Woods. I decided to hike barefoot. This is a new thing that I'm all enthusiastic about. I like to go around barefoot, even in places where most don't think it's really okay. It is okay. For one thing, there is no law that you have to have shoes on in any establishment. The Health Department doesn't care. As for broken glass, well, it's very little danger if you use your eyes (so that's what those are for!). Feet are also much more resilient than most people think. I didn't sustain any wounds during the whole hike. I was walking on all sorts of terrains: Straight dirt at first, but then I got in the creek. And it was really slick, but, with my keen sense of balance, I managed to stay approximately upright. I finished crossing the creek and I was on low-growing plants in mud. I continued along the creek and found Tyler and Micah behind a few trees. Tyler had lit up a cigarette. I just pulled it out of his mouth and chucked it in the creek. I know it's littering, and I wish I'd done it differently, but it was sort of necessary. Micah got defensive (the best defense is a good offense?) and said, "You know those things cost money?!" I said, "Yep." And without a word we continued walking. I stayed in the creek sometimes and on the bank sometimes. The creekbed is rocky. The rocks are all slick, but I found I could walk with nearly normal stability if I didn't try to stay on the higher ones close to the surface but rather walked indiscriminately on the bottom. I came to the bottom of the cliff, crossed the water, and climbed the cliff, which is made mostly of mud and gravel-type rocks. The cliff affords a disorienting and very pretty view. I met Grandma at the top and kept walking now with her instead of Micah and Tyler. The trail got muddy - that thick black mud that's mixed with leaves. I enjoyed every step of it. We finished the trail and walked back to the van.
-And we had dinner: pork roast, mashed potatoes, gravy, broccoli, bread, and salad. Afterwards I had my birthday cake (angel food with white icing). I'm now 18. Can you believe it? Yeah, so can I. But it's an innovative concept. I can now do things minors can't do: withdraw money from my own account (balance: $32), cash checks, stay out after 2300, sign stuff with an official signature, enter strip bars. Now, society regards me as a sovereign entity, though an irresponsible one. It makes you think.
-On Sunday I went to the Symphony for the first time (not that I couldn't before I was 18, but I never had), and they had the biggest chandelier I've ever seen. It was about fifteen feet across and must have weighed at least a ton. It was also suspended about 50 feet above the floor seats, and Mom and I tried to figure out how they change the light bulbs. I finally worked out that they must be able to lower it. The music was also fantastic like a majestic river running through the countryside (that would be Smetana's The Moldau), fantastic with the best piano playing I've ever personally seen from Piotr Anderszewski (Bartók's Piano Concerto No. 3), and simply fantastic (Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique).
-And on Monday, I had a couple friends - Matt and Aaron (Keith was invited, but he got grounded) - over to LaRosa's, and we amused ourselves finding strange words in the word search, some of which took some doing and considerable rule-bending to get to. That wasn't all we did, of course: that would make us extraordinarily lame.
-Another item is colleges. My letters are coming in from the colleges I've applied to. I got one from Carleton last week. Something happened that I wasn't expecting: they won't let me in. Neither will Kenyon. I'm still waiting for Grinnell's answer. I expected to have to make a difficult choice between fine institutions. I didn't expect the choice to be made for me. But there it is, all at once. It happened pretty quickly. And it didn't strike me until later the full scope of it. Mom had to convince me that I should be upset before I realized I was. I had envisioned my coming years on a quiet, green campus with a small amount of dedicated students. Carleton. Pine forests, cool weather, Minnesota winters, freezing lakes, "Minnesota Nice". Kenyon. Old friendly buildings, rolling green quad, relaxing air, calmness from being well-established. I realized. Their doors are shut to me for at least another year. They won't let me in. Even if I ask nicely. It's a pretty depressing thought.
-But I'm resilient. I can't stay very sad for very long. Now I have left Miami and maybe Grinnell. Miami doesn't have the relaxed atmosphere and peaceful green campus of Kenyon; it won't have the great winters or two attendant lakes I could have looked forward to at Carleton. But it's not without merits. Its programs, of course, are one. It has a new writing school, just now made with a donation. I can major and take classes in all sorts of things. And Oxford is a nice town. My grandparents found it agreeable enough to live there or forty years so far. Grinnell is still a possibility, too, and it's a good school too. Depending on whether I get in and how much money they give me if I do, I might end up going there. It's certainly a great little place.
-That's all I'm going to write for now, except for this: I've made a couple new shirt designs, and I'm Commanding you to go look at them here. And feel free to check out my other two stores Maybe you'll actually buy one. They are exceedingly nice and well-designed shirts. You coud do a lot worse, if I do say so myself.
-I saw An Inconvenient Truth in biology class. It struck me as rather astoundingly good and I figured that one of the main reasons people are doing so little about global warming is that they know so little about it and they think it might not even be happening or that it's a trivial little thing (1.7°C - it sounds so meaningless!), and then I figured that if people watch this movie they'll finally be educated, and that's the first step to solving the problem. That's what Al Gore was thinking when he made it.
-So I encouraged Mom and Dad to watch it. The results were less than spectacular, but enlightening in a couple different ways. To begin, Mom rented it as a one-night rental at about 2300. Dad refused to let us use the living room TV on the pretense that he was currently watching Romancing the Stone (which, not more than half an hour earlier, he had called a "throwaway movie"). I plugged the external DVD player in anyway and it started playing. He said: "Unplug the fucking thing and let me watch the movie. Now." Mom, Micah, and I watched it in Micah's room on a small television in a cramped space.
-Over the next few days after the viewing, Mom and Dad did all they could to refute all of Al's points. Dad was the most diligent at it. He pointed me to a slideshow (to see: click on "view slideshow"). In the interest of impartiality, I'll tell you a few things the slideshow got right:
-It admitted that global warming is happening.
-It pointed out a couple graphs that Al Gore cut off before 1947, making them misleading.
-It noted that the international science community says Al is overstating things a bit. (This does not mean that it is a trivial problem. It means that Al overstated it a bit to make it even bigger. It's possible to overstate even very large problems: for example, I could say, "Global warming will cause the earth to collapse in upon itself and become a black hole, and any spacecraft escaping from the planet will not be able to get far enough away and will be sucked in and destroyed.")
But, let me quote myself here. When I finished reading the slideshow, I told Dad: "There were two or three good points, and the rest was BS." He said, "Yes!" trimphantly. I had to inform him, "I was talking about the slideshow, not the movie." Here are some problems.
-Right off the bat, it suggests that global warming is actually a good thing! Think of how much better all our trees will grow with all the extra carbon dioxide in the air! This completely misses the point that there's more carbon dioxide because (partially) there are too few trees to use it! And it reminds me of the premise for the Colbert Report's "The Convenientest Truth", although I didn't watch that (I read what the premise was online).
-It misses the point: "There has been no increase in the rate of warming since the mid-1970s." But there is warming!
-It tries to make things that are bad sound less bad. It criticizes Al for describing a breaking ice shelf as being "the size of Rhode Island" because it sounds scary, and then says that's only 1/246 the size of the sheet it's part of. 1/246 is rather a lot, all things considered, and that is one heck of a big ice sheet that broke off.
-On page 40 (my favorite page) it forecasts doom and death for the whole world if the United States isn't allowed to burn fossil fuels like crazy, by implying that our carbon dioxide emissions are the only thing that enables us to be a force of good in the world. "Without our CO2 emissions, the world would be poorer, sicker, and less free."
-It ascribes scientists' viewpoints solely to their desire for money (on page 42).
-It's overall almost totally inconclusive, picking on little bits of the movie and failing to discount the main point.
I've taken the time out to criticize this to show how much some people - in this case, Dad - will seek out and believe in the name of politics. Let the record show that I believe as much as the next person that Al Gore is something of a joke. Look at his personal emissions, for instance; he uses I think 30 times more energy than the average American. But this does not mean that he's wrong about everything; just that he's hypocritical there. Dad thinks it does mean he's wrong about everything. Actually, he thinks Al Gore is wrong about everything because he's a Democrat. And that is the point of this story.
-Why do politics turn people against each other so viciously? Dad now won't hear a word said in defense of anything Al Gore says or does. Gore is a godless, nonscientific Democrat. Dad has a deep loathing of Democrats as people, as far as I can tell. He's not the only one. I was recently in his truck and got the treat of listening to talk radio spouted forth by Rush Limbaugh. Talk about a man who can't stand Democrats. Anything a Democrat says, for him, is instantly wrong; his callers who try to tell him something from an opposing viewpoint are "idiots" (though it doesn't help that many of them actually are, such as the woman who called in to protest clubbing baby seals and then admitted to wearing leather and couldn't, despite all efforts, be made to see the conflict of interests). What must it be like to be so deeply prejudiced, have such an all-consuming hatred, for something like half of America? How can he walk in public - is he afraid he'll breathe air that Democrats have breathed? Is it like being a member of the KKK? Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, George W. Bush, and an extensive list of others. It's incredible, to me. It's incredible how blind a person can be if there's an opposition of principles, even if the principles are irrelevant to the issue at hand. It's incredible how nitpicking differences in principles can drive two sane people to hate each other so completely. I will not join a political party. George Washington knew the dangers of parties, but nobody wanted to listen. I will, at least.
-Let's leave that melancholy subject and go on to a different one. I turned 18. And it was great.
-Mom and Dad and Micah and I and (I tried to stop it, but still) Micah's friend Tyler went up to Oxford. Grandma took us to Hueston Woods. I decided to hike barefoot. This is a new thing that I'm all enthusiastic about. I like to go around barefoot, even in places where most don't think it's really okay. It is okay. For one thing, there is no law that you have to have shoes on in any establishment. The Health Department doesn't care. As for broken glass, well, it's very little danger if you use your eyes (so that's what those are for!). Feet are also much more resilient than most people think. I didn't sustain any wounds during the whole hike. I was walking on all sorts of terrains: Straight dirt at first, but then I got in the creek. And it was really slick, but, with my keen sense of balance, I managed to stay approximately upright. I finished crossing the creek and I was on low-growing plants in mud. I continued along the creek and found Tyler and Micah behind a few trees. Tyler had lit up a cigarette. I just pulled it out of his mouth and chucked it in the creek. I know it's littering, and I wish I'd done it differently, but it was sort of necessary. Micah got defensive (the best defense is a good offense?) and said, "You know those things cost money?!" I said, "Yep." And without a word we continued walking. I stayed in the creek sometimes and on the bank sometimes. The creekbed is rocky. The rocks are all slick, but I found I could walk with nearly normal stability if I didn't try to stay on the higher ones close to the surface but rather walked indiscriminately on the bottom. I came to the bottom of the cliff, crossed the water, and climbed the cliff, which is made mostly of mud and gravel-type rocks. The cliff affords a disorienting and very pretty view. I met Grandma at the top and kept walking now with her instead of Micah and Tyler. The trail got muddy - that thick black mud that's mixed with leaves. I enjoyed every step of it. We finished the trail and walked back to the van.
-And we had dinner: pork roast, mashed potatoes, gravy, broccoli, bread, and salad. Afterwards I had my birthday cake (angel food with white icing). I'm now 18. Can you believe it? Yeah, so can I. But it's an innovative concept. I can now do things minors can't do: withdraw money from my own account (balance: $32), cash checks, stay out after 2300, sign stuff with an official signature, enter strip bars. Now, society regards me as a sovereign entity, though an irresponsible one. It makes you think.
-On Sunday I went to the Symphony for the first time (not that I couldn't before I was 18, but I never had), and they had the biggest chandelier I've ever seen. It was about fifteen feet across and must have weighed at least a ton. It was also suspended about 50 feet above the floor seats, and Mom and I tried to figure out how they change the light bulbs. I finally worked out that they must be able to lower it. The music was also fantastic like a majestic river running through the countryside (that would be Smetana's The Moldau), fantastic with the best piano playing I've ever personally seen from Piotr Anderszewski (Bartók's Piano Concerto No. 3), and simply fantastic (Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique).
-And on Monday, I had a couple friends - Matt and Aaron (Keith was invited, but he got grounded) - over to LaRosa's, and we amused ourselves finding strange words in the word search, some of which took some doing and considerable rule-bending to get to. That wasn't all we did, of course: that would make us extraordinarily lame.
-Another item is colleges. My letters are coming in from the colleges I've applied to. I got one from Carleton last week. Something happened that I wasn't expecting: they won't let me in. Neither will Kenyon. I'm still waiting for Grinnell's answer. I expected to have to make a difficult choice between fine institutions. I didn't expect the choice to be made for me. But there it is, all at once. It happened pretty quickly. And it didn't strike me until later the full scope of it. Mom had to convince me that I should be upset before I realized I was. I had envisioned my coming years on a quiet, green campus with a small amount of dedicated students. Carleton. Pine forests, cool weather, Minnesota winters, freezing lakes, "Minnesota Nice". Kenyon. Old friendly buildings, rolling green quad, relaxing air, calmness from being well-established. I realized. Their doors are shut to me for at least another year. They won't let me in. Even if I ask nicely. It's a pretty depressing thought.
-But I'm resilient. I can't stay very sad for very long. Now I have left Miami and maybe Grinnell. Miami doesn't have the relaxed atmosphere and peaceful green campus of Kenyon; it won't have the great winters or two attendant lakes I could have looked forward to at Carleton. But it's not without merits. Its programs, of course, are one. It has a new writing school, just now made with a donation. I can major and take classes in all sorts of things. And Oxford is a nice town. My grandparents found it agreeable enough to live there or forty years so far. Grinnell is still a possibility, too, and it's a good school too. Depending on whether I get in and how much money they give me if I do, I might end up going there. It's certainly a great little place.
-That's all I'm going to write for now, except for this: I've made a couple new shirt designs, and I'm Commanding you to go look at them here. And feel free to check out my other two stores Maybe you'll actually buy one. They are exceedingly nice and well-designed shirts. You coud do a lot worse, if I do say so myself.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
A week that was not a typical week and had abnormally bad and abnormally good parts both
This week the sophomores had OGT testing, which, entirely by the way, is stupid. None of the teachers are one hundred percent on board with it, and a few, I believe, are rather vehemently opposed to OGTs. These are the Ohio Graduation Tests, instituted after the No Child Left Behind Act. They make it so that teachers teach to a test. That sort of stuff should have been through with after the Proficiency Tests in, what grades were they, 4th, 6th, and 9th? So the compound has had to rearrange its whole curriculum. Now, no child is getting left behind: rather, we're all equally behind. Behind Japan and a host of other smart countries, that is to say. Entirely by the way. So anyhow, because of OGTs, and the way the schedule works, it happened that everyone had to be given a two-hour delay every day. However, we in the band had a contest on Friday, and we had to prepare. So we still had X-Period, which is a bell before the regular schedule starts, and we had it at the same time, 0720. Then, after it, band people had two unused hours until compound started at 1000.
-On Monday we had a bio lab during the two hours, because Dr White was afeared of us getting behind and saw an opportunity to keep us caught up by scheduling a lab in that time.
-On Tuesday I used the time to go home, and Dad took me to Angelo's.
-On Wednesday I went to Panera, which was tasty.
-On Thursday I was going to bike to Winton Woods, but as i was biking to school I couldn't help but realize that there was a driving rain and it was freezing cold and I became soaked for four or more hours. So I didn't bike to Winton Woods. Instead I slept in the Media Center (real schools have a library, but we have a Media Center).
-On Friday, Caitlin Pantano's mom made all the band seniors breakfast for before the contest as a mood improver, and it worked. Few things are better than a really good breakfast.
Those were just the mornings. In the afternoons I was booked with absurd amounts of work. On Thursday I had a Spanish take-home test and the band concert. On Friday we had the contest. We gave a total great performance. But we got a II. I'm not too impressed with OMEA (the organization in charge here). But on the plus side, we're finished with them now, and we're playing whatever the hell we feel like for the rest of the year. So we'll be playing Vesuvius by Frank Ticheli, which I strongly recommend plugging into an audio search such as AltaVista's. It must have been annoying to have to write "Vesuvius" back before there was a difference between U and V. Vesvvivs. "Where? Vest Viv's?" Whatever.
-Saturday was great, though. I got a new bike. It's a Fuji Crosstown 3.0. It has shocks! And fenders! It's straight luxury. It's my birthday present, by the way, although my birthday is this Saturday. I will be 18 years old and no longer a minor but rather a major. My possessions become legally my property! I can withdraw money from my own bank account! I won't have to obey a stoopid 2300 curfew law! How am I to celebrate this new freedom? Well, I'm going to my grandparents' house. I'll probably play some Scrabble. I should try to organize a krokay game this weekend with my friends and then we can go out to a restaurant afterwards! That will be rather more exciting than playing Scrabble with Grandma. No offense, Grandma. And, she's going to take me to Hueston Woods, which is infinitely superior to Winton Woods, where I went today. I was breaking in my new bike. Maybe I'll name it. Maybe not. In any case, it's the best bike I've ever ridden.
-And, no X-Period Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday this week. Right awesome!
-On Monday we had a bio lab during the two hours, because Dr White was afeared of us getting behind and saw an opportunity to keep us caught up by scheduling a lab in that time.
-On Tuesday I used the time to go home, and Dad took me to Angelo's.
-On Wednesday I went to Panera, which was tasty.
-On Thursday I was going to bike to Winton Woods, but as i was biking to school I couldn't help but realize that there was a driving rain and it was freezing cold and I became soaked for four or more hours. So I didn't bike to Winton Woods. Instead I slept in the Media Center (real schools have a library, but we have a Media Center).
-On Friday, Caitlin Pantano's mom made all the band seniors breakfast for before the contest as a mood improver, and it worked. Few things are better than a really good breakfast.
Those were just the mornings. In the afternoons I was booked with absurd amounts of work. On Thursday I had a Spanish take-home test and the band concert. On Friday we had the contest. We gave a total great performance. But we got a II. I'm not too impressed with OMEA (the organization in charge here). But on the plus side, we're finished with them now, and we're playing whatever the hell we feel like for the rest of the year. So we'll be playing Vesuvius by Frank Ticheli, which I strongly recommend plugging into an audio search such as AltaVista's. It must have been annoying to have to write "Vesuvius" back before there was a difference between U and V. Vesvvivs. "Where? Vest Viv's?" Whatever.
-Saturday was great, though. I got a new bike. It's a Fuji Crosstown 3.0. It has shocks! And fenders! It's straight luxury. It's my birthday present, by the way, although my birthday is this Saturday. I will be 18 years old and no longer a minor but rather a major. My possessions become legally my property! I can withdraw money from my own bank account! I won't have to obey a stoopid 2300 curfew law! How am I to celebrate this new freedom? Well, I'm going to my grandparents' house. I'll probably play some Scrabble. I should try to organize a krokay game this weekend with my friends and then we can go out to a restaurant afterwards! That will be rather more exciting than playing Scrabble with Grandma. No offense, Grandma. And, she's going to take me to Hueston Woods, which is infinitely superior to Winton Woods, where I went today. I was breaking in my new bike. Maybe I'll name it. Maybe not. In any case, it's the best bike I've ever ridden.
-And, no X-Period Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday this week. Right awesome!
Saturday, March 10, 2007
A new CD
I've got a new Béla Bartók CD playing; I got it at Borders a little while ago. Let's see, what's happened?
-Lamont has commented. Way to go, Lamont. That is the right on. I will militarize against the compound. Here's something to think about.
-Ms Miller is very frequently missing from klass, often for days at a time. (Note: since at the compound many of our classes aren't real classes, I elect to spell the not real ones "klass".) I've given up hope of finding out where my teachers are when they're not in class; they never tell you. (Is this a Finneytown phenomenon?) On Thursday she was gone again. In her place was Mr Byers. All of our substitute teachers are at least slightly insane. Mr Byers is quite simply strange. Example: Last year in English class, Sam Battistone asked someone, "How'd your day go?" Mr Byers, from across the room, asked Sam, "Where did you learn Ilonggo?" He later explained that there was a phrase in the Ilonggo language that sounded like "How'd your day go?" that means "man with fierce countenance".
-Our klass plan for the day was to watch the Mel Gibson version of Hamlet, which we're studying. We put the tape in. Before the movie was an amount of footage of Mel talking to a class in some school about the play. After that was footage from a different class. We fast-forwarded and he was still talking to a class. Someone thought to look at the tape box. It said:
"Mel Gibson goes BACK TO SCHOOL"
And it described the video: a series of lessons given by Mel Gibson about Hamlet to middle- and high-school kids. After that, tell me: Is this a real school?!
-Okay, what else has happened?
-It's spring now, pretty much. The first day of spring was yesterday. And doggone if it didn't feel pretty nice. I still love winter. But I'm coming to realize that it's because I like contrast, and in Cincinnati and other lousy-winter places there's no contrast: it's just warm all year, getting cooler in winter. I want a marked difference when I get into the later months of the year. I want three-foot snowfalls and lakes you can drive a truck over. I want subzero temperatures and roaring fireplaces. I want real winters. None of this watered-down crap. But that's not all I want. I want the rest of the seasons too, in their correct time. And now, I suppose I must admit, it's the right time for spring. Micah and I walked to Warder, barefoot.
-Not something that most sane people would consider. Walking outside barefoot doesn't seem to be in the realm of reasonable things on most people's lists. But Micah and I had no problem with it. I was quite giddy. Who cares about sticks and stuff? Not us! We walked back through the more obscure paths, ones that haven't been traveled for a while, and had fun. I returned to a tree I've found, one that's split and fallen over, but is still partially connected at the break, so it makes a long beam in the air. I did exercises on it, such as a variation on sit-ups wherein the practitioner hangs upside-down off the branch and curls upward to it. Micah gathered wood to build a fire, which we're going to light off tomorrow after dark. We need to get some marshmallows. Brian showed up, by chance, and I ran off home, because I can't stand him. Quite literally, I ran, through an area of bamboo and a lot of rugged grounds, but my feet are just fine, because human feet are a lot sturdier than most people give them credit for. They were thoroughly mudded through when I got home, which was cool.
-Oh, and I'm going to write a book. I haven't got all the details worked out yet, but I'm going to work on them in my mind and start writing at some point in the not-very-distant future.
-Lamont has commented. Way to go, Lamont. That is the right on. I will militarize against the compound. Here's something to think about.
-Ms Miller is very frequently missing from klass, often for days at a time. (Note: since at the compound many of our classes aren't real classes, I elect to spell the not real ones "klass".) I've given up hope of finding out where my teachers are when they're not in class; they never tell you. (Is this a Finneytown phenomenon?) On Thursday she was gone again. In her place was Mr Byers. All of our substitute teachers are at least slightly insane. Mr Byers is quite simply strange. Example: Last year in English class, Sam Battistone asked someone, "How'd your day go?" Mr Byers, from across the room, asked Sam, "Where did you learn Ilonggo?" He later explained that there was a phrase in the Ilonggo language that sounded like "How'd your day go?" that means "man with fierce countenance".
-Our klass plan for the day was to watch the Mel Gibson version of Hamlet, which we're studying. We put the tape in. Before the movie was an amount of footage of Mel talking to a class in some school about the play. After that was footage from a different class. We fast-forwarded and he was still talking to a class. Someone thought to look at the tape box. It said:
"Mel Gibson goes BACK TO SCHOOL"
And it described the video: a series of lessons given by Mel Gibson about Hamlet to middle- and high-school kids. After that, tell me: Is this a real school?!
-Okay, what else has happened?
-It's spring now, pretty much. The first day of spring was yesterday. And doggone if it didn't feel pretty nice. I still love winter. But I'm coming to realize that it's because I like contrast, and in Cincinnati and other lousy-winter places there's no contrast: it's just warm all year, getting cooler in winter. I want a marked difference when I get into the later months of the year. I want three-foot snowfalls and lakes you can drive a truck over. I want subzero temperatures and roaring fireplaces. I want real winters. None of this watered-down crap. But that's not all I want. I want the rest of the seasons too, in their correct time. And now, I suppose I must admit, it's the right time for spring. Micah and I walked to Warder, barefoot.
-Not something that most sane people would consider. Walking outside barefoot doesn't seem to be in the realm of reasonable things on most people's lists. But Micah and I had no problem with it. I was quite giddy. Who cares about sticks and stuff? Not us! We walked back through the more obscure paths, ones that haven't been traveled for a while, and had fun. I returned to a tree I've found, one that's split and fallen over, but is still partially connected at the break, so it makes a long beam in the air. I did exercises on it, such as a variation on sit-ups wherein the practitioner hangs upside-down off the branch and curls upward to it. Micah gathered wood to build a fire, which we're going to light off tomorrow after dark. We need to get some marshmallows. Brian showed up, by chance, and I ran off home, because I can't stand him. Quite literally, I ran, through an area of bamboo and a lot of rugged grounds, but my feet are just fine, because human feet are a lot sturdier than most people give them credit for. They were thoroughly mudded through when I got home, which was cool.
-Oh, and I'm going to write a book. I haven't got all the details worked out yet, but I'm going to work on them in my mind and start writing at some point in the not-very-distant future.
Sunday, March 4, 2007
And wrap-up
Three new posts today; this is the third.
***
I apparently avoided having to pack stuff up - I just woke up at 0600, put in a few things that hadn't made it into the Limos, and climbed in. A few last pictures. Of course I wish I were still there. I get used to it, somewhat.
-We had taken the drive through the dense Canadian forest and then the brisk ride across Big Whiteshell and packed our stuff onto the van by 0646. Then it was smooth, boring sailing. We stopped for dry ice in Canada while I was half-asleep, and I woke up somewhere before Fort Frances. And there was a line to get through the border. First we did some stuff at a cluster of buildings on the Canadian side, - Grandpa got his GST tax back or whatever that is - and then we joined up the queue. It was set to have ten minutes of absolute standstill followed by a minute of brisk movement and then a repeat. We joined the line at 1130 and finally got to the interrogation booth at 1230. The line was at least a mile long. (I had Aunt Ellen listen to Long Line of Cars [by Cake].) At the booth a sour-faced man gave us a stern warning that we weren't supposed to carry all the fish back from the trip, just the share from the people in our car, and if a conservation officer caught us the fine would be $200 per fish. (We were only four over limit, so it's not like we'd be fined for all 39 fish.) We learned that the line was due to a composite of things: construction, and an orange terror alert due to a foisted plot in England. We had lunch after a fashion at Sandy's Place in International Falls - my burger was okay, but the older folks said the soup they got was WAY too salty - and moved on again.
-Next stop of note: Eau Claire, our motel for the night. We found our rooms in the Antlers Inn (all 15 of us), and then walked to a great restaurant called Draganetti's. Six of us ate outdoors, three indoors (the older ones), and Dave's family had pizza at the motel. I couldn't eat it all, but it was superb.
-So now we're back at the motel. Dad and I watched a crappy community band on community TV, and then we all watched Comedy Central for a while. I borrowed Dad's pen from his shirt and wrote my journal. That's all.
***
Here's something that for some reason never made it to the journal.
One day - maybe day 4 or 5 - Dan instituted a scheme he'd heard about for keeping bees away. What you do is fill a bottle with Kool-Aid, and then they all flock to that instead of to your drinks. So he made some and put it in a little 16-ounce water bottle, and put that on top of the disused concrete barbecue in front of Cabin 6.
-The next day someone glanced over at it and noticed something decidedly strange. There was a dead mouse in the bottle. Here's what apparently happened: It smelled or saw the Kool-Aid. Then it climbed three vertical feet up some concrete blocks. Then it somehow got in through the mouth of the bottle - and remember, this bottle's mouth is the same size as a typical pop bottle's - without toppling the precariously placed bottle at any point during the process. Once inside, it realized its folly, but was unable to tip the bottle over, even though it was probably at least a third of its weight. So it drowned, and we found it the next day. I'll probably use that at some point when I eventually write books. Want something so bad, and your downfall is when you finally get it. Are animals eligible for the Darwin Awards?
***
And, since you've all been clamoring for it, here's that picture of me that I mentioned the other day, dutifully scanned into my computer. It's not the ideal picture (for example, much of my face is cut out and you can't see all the tons of snow that were in my hair), but I was taking it myself with my camera at arm's length, so I didn't have any way to aim it just right.
***
I apparently avoided having to pack stuff up - I just woke up at 0600, put in a few things that hadn't made it into the Limos, and climbed in. A few last pictures. Of course I wish I were still there. I get used to it, somewhat.
-We had taken the drive through the dense Canadian forest and then the brisk ride across Big Whiteshell and packed our stuff onto the van by 0646. Then it was smooth, boring sailing. We stopped for dry ice in Canada while I was half-asleep, and I woke up somewhere before Fort Frances. And there was a line to get through the border. First we did some stuff at a cluster of buildings on the Canadian side, - Grandpa got his GST tax back or whatever that is - and then we joined up the queue. It was set to have ten minutes of absolute standstill followed by a minute of brisk movement and then a repeat. We joined the line at 1130 and finally got to the interrogation booth at 1230. The line was at least a mile long. (I had Aunt Ellen listen to Long Line of Cars [by Cake].) At the booth a sour-faced man gave us a stern warning that we weren't supposed to carry all the fish back from the trip, just the share from the people in our car, and if a conservation officer caught us the fine would be $200 per fish. (We were only four over limit, so it's not like we'd be fined for all 39 fish.) We learned that the line was due to a composite of things: construction, and an orange terror alert due to a foisted plot in England. We had lunch after a fashion at Sandy's Place in International Falls - my burger was okay, but the older folks said the soup they got was WAY too salty - and moved on again.
-Next stop of note: Eau Claire, our motel for the night. We found our rooms in the Antlers Inn (all 15 of us), and then walked to a great restaurant called Draganetti's. Six of us ate outdoors, three indoors (the older ones), and Dave's family had pizza at the motel. I couldn't eat it all, but it was superb.
-So now we're back at the motel. Dad and I watched a crappy community band on community TV, and then we all watched Comedy Central for a while. I borrowed Dad's pen from his shirt and wrote my journal. That's all.
***
Here's something that for some reason never made it to the journal.
One day - maybe day 4 or 5 - Dan instituted a scheme he'd heard about for keeping bees away. What you do is fill a bottle with Kool-Aid, and then they all flock to that instead of to your drinks. So he made some and put it in a little 16-ounce water bottle, and put that on top of the disused concrete barbecue in front of Cabin 6.
-The next day someone glanced over at it and noticed something decidedly strange. There was a dead mouse in the bottle. Here's what apparently happened: It smelled or saw the Kool-Aid. Then it climbed three vertical feet up some concrete blocks. Then it somehow got in through the mouth of the bottle - and remember, this bottle's mouth is the same size as a typical pop bottle's - without toppling the precariously placed bottle at any point during the process. Once inside, it realized its folly, but was unable to tip the bottle over, even though it was probably at least a third of its weight. So it drowned, and we found it the next day. I'll probably use that at some point when I eventually write books. Want something so bad, and your downfall is when you finally get it. Are animals eligible for the Darwin Awards?
***
And, since you've all been clamoring for it, here's that picture of me that I mentioned the other day, dutifully scanned into my computer. It's not the ideal picture (for example, much of my face is cut out and you can't see all the tons of snow that were in my hair), but I was taking it myself with my camera at arm's length, so I didn't have any way to aim it just right.
Day 7
I got up not in time to go out fishing with anyone, so I had fun with Sierra some more, and Erin and folks too. Eventually I stumbled out and found Mom and Dad on the porch, which was a bit puzzling because what I didn't mention is that I fished off the dock for about an hour and they didn't come in. But then I realized they must've been in the bedroom the whole time. Dad asked if I still wanted to go to the falls, and I said if he was feeling up to it. See, the way to the Falls is really shallow, and this year since it's been so dry the water is down about two feet from last year, maybe one or more from usual, so Dan was giving us stories about how they had to have a spotter on the bow, and even then the engine sometimes hit rocks. Well, Dad was feeling up to it, so we went. It was windy and sort of choppy, and a long ride. And then the narrow channel was very shallow. But the engine never hit any rocks, only maybe sand once or twice. We got to the far-end-of-the-lake dock without incident.
-We had heard it was really the Crowduck Trickle this year, and that was to some extent true. It was still obviously several magnitudes more majestic than anything back home, but there wasn't a whole lot slipping down, and I could easily jump over it, at most places. I like Crowduck Falls, because the water doesn't fall, but rather slides down a steep slope and dashes itself senseless against rocks. Dad and I were able to walk to the bottom and look up to the top. Then I noticed things swimming around at the bottom, lots of them. At first I thought they might be fry, but they proved to be tailfins of a whole bunch of idiot walleye that had fallen over the Falls. Only walleye, too. They were trapped in a trough lined with big rocks on all sides. [There were also two that had ended up on top of rocks and died. It was really eerie, because they had been dead there for so long that they had dried up into desiccated eyeless husks of fish.]
-Well, Dad picked one up [with his hat], and tossed it downstream. He did that for three of them, and then we got the net. There were probably about 25 in that little 5-square-foot trough. It was hard to find them because the Falls constantly renewed our supply of foam atop the water. But eventually we got most of them, and I created an outlet so any newcomers could get out. The [two that were left after I did that] were pretty stupid, and we ended up netting one of them out. But one found its way!
-We brought the boat to North Bay for two pike, one for each of us, and then back to camp and cleaned it out. There was horseshoes: Maria and I finally put an end to Dan and Tracy's 7-0 record! And then dinner. There was too much food, especially baked beans. If everyone had eaten four helpings of beans, we'd probably still have plenty left over. I had a good blueberry muffin courtesy of Tracy.
-After dinner I played bedtime with Sierra: I go to sleep with an imaginary tooth under my pillow and wake up with money, and then I buy something from Sierra. I started the imaginary money at a quarter and I was up to $16 when I decided to let Sierra decide the amounts. (They were $100 and $80.) I bought a new car with $4.
-Then there was poker. Grandpa was in for only one pot, all-in blind. Three people called and Erin won with an Ace-high. Grandpa had 6-2 off-suit. Dave left after one more hand, with no money. So Dan, Micah, Maria, Erin, and I battled it out. Micah bought out soon. I was getting hands! I took Dan for a huge pot where I flopped an eight to triple my pocket eights and then two sixes came up and Dan thought I hit them and thought I had trip sixes with a bad kicker (he had 6-A). That was the high point, though it was early. My streak didn't last long at all, though, because everyone left.
-Also tonight we had the Pretzel Inquisition. After he got out, Micah came in with some pretzels and Dan asked where he got them, and Micah said from (Tracy's famous) Chex Mix. Dan got all mad and asked why Micah had to be told so many times not to just pick stuff out of the Chex Mix, and ended up asking the witnesses if Micah had picked out pretzels, or, as he claimed, taken an indiscriminate handful and eaten the pretzels last. Grandpa said next year he was going to eat whatever he wanted out of the Chex Mix and Dan and Tracy said fine, they wouldn't bring any. I later found out that after a while Tracy went to her bedroom and then came out in a snit and dumped all the Chex Mix in the trash. So now Dan is the Chex Mix Nazi, thanks to Mom, who came up with that.
-We all cooled down and went to bed. Departure at 0600 tomorrow.
-We had heard it was really the Crowduck Trickle this year, and that was to some extent true. It was still obviously several magnitudes more majestic than anything back home, but there wasn't a whole lot slipping down, and I could easily jump over it, at most places. I like Crowduck Falls, because the water doesn't fall, but rather slides down a steep slope and dashes itself senseless against rocks. Dad and I were able to walk to the bottom and look up to the top. Then I noticed things swimming around at the bottom, lots of them. At first I thought they might be fry, but they proved to be tailfins of a whole bunch of idiot walleye that had fallen over the Falls. Only walleye, too. They were trapped in a trough lined with big rocks on all sides. [There were also two that had ended up on top of rocks and died. It was really eerie, because they had been dead there for so long that they had dried up into desiccated eyeless husks of fish.]
-Well, Dad picked one up [with his hat], and tossed it downstream. He did that for three of them, and then we got the net. There were probably about 25 in that little 5-square-foot trough. It was hard to find them because the Falls constantly renewed our supply of foam atop the water. But eventually we got most of them, and I created an outlet so any newcomers could get out. The [two that were left after I did that] were pretty stupid, and we ended up netting one of them out. But one found its way!
-We brought the boat to North Bay for two pike, one for each of us, and then back to camp and cleaned it out. There was horseshoes: Maria and I finally put an end to Dan and Tracy's 7-0 record! And then dinner. There was too much food, especially baked beans. If everyone had eaten four helpings of beans, we'd probably still have plenty left over. I had a good blueberry muffin courtesy of Tracy.
-After dinner I played bedtime with Sierra: I go to sleep with an imaginary tooth under my pillow and wake up with money, and then I buy something from Sierra. I started the imaginary money at a quarter and I was up to $16 when I decided to let Sierra decide the amounts. (They were $100 and $80.) I bought a new car with $4.
-Then there was poker. Grandpa was in for only one pot, all-in blind. Three people called and Erin won with an Ace-high. Grandpa had 6-2 off-suit. Dave left after one more hand, with no money. So Dan, Micah, Maria, Erin, and I battled it out. Micah bought out soon. I was getting hands! I took Dan for a huge pot where I flopped an eight to triple my pocket eights and then two sixes came up and Dan thought I hit them and thought I had trip sixes with a bad kicker (he had 6-A). That was the high point, though it was early. My streak didn't last long at all, though, because everyone left.
-Also tonight we had the Pretzel Inquisition. After he got out, Micah came in with some pretzels and Dan asked where he got them, and Micah said from (Tracy's famous) Chex Mix. Dan got all mad and asked why Micah had to be told so many times not to just pick stuff out of the Chex Mix, and ended up asking the witnesses if Micah had picked out pretzels, or, as he claimed, taken an indiscriminate handful and eaten the pretzels last. Grandpa said next year he was going to eat whatever he wanted out of the Chex Mix and Dan and Tracy said fine, they wouldn't bring any. I later found out that after a while Tracy went to her bedroom and then came out in a snit and dumped all the Chex Mix in the trash. So now Dan is the Chex Mix Nazi, thanks to Mom, who came up with that.
-We all cooled down and went to bed. Departure at 0600 tomorrow.
Day 6
It rained last night while I was asleep. I got to sleep rather quick - I was tired. I got up at 1000 or so, but I figured it was a lot later than that from the way everyonr had already gotten up and left to East Gull. Since there was nobody in our cabin, I checked out Dave's. Thus, Sierra and erin and I drew stupid stuff for a while; I listened to stuff from Gregor with Erin's headphones; for breakfast/lunch I had bread. Later I took Sierra and Jazmin down to the beach. Micah was there on a large donut-shaped item, with which the four of us had endless fun. The addition of lifejackets for the girls also made things fun. Jazmin caught three tiny toads (actual length about 15 millimeters) and we played with those: tossing toads is fun. I went underwater at least 12½ feet one time, according to my [pressure-sensing] watch.
-After that, Grandpa took me away to a place Dave had described to him not-very-thoroughly. We ended up, Grandpa says, in North Bay, in a terrific weedbed. Grandpa pulled out a pike and a walleye, but I got at least four bass, and we kept two. Dan and Tracy got back from Ritchie with two pike, but they [had] caught about 15 and only kept the damaged ones. It was a good fishing day.
-Dinner was Dad's cabbage rolls, and, though the rice wasn't crunchy this year, I had the interesting suspicion that he deliberately steamed all the flavor away. I still ate three.
-And then there was poker. I started winning, really! I think I sold back a few bucks, and then everyone got out, except three or four of us. I'd had a few good hands and a few where I totatlly bought the pot. With this small game I didn't really go either way. And then Grandpa came back and, for a change of pace, distributed $4.00 apiece to each of the poorest players, of which group I was a member. He also kept raking in huge pots out of sheer luck, going all-in blind, taking all the chips, and then - redistributing them. I think he distributed four times, for various amounts. If he hadn't, he'd probably be up $40 or something absurd like that. He paid his college tuition with poker money back in the day.
-I took a gander at the moon - stunning - and a shower, so now it's off to bed. I like the porch, too. Tonight it's really windy; the breeze is terrific.
-After that, Grandpa took me away to a place Dave had described to him not-very-thoroughly. We ended up, Grandpa says, in North Bay, in a terrific weedbed. Grandpa pulled out a pike and a walleye, but I got at least four bass, and we kept two. Dan and Tracy got back from Ritchie with two pike, but they [had] caught about 15 and only kept the damaged ones. It was a good fishing day.
-Dinner was Dad's cabbage rolls, and, though the rice wasn't crunchy this year, I had the interesting suspicion that he deliberately steamed all the flavor away. I still ate three.
-And then there was poker. I started winning, really! I think I sold back a few bucks, and then everyone got out, except three or four of us. I'd had a few good hands and a few where I totatlly bought the pot. With this small game I didn't really go either way. And then Grandpa came back and, for a change of pace, distributed $4.00 apiece to each of the poorest players, of which group I was a member. He also kept raking in huge pots out of sheer luck, going all-in blind, taking all the chips, and then - redistributing them. I think he distributed four times, for various amounts. If he hadn't, he'd probably be up $40 or something absurd like that. He paid his college tuition with poker money back in the day.
-I took a gander at the moon - stunning - and a shower, so now it's off to bed. I like the porch, too. Tonight it's really windy; the breeze is terrific.
Friday, March 2, 2007
Day 5
A few brief notes from the present first:
1. This is the third of three sequential new posts.
2. I've made a couple new T-shirts, which you can see at www.cafepress.com/permanentmark3, and maybe you'll buy something from one of my three stores.
Now, on with Crowduck.
***
I got up around 1100 today. I persuaded Micah to come with me to the Square Cove. And man, let me tell you, he did nothing but complain. At first he fished too and just complained that there are never any fish there (a valid complaint, actually), but then his rod crapped out and he decided he only uses his very own (sucky) rod, and none of the other perfectly good ones in the boat would suffice. So I just trolled and drifted or a while, alternately, listening to him complain that he never catches any fish, he wanted to go back to camp, he didn't like the Square Cove, he was bored, [and] his rod was crappy; and it was quite grating. He quoted Dad as saying to go back in if we spotted whitecaps, and Micah found some out in the open water, and after a lengthy wait just to get back at him for complaining, I turned back, but made sure to troll all the way, or a long way at least, back. Dad later noted that he said to move closer if there were whitecaps.
-So, having gotten fed up with Micah, I teamed up with Dad, Mom, and Erin to go out to Gull Rock. It took a while for us to get going, but we eventually did, and it was really windy and choppy. I got soaked by the spray. When we finally reached the rock, the water was so down from last year that our former docking spot was two feet away on dry land. Dad rigged it somehow - it involved him getting waist-deep in the water - and we all started fishing.
-It was a great day at Gull Rock. I sat next to Erin and discussed Homestar and Cake, and everyone pulled in fish. All except me. I got one good-sized bass, and much later on, one tiny one that we didn't keep. Meanwhile Dad and Mom and Erin were pulling out bass (and walleye) one after another, and Erin pulled out this walleye that turned out to be an absolutely enormous bass. The official measurement was 19½ inches, and 18 inches qualifies for a Master Angler certification, so now Erin is a Master Angler. I guess I'm just bad at fishing.
-There was dinner, after Nick (now 79) told his famous Mrs Pitt's Pot joke, and before we even finished eating, I instituted a game of poker for imaginary bets. Some sample bets: three million dollars, six million dollars, eight billion dollars, Greenland, Neptune, Michael Jackson, a dozen empty beer cans plus a pine cone, and a dentist's office. Once, Erin bet Sweden, and I called and raised six grains of sand, but she called my bluff!
-[Then we got real] poker started up. I must really suck at poker, because I lost quite consistently. I lost I think three or six bucks, and then later (I think it was three) $1.50 more. It was down to Dan and Micah head-to-head or a while and Micah was surprisingly kicking Dan to the curb, but then I bought in and Tracy bought in (that was the $1.50 that I lost). (As you can tell, I'm not planning very far ahead with my writing here.) There was hot chocolate courtesy of Grandma. Crowduck is great, isn't it?
-The sky was dark with no moon, but that's because it was covered with clouds. Dan and Tracy and Co. say there's a storm blowing in - they saw it lighting up the sky off in the distance - so I'm going to go look at that.
1. This is the third of three sequential new posts.
2. I've made a couple new T-shirts, which you can see at www.cafepress.com/permanentmark3, and maybe you'll buy something from one of my three stores.
Now, on with Crowduck.
***
I got up around 1100 today. I persuaded Micah to come with me to the Square Cove. And man, let me tell you, he did nothing but complain. At first he fished too and just complained that there are never any fish there (a valid complaint, actually), but then his rod crapped out and he decided he only uses his very own (sucky) rod, and none of the other perfectly good ones in the boat would suffice. So I just trolled and drifted or a while, alternately, listening to him complain that he never catches any fish, he wanted to go back to camp, he didn't like the Square Cove, he was bored, [and] his rod was crappy; and it was quite grating. He quoted Dad as saying to go back in if we spotted whitecaps, and Micah found some out in the open water, and after a lengthy wait just to get back at him for complaining, I turned back, but made sure to troll all the way, or a long way at least, back. Dad later noted that he said to move closer if there were whitecaps.
-So, having gotten fed up with Micah, I teamed up with Dad, Mom, and Erin to go out to Gull Rock. It took a while for us to get going, but we eventually did, and it was really windy and choppy. I got soaked by the spray. When we finally reached the rock, the water was so down from last year that our former docking spot was two feet away on dry land. Dad rigged it somehow - it involved him getting waist-deep in the water - and we all started fishing.
-It was a great day at Gull Rock. I sat next to Erin and discussed Homestar and Cake, and everyone pulled in fish. All except me. I got one good-sized bass, and much later on, one tiny one that we didn't keep. Meanwhile Dad and Mom and Erin were pulling out bass (and walleye) one after another, and Erin pulled out this walleye that turned out to be an absolutely enormous bass. The official measurement was 19½ inches, and 18 inches qualifies for a Master Angler certification, so now Erin is a Master Angler. I guess I'm just bad at fishing.
-There was dinner, after Nick (now 79) told his famous Mrs Pitt's Pot joke, and before we even finished eating, I instituted a game of poker for imaginary bets. Some sample bets: three million dollars, six million dollars, eight billion dollars, Greenland, Neptune, Michael Jackson, a dozen empty beer cans plus a pine cone, and a dentist's office. Once, Erin bet Sweden, and I called and raised six grains of sand, but she called my bluff!
-[Then we got real] poker started up. I must really suck at poker, because I lost quite consistently. I lost I think three or six bucks, and then later (I think it was three) $1.50 more. It was down to Dan and Micah head-to-head or a while and Micah was surprisingly kicking Dan to the curb, but then I bought in and Tracy bought in (that was the $1.50 that I lost). (As you can tell, I'm not planning very far ahead with my writing here.) There was hot chocolate courtesy of Grandma. Crowduck is great, isn't it?
-The sky was dark with no moon, but that's because it was covered with clouds. Dan and Tracy and Co. say there's a storm blowing in - they saw it lighting up the sky off in the distance - so I'm going to go look at that.
Day 4
I woke up at 1030 or thereabouts and Dad and I and Micah too got headed to Ritchie at 1100. So, first Dad headed into the complete wrong bay. I told him, "Where are you going?" but he kept on. Then he had to agree that there was no portage, so he asked Dan, who was nearby on Gull Rock, where to go. From there he eventually found it.
-So we took the portage, [we got the canoe,] and we deposited Micah on a rock on one bank, and we paddled. The thing is, the fish weren't biting, at all. There wasn't even a hint. Dad took us about halfway across the Ritchie, which is a respectably-sized lake, and finally we found a kind of nice weed bed. It gave us a hit at least. While we fished we heard across the lake a few canoeists. They got near us just as Dad caught a very nice pike. I asked how it was going and they said good; they asked how fishing was and I reported that after an hour and a half this was our first fish. There were six people in three canoes; they were doing the Mantario Trail ([Whiteshell-]Crowduck-Ritchie-One Lake-Two Lake-Three Lake-Mantario). So they went to the other end of Ritchie and portaged off. Dad stuck around to catch one more fish, and then we had an exhaustive row back to Micah's rock and then (after just a little more fishing) the shore. We portaged back and ended up back at camp at 1600.
-There was a brief break, and then we took Maria to East Gull. Maria is psyched about fishing. but, Dad caught the only fish there too, two bass. I caught a decent walleye, but that doesn't really count.
-There was dinner (onion rings involved today!), and then I did the dishes, ending my successful run of shirking. Oh! There was horseshoes before dinner. Dan and Tracy are 7 and 0, and I had a bee sting my lip when I tried to drink a pop with the bee on it. Anyways, then we did poker. And I was working it! I won some great stuff, but I can't remember any of it now. I do remember that the play turned sour. There was a run where every single time I dealt, Dan won. Dan was the big winner, which makes him the object of all hate. After I got out and he played a little more he cashed in up $14-something. I won't soon forget the hand where I had the nut flush and he had a full house.
-We headed out to see the stars, but we're in a bad moon cycle where it's up higher and fuller each night, and we didn't see anything. We didn't even go out to the Point.
-It's been a day less than totally awesome - no fish to keep, bee sting, sunburn, poker loss - but they say, the best day fishing is better than the best day at (school), and I wouldn't trade today for any day in Finneytown.
-So we took the portage, [we got the canoe,] and we deposited Micah on a rock on one bank, and we paddled. The thing is, the fish weren't biting, at all. There wasn't even a hint. Dad took us about halfway across the Ritchie, which is a respectably-sized lake, and finally we found a kind of nice weed bed. It gave us a hit at least. While we fished we heard across the lake a few canoeists. They got near us just as Dad caught a very nice pike. I asked how it was going and they said good; they asked how fishing was and I reported that after an hour and a half this was our first fish. There were six people in three canoes; they were doing the Mantario Trail ([Whiteshell-]Crowduck-Ritchie-One Lake-Two Lake-Three Lake-Mantario). So they went to the other end of Ritchie and portaged off. Dad stuck around to catch one more fish, and then we had an exhaustive row back to Micah's rock and then (after just a little more fishing) the shore. We portaged back and ended up back at camp at 1600.
-There was a brief break, and then we took Maria to East Gull. Maria is psyched about fishing. but, Dad caught the only fish there too, two bass. I caught a decent walleye, but that doesn't really count.
-There was dinner (onion rings involved today!), and then I did the dishes, ending my successful run of shirking. Oh! There was horseshoes before dinner. Dan and Tracy are 7 and 0, and I had a bee sting my lip when I tried to drink a pop with the bee on it. Anyways, then we did poker. And I was working it! I won some great stuff, but I can't remember any of it now. I do remember that the play turned sour. There was a run where every single time I dealt, Dan won. Dan was the big winner, which makes him the object of all hate. After I got out and he played a little more he cashed in up $14-something. I won't soon forget the hand where I had the nut flush and he had a full house.
-We headed out to see the stars, but we're in a bad moon cycle where it's up higher and fuller each night, and we didn't see anything. We didn't even go out to the Point.
-It's been a day less than totally awesome - no fish to keep, bee sting, sunburn, poker loss - but they say, the best day fishing is better than the best day at (school), and I wouldn't trade today for any day in Finneytown.
Day 3
I didn't get up until about 1000 today, and then Dad and I went out to that one spot before Darkwater that we keep fishing. We found a real hot spot, too, about twenty yards from shore. We pulled five fish out of it over a two- or three-hour period, I three pike and Dad a pike and a bass. A little later we strayed a bit and Dad found one pike, for a total of six. Toward the end, as per a forecast the dockhands had told us, it started getting really windy, and choppy, setting the scene for the rest of the day. When we pulled back in, the dockhands told us and Grandma and Grandpa (just a little behind us) that they got a call to the effect that the backcountry trail ban is lifted. Ha! Dad got the key to Ritchie right away, but later Dan and Tracy convinced him that with the wind we've got Ritchie is a really bad idea. You'd blow right over to the other side and bust your tail getting back. We also didn't fish Gull today because of the wind.
-Micah and Mom and Dad and I went out a bit later to the same place, in two boats (Micah in mine), but we only pulled in two fish in an hour. Micah got one of them, but it was a walleye.
-The squirrels are a great source of amusement around here. Sierra and Jazmin and some of the adults were doing what they could to vex this one poor little squirrel who was very energetic and always proclaiming his dominion from his treetop in front of Cabin 4. (BREAK) Micah got caught up in the action too, and jumped and went "RAAH!" He landed on the squirrel. There was a a shock, and then it started twitching, and Micah went "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God," and Dad told him to take it away to another place. After he did it got a lot quieter in front of the cabin. The squirrel died. I don't know what will become of his tree.
-Later there was a horseshoe game, or rather several, all of which Dan and Tracy won. Then I fished off the dock and watched Jim and Mike, the two dockhands, clear out boats from day trippers. Then there was dinner. Dinner was the same as last night, so, terrific. Micah had been jonesing to play I Doubt It (BS), so we played that for him right after dinner, and while we were playing, Grandma and Tracy came in with his birthday cake and we all sang to him. I had three slices of his cake, which Tracy made (thank you). We played Pig (Spoons), and then got into poker.
-I lost my lead. I think I only took in one good hand all night. No, two. Meanwhile, Grandpa absolutely cleaned up. I think he made $20 on the night. We played some In-Between briefly, but I didn't get in because it's too risky. It ended up Dave put in about $10 and everyone else lost a bunch, and Maria took it all on an A-2. There were so many posts. I was about ready to buy in again, but everyone left. So I got out my journal. Now, I bet you're wondering what that BREAK was back there. That was where some people came and said there were Northern Lights. I went out there. I had already gone, I forgot to mention, with Dan and Ellen, but there was nothing and Aunt Ellen ended up just telling us about whooping cranes. But this time I got to watch an absolutely tremendous display of lights. Now, I am not going to attempt to extemporaneously describe the Northern Lights, but I'll say that at one point they did quite literally take my breath away. They were mostly green, but they were edged with red sometimes. They were mostly concentrated in one sector of the sky, and we watched them from the Point. I saw some that snaked around up closer to me, and one that split like curtains at a theater, and plenty others. You need to see them.
-I understand Dad is taking me to Ritchie early tomorrow, so I need to get to bed. Sheez, it's 0207.
-Micah and Mom and Dad and I went out a bit later to the same place, in two boats (Micah in mine), but we only pulled in two fish in an hour. Micah got one of them, but it was a walleye.
-The squirrels are a great source of amusement around here. Sierra and Jazmin and some of the adults were doing what they could to vex this one poor little squirrel who was very energetic and always proclaiming his dominion from his treetop in front of Cabin 4. (BREAK) Micah got caught up in the action too, and jumped and went "RAAH!" He landed on the squirrel. There was a a shock, and then it started twitching, and Micah went "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God," and Dad told him to take it away to another place. After he did it got a lot quieter in front of the cabin. The squirrel died. I don't know what will become of his tree.
-Later there was a horseshoe game, or rather several, all of which Dan and Tracy won. Then I fished off the dock and watched Jim and Mike, the two dockhands, clear out boats from day trippers. Then there was dinner. Dinner was the same as last night, so, terrific. Micah had been jonesing to play I Doubt It (BS), so we played that for him right after dinner, and while we were playing, Grandma and Tracy came in with his birthday cake and we all sang to him. I had three slices of his cake, which Tracy made (thank you). We played Pig (Spoons), and then got into poker.
-I lost my lead. I think I only took in one good hand all night. No, two. Meanwhile, Grandpa absolutely cleaned up. I think he made $20 on the night. We played some In-Between briefly, but I didn't get in because it's too risky. It ended up Dave put in about $10 and everyone else lost a bunch, and Maria took it all on an A-2. There were so many posts. I was about ready to buy in again, but everyone left. So I got out my journal. Now, I bet you're wondering what that BREAK was back there. That was where some people came and said there were Northern Lights. I went out there. I had already gone, I forgot to mention, with Dan and Ellen, but there was nothing and Aunt Ellen ended up just telling us about whooping cranes. But this time I got to watch an absolutely tremendous display of lights. Now, I am not going to attempt to extemporaneously describe the Northern Lights, but I'll say that at one point they did quite literally take my breath away. They were mostly green, but they were edged with red sometimes. They were mostly concentrated in one sector of the sky, and we watched them from the Point. I saw some that snaked around up closer to me, and one that split like curtains at a theater, and plenty others. You need to see them.
-I understand Dad is taking me to Ritchie early tomorrow, so I need to get to bed. Sheez, it's 0207.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Day 2
[A continuing serial! See your local bookseller for back issues! Or just scroll down!]
Bit of a controversy this morning; seems Mom forgot to buy groceries when she bought groceries. She bought no bacon and only one dozen eggs. Most of the rest she was a bit okay on, but generally her quantities were too low.
-First I went out fishing with Dad at Darkwater. I caught a pike and Dad caught two during about three hours of fishing, and then a storm blew in. You can see storms from a long way off here, and you can see weather that doesn't pertain to you. This storm skirted us for a long time, but finally started putting out rain and lightning, so we left. I like storm watching. It's kind of giddying to see a really big cloud just scud right along. And it's quiet here too, which I like. I can hear the thunder even from miles off. Five, probably. There wasn't all that much rain, unfortunately.
-After a brief interlude, I went back out to Darkwater with Erin and Maria, but we didn't catch anything and it started getting weather on us again.
-There are squirrels all over the place here, and chipmunks too. They're a bit audacious, but I haven't actually gotten close enough to touch one yet. My goal is to count coup on one before the week is up. Sierra and Jazmin are having fun here, with the squirrels and the abundance of older people to watch them and have fun with them. After a makeshift lunch of chips and salsa, Dad and Micah and I went out again, to no avail I believe. I think Dad got a walleye [recall, you can't keep walleye at Crowduck]. No good. And then I stuck around a little while longer and decided I'd take Micah out to this one cove I found last year. After checking out with Mom, the two of us left.
-Micah wouldn't quit complaining. "No, stop trolling! Just leave the engine off! I told you we were too close in!" Shut up! Micah just keeps complaining; it's all he does. He doesn' stop to think that he's got it really really good sitting on a secluded lake in the northwoods of Canada for free. Just complains. I caught one hammerhandle (small pike), but it got away before I could get it in the boat. Another sorm came up and I took us back, joined by Grandma & Grandpa, who I later found out had been sent to get us but were surprised to find us with sense enough to turn back.
-Dinner was deep-fried fish and waffle fries, and I ate with Erin and Dan and Jazmin and Sierra. This year with them I'm "worm boy", because I keep saying I'm eating worms. Ah, kids. After dinner (delicious, by the way), I took the little girls out swimming. Brisk! But I got used to it, even if it took a while, and up until my arms went numb I was feeling great in that water. It's terrific swimming in a lake instead of a pool - no chlorine, way more space, possibly even cleaner. I swam for probably an hour. The waves are great on a lake - just today I noticed for the first time how interesting wave patterns can look. They're interesting, something to stare at for hours.
-When I was dry there was poker. I bought two dollars and lost that. Then I bought another dollar and slowly regained. Maria proved a strong player, as well as Dave, but not Grandpa[, who had had some refreshing beverages]. Micah sat and steadily lost almost every single hand. I think he won one, maybe two or three. I played fairly tight. On one, it was just my luck to get pocket Queens on the hand where Grandpa decided to go all-in without looking at his cards ("Looking at them doesn't seem to do much good"). A bunch of other people stuck around on his $1.40 all-in, and two aces came up on the board, and then - another Queen. I tell you, I raked it in with that full house, and I sold $3 back to the bank. I stuck around in the pot with a 10-3 off-suit, and three Jacks popped up, two on the flop, along with a three (on the flop). The river was a 6. I won with the full house again. That was about the last hand of the night, I believe. I paid back my debts and ended up in the black $4.55, though Dan's accounting probably leaves a little to be desired (for example, Mom came into the porch tonight and glanced at the ledgers and dais she wasn't down $1.50 but up $0.15, and Dan just said, "Okay," and put her up $0.15, figuring on balancing later, I guess.) Micah sulked a lot, and then left us to play Hearts - Dan, Grandpa, Aunt Ellen, and me. I won that too. I'm hot tonight! Later Dan and tracy and I checked out the stars, but the moon was too bright (though under the horizon) to let us see anything. Ah well. The night was impeccable otherwise. A light breeze, not a cloud in the sky, temperature pleasantly cool. I could live in this night - until I missed snow. It's the perfect night, in my opinion. I hope Mom hasn't already stolen the porch bed, but I think she has. I hear some loons out on the lake right now. A loon call is something I want to live with all the time. I want to be able to walk out the door every day in the summer and hear that ghost whistle, possibly fall asleep to it. This lake is, I think, where I live. I'm on a mandatory vacation 51 weeks a year. Looking at a Manitoba map early yesterday, I saw so many untenanted lakes, no roads for hundreds of miles around. Could I have a cabin on one of those? Just for a summer home. Please? My goal in life is to be the sole inhabitant - sole homeowner - on one lake. In Minnesota, in Manitoba or Ontario, I don't care. I'll go through the paperwork for a dual citizenship, I suppose, if I have to. Or whatever. It's my goal.
Bit of a controversy this morning; seems Mom forgot to buy groceries when she bought groceries. She bought no bacon and only one dozen eggs. Most of the rest she was a bit okay on, but generally her quantities were too low.
-First I went out fishing with Dad at Darkwater. I caught a pike and Dad caught two during about three hours of fishing, and then a storm blew in. You can see storms from a long way off here, and you can see weather that doesn't pertain to you. This storm skirted us for a long time, but finally started putting out rain and lightning, so we left. I like storm watching. It's kind of giddying to see a really big cloud just scud right along. And it's quiet here too, which I like. I can hear the thunder even from miles off. Five, probably. There wasn't all that much rain, unfortunately.
-After a brief interlude, I went back out to Darkwater with Erin and Maria, but we didn't catch anything and it started getting weather on us again.
-There are squirrels all over the place here, and chipmunks too. They're a bit audacious, but I haven't actually gotten close enough to touch one yet. My goal is to count coup on one before the week is up. Sierra and Jazmin are having fun here, with the squirrels and the abundance of older people to watch them and have fun with them. After a makeshift lunch of chips and salsa, Dad and Micah and I went out again, to no avail I believe. I think Dad got a walleye [recall, you can't keep walleye at Crowduck]. No good. And then I stuck around a little while longer and decided I'd take Micah out to this one cove I found last year. After checking out with Mom, the two of us left.
-Micah wouldn't quit complaining. "No, stop trolling! Just leave the engine off! I told you we were too close in!" Shut up! Micah just keeps complaining; it's all he does. He doesn' stop to think that he's got it really really good sitting on a secluded lake in the northwoods of Canada for free. Just complains. I caught one hammerhandle (small pike), but it got away before I could get it in the boat. Another sorm came up and I took us back, joined by Grandma & Grandpa, who I later found out had been sent to get us but were surprised to find us with sense enough to turn back.
-Dinner was deep-fried fish and waffle fries, and I ate with Erin and Dan and Jazmin and Sierra. This year with them I'm "worm boy", because I keep saying I'm eating worms. Ah, kids. After dinner (delicious, by the way), I took the little girls out swimming. Brisk! But I got used to it, even if it took a while, and up until my arms went numb I was feeling great in that water. It's terrific swimming in a lake instead of a pool - no chlorine, way more space, possibly even cleaner. I swam for probably an hour. The waves are great on a lake - just today I noticed for the first time how interesting wave patterns can look. They're interesting, something to stare at for hours.
-When I was dry there was poker. I bought two dollars and lost that. Then I bought another dollar and slowly regained. Maria proved a strong player, as well as Dave, but not Grandpa[, who had had some refreshing beverages]. Micah sat and steadily lost almost every single hand. I think he won one, maybe two or three. I played fairly tight. On one, it was just my luck to get pocket Queens on the hand where Grandpa decided to go all-in without looking at his cards ("Looking at them doesn't seem to do much good"). A bunch of other people stuck around on his $1.40 all-in, and two aces came up on the board, and then - another Queen. I tell you, I raked it in with that full house, and I sold $3 back to the bank. I stuck around in the pot with a 10-3 off-suit, and three Jacks popped up, two on the flop, along with a three (on the flop). The river was a 6. I won with the full house again. That was about the last hand of the night, I believe. I paid back my debts and ended up in the black $4.55, though Dan's accounting probably leaves a little to be desired (for example, Mom came into the porch tonight and glanced at the ledgers and dais she wasn't down $1.50 but up $0.15, and Dan just said, "Okay," and put her up $0.15, figuring on balancing later, I guess.) Micah sulked a lot, and then left us to play Hearts - Dan, Grandpa, Aunt Ellen, and me. I won that too. I'm hot tonight! Later Dan and tracy and I checked out the stars, but the moon was too bright (though under the horizon) to let us see anything. Ah well. The night was impeccable otherwise. A light breeze, not a cloud in the sky, temperature pleasantly cool. I could live in this night - until I missed snow. It's the perfect night, in my opinion. I hope Mom hasn't already stolen the porch bed, but I think she has. I hear some loons out on the lake right now. A loon call is something I want to live with all the time. I want to be able to walk out the door every day in the summer and hear that ghost whistle, possibly fall asleep to it. This lake is, I think, where I live. I'm on a mandatory vacation 51 weeks a year. Looking at a Manitoba map early yesterday, I saw so many untenanted lakes, no roads for hundreds of miles around. Could I have a cabin on one of those? Just for a summer home. Please? My goal in life is to be the sole inhabitant - sole homeowner - on one lake. In Minnesota, in Manitoba or Ontario, I don't care. I'll go through the paperwork for a dual citizenship, I suppose, if I have to. Or whatever. It's my goal.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Some miscellany | Crowduck
You asked for the best, and you got the best! Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to transcribe journal entries from Crowduck into the blog! Metallica! I mean, no!
First, I'm going to write down this one thing I thought of the other night. See, since I decided TV was bad, I've been plagued by a nagging feeling: Well, it's just a mass medium; why is my mass medium of choice (books) so inherently superior to it? So I was sitting in bed, just having finished Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (tremendous book, by the way, and by that I mostly don't mean "long" because it is very good). And it struck me - a good book is an invention. It's not just a command on how to live your life. It's helping you along on figuring out how to do it. Walden, for example. Thoreau, obviously, had lived longer than I had when he wrote it, and had more time to think about the best way of living a life. He put all that experience into a book. Because of that, I don't have to spend all my life figuring out the same stuff he did: I already have it, and now I can continue from that point. Without computers we wouldn't be able to get these sorts of complex mathematical and scientific discoveries that we get every day. Likewise, without certain books our whole culture (our knowledge of ourselves and of other people and of what to do with this whole "life" thing) would be set back decades or centuries, and we would be way less edified in general. Next I have to figure out what's the point of edification. Because why would everyone want to be named Ed?
Okay, on to Crowduck. I'll leave out travel this year. Note that Micah and I were traveling with Grandma and Grandpa so we could visit some colleges (Carleton, Grinnell, Macalester) beforehand, and everyone else came separately.
We got Mom up to go shopping [at the Kenora Safeway] at about 0730, though she kept going back to bed until 0830. The shoppers [Mom, Grandma, and Tracy, I believe] came back at 0930 or so, and we left. An earlier start than ever, it happens! While we were on 17, it started raining, and it kept raining off and on, mostly on, all the way to the drop-off point, causing me to get the song "It's Coming Down" [by Cake] lodged in my head. Both vans (Dan, Tracy, Mom, Dad, and Erin were using a rented van) arrived concurrently, and we called Bill and waited and he got there on the boats. It was still sprinkling, and kept sprinkling all the way across Big Whiteshell. I didn't care. I'm cool. Someone, one of the dockhands, broke the news that there's a [governmental] "backwoods ban" because the summer's been so dry and they want to know where everyone is in case of a forest fire: So, we can't go to Ritchie this year unless there are at least 40 mm of rain. It didn't rain but maybe a half inch today, but it's raiing tomorrow, so who knows?
[...]
-Ah, the pickup trucks, the Limos. When we pulled into camp, the sky was a lot clearer. We unpacked and assembled poles and that kind of stuff. After a while, Dad and I even went fishing, with Micah. I drove to Darkwater Bay. Micah caught the first fish at 1620, a pike. They said pike are slow this year, but we caught one. Then, trolling, Dad caught another pike. We threw them both pack because you can't keep any the first day I had zero luck. However, there are practically no bugs this year, because it's been so dry. It's great.
-At the cabins again, I played in the water with Sierra and Jazmin [Uncle Dave's nanny Maria's daughter], who arrived at 1900 or so. Oh yes, dinner (soup) first, then water fun. It was cold, but we got used to it, sort of. Jazmin seems impervious to cold. I swam a couple times to where I couldn't touch bottom. It was cool. We must've been out there an hour and a half. Vigorous fun.
-Then, poker. At first I played well. Then I ended up sucking. Micah played absolutely every hand to the end, and he had some luch for a while that way. I tried to bluff him out once, but he just kept on going and took the pot. I got out with $6 of debt, but I stuck around to watch Micah lose all his money too. His strategy turned sour. Mine never was much good, though it did win me some hands.
-Afterwards Dan and Dave and I checked out the skes, and I went to bed. I'd write in more detail, like I usually do, but I want to fish early tomorrow
First, I'm going to write down this one thing I thought of the other night. See, since I decided TV was bad, I've been plagued by a nagging feeling: Well, it's just a mass medium; why is my mass medium of choice (books) so inherently superior to it? So I was sitting in bed, just having finished Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (tremendous book, by the way, and by that I mostly don't mean "long" because it is very good). And it struck me - a good book is an invention. It's not just a command on how to live your life. It's helping you along on figuring out how to do it. Walden, for example. Thoreau, obviously, had lived longer than I had when he wrote it, and had more time to think about the best way of living a life. He put all that experience into a book. Because of that, I don't have to spend all my life figuring out the same stuff he did: I already have it, and now I can continue from that point. Without computers we wouldn't be able to get these sorts of complex mathematical and scientific discoveries that we get every day. Likewise, without certain books our whole culture (our knowledge of ourselves and of other people and of what to do with this whole "life" thing) would be set back decades or centuries, and we would be way less edified in general. Next I have to figure out what's the point of edification. Because why would everyone want to be named Ed?
Okay, on to Crowduck. I'll leave out travel this year. Note that Micah and I were traveling with Grandma and Grandpa so we could visit some colleges (Carleton, Grinnell, Macalester) beforehand, and everyone else came separately.
We got Mom up to go shopping [at the Kenora Safeway] at about 0730, though she kept going back to bed until 0830. The shoppers [Mom, Grandma, and Tracy, I believe] came back at 0930 or so, and we left. An earlier start than ever, it happens! While we were on 17, it started raining, and it kept raining off and on, mostly on, all the way to the drop-off point, causing me to get the song "It's Coming Down" [by Cake] lodged in my head. Both vans (Dan, Tracy, Mom, Dad, and Erin were using a rented van) arrived concurrently, and we called Bill and waited and he got there on the boats. It was still sprinkling, and kept sprinkling all the way across Big Whiteshell. I didn't care. I'm cool. Someone, one of the dockhands, broke the news that there's a [governmental] "backwoods ban" because the summer's been so dry and they want to know where everyone is in case of a forest fire: So, we can't go to Ritchie this year unless there are at least 40 mm of rain. It didn't rain but maybe a half inch today, but it's raiing tomorrow, so who knows?
[...]
-Ah, the pickup trucks, the Limos. When we pulled into camp, the sky was a lot clearer. We unpacked and assembled poles and that kind of stuff. After a while, Dad and I even went fishing, with Micah. I drove to Darkwater Bay. Micah caught the first fish at 1620, a pike. They said pike are slow this year, but we caught one. Then, trolling, Dad caught another pike. We threw them both pack because you can't keep any the first day I had zero luck. However, there are practically no bugs this year, because it's been so dry. It's great.
-At the cabins again, I played in the water with Sierra and Jazmin [Uncle Dave's nanny Maria's daughter], who arrived at 1900 or so. Oh yes, dinner (soup) first, then water fun. It was cold, but we got used to it, sort of. Jazmin seems impervious to cold. I swam a couple times to where I couldn't touch bottom. It was cool. We must've been out there an hour and a half. Vigorous fun.
-Then, poker. At first I played well. Then I ended up sucking. Micah played absolutely every hand to the end, and he had some luch for a while that way. I tried to bluff him out once, but he just kept on going and took the pot. I got out with $6 of debt, but I stuck around to watch Micah lose all his money too. His strategy turned sour. Mine never was much good, though it did win me some hands.
-Afterwards Dan and Dave and I checked out the skes, and I went to bed. I'd write in more detail, like I usually do, but I want to fish early tomorrow
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
S N O W
It got cold, and then it stayed cold. As a result, Burke's pond back in Warder Park behind Whitaker froze over to a very good depth. Micah and I went up on Sunday to play krokay on it. There was only one wicket on the ice, but that was the greatest wicket I'd yet had the pleasure to go through. It was great: with even the slightest tap, a ball would go sliding for about half a minute. It was hard to get it to stop anywhere near the wicket for a reasonably good next shot. That was probably the first time I wished I'd taken more shots to get through (amazingly, I only needed two). However, with all this cold, the one thing we were missing was snow.
-The weatherman told us the story last Monday: a system was moving in, promising to dump three to five inches on us, starting sometime Tuesday. The snow began falling as I was in fourth bell at the Building, but it started coming down really in earnest during about sixth. Whenever an announcement came on, everyone expected it to be an early dismissal announcement. Eventually, in seventh bell, it was. Mr Rasulis said they would be letting out middle building first and then proceeding to high school shortly. People in my class started whipping out cell phones to call to get picked up. So here's what the building did: They waited five minutes and let out middle school bus riders. Then, they waited ten more minutes and let out middle school in general, prompting Rosie to shout, "They haven't even let out middle school yet?" About this time she also noted: "It takes my mom five minutes to drive here from my house. That means she's been sitting out in the parking lot for ten minutes in a cold car. They should've let us out an hour and a half ago, because now everyone's driving really carefully and slowly to keep from sliding on the snow, and they're also all bocking the buses." Well, what do you expect? It's not a real school. They waited another fifteen minutes, during which we speculated when we might get out: I figured we would end up not even getting out early. Aaron took it a step farther and said, "Watch. We're going to get out late. That would be the ultimate irony." When we did get out it was ten minutes before normal dismissal, but I decided I wasn't going to think of it as getting out ten minutes early; rather, as getting out half an hour late. I biked home and got snow all up in my hair and beard, which looked so fetching I had to take a picture of it.
-I learned about nine that night that Wednesday (the seventh) was a snow day. I also measured the snow after it had finished falling: seven inches.
-Keith had given me an idea. I got up at 0700, borrowed a snow shovel, and started offering to shovel people's driveways. It was 0815 before I got a customer, but I ended up shoveling five driveways and building up a good amount of warmth in the process. All told, I made $81.25 on the day and stayed warm, and also worked up an appetite. After that I walked up to Warder to check out how everything was looking. Looking out onto Burke's Pond, I noticed there were footprints halfway out onto it. Now, when Micah and I had played krokay there, we had only gone a little way out. But here, clearly, someone was daring enough to go out all the way to the middle of the pond; indeed, there appeared to have been a group of them. I decided to go out too. The whole time, I kept telling myself: "I must be a dang fool. I'm an idiot." But the ice held. I became the first person this winter (and probably for several winters, because this is the best cold snap I remember) to walk all the way across. I spotted a promising empty spot near the middle, so I went and made a Vitruvian snow angel. I also dropped off some pictures at Walgreens. I was extremely satisfied for the day; it was the best day I'd had in a really long time, perhaps years.
-Yesterday, that weatherman was at it again. Originally we were forecast to get five to ten inches overnight and today, but then it was downgraded to something like four to six, if any. The system could miss us, he said. This morning I had almost forgotten about all that, but my alarm was luckily tuned to 700 WLW, where they were reading school closings. The guy stopped at the end of the E's and said, "Let's take a break and we'll start with the F's." So then they took five agonizing minutes to do a weather report, a traffic report, a sports report, and an airport report. Then the guy started reading again. Fayetteville, Felicity, Finneytown, Franklin. All closed. Ha! I went back to sleep. Ha!
-Later today, Micah and I walked up to Panera. He wanted to eat somewhere else, but I had the money, thanks to last Wednesday. On the way, we admired the exquisite havoc. Our street wasn't even plowed yet; it didn't get plowed until 1430. We saw a pine tree that was severely droopy. Winton was fine, to my dismay. I took my camera along and stocked up on pictures of the ice everywhere. There was an especially interesting layer that had formed on a sign and partially slipped off, leaving a clear replica of the sign.
-Panera was good. I have a tradition of using names that are not actually mine at Panera. In the past I've used Spock, Vladimir, and Ivanhoe. Today I used Santa Claus. The guy who called it out said, "A little late for that, isn't it?"
-We walked back. I should note that the sidewalks were not even visible. There was of course a thick layer (well, a quarter inch or so) of ice on top of the snow. I was extraordinarily happy. Snow days are the best days ever.
-Back in the house, I contemplated how to spend the rest of the day. I was reading Calvin and Hobbes, and I suddenly realized what I needed to do. It was heavy snow, but I was determined. I started by building up a very large pile of snow with a shovel. Then I started shaping it by hand. I got the shovel and carved a big hole in the pile. I added features and sticks. And then I took pictures. It's a replica of the famous Calvin sculpture "The Torment of Existence Weighed against the Horror of Nonbeing". It is the greatest thing ever, especially for a Calvin and Hobbes person such as myself.
-"Look at that kid's snowman! What a pathetic cliché!
-"Am I supposed to identify with this complacent moron and his shovel?? This snowman says nothing about the human condition! Is this all the kid has to say about contemporary suburban life?!
-"The soulless banality of this snowman is a sad comment on today's art world.
-"Now come look at my snowman.
-"I call it, 'The Torment of Existence Weighed against the Horror of Nonbeing.'
-"As he melts, the sculpture will become even more poignant."
-"I admire your willingness to put artistic integrity before marketability."
COPYRIGHT BILL WATTERSON. REPRODUCED HERE ONLY FOR ILLUSTRATIVE PURPOSES. (PLEASE DO NOT SUE ME, MR WATTERSON; I HAVE NO ILL INTENTIONS AND I LOVE YOU DEARLY. AND I'LL TAKE IT DOWN IF YOU WANT ME TO)
-The weatherman told us the story last Monday: a system was moving in, promising to dump three to five inches on us, starting sometime Tuesday. The snow began falling as I was in fourth bell at the Building, but it started coming down really in earnest during about sixth. Whenever an announcement came on, everyone expected it to be an early dismissal announcement. Eventually, in seventh bell, it was. Mr Rasulis said they would be letting out middle building first and then proceeding to high school shortly. People in my class started whipping out cell phones to call to get picked up. So here's what the building did: They waited five minutes and let out middle school bus riders. Then, they waited ten more minutes and let out middle school in general, prompting Rosie to shout, "They haven't even let out middle school yet?" About this time she also noted: "It takes my mom five minutes to drive here from my house. That means she's been sitting out in the parking lot for ten minutes in a cold car. They should've let us out an hour and a half ago, because now everyone's driving really carefully and slowly to keep from sliding on the snow, and they're also all bocking the buses." Well, what do you expect? It's not a real school. They waited another fifteen minutes, during which we speculated when we might get out: I figured we would end up not even getting out early. Aaron took it a step farther and said, "Watch. We're going to get out late. That would be the ultimate irony." When we did get out it was ten minutes before normal dismissal, but I decided I wasn't going to think of it as getting out ten minutes early; rather, as getting out half an hour late. I biked home and got snow all up in my hair and beard, which looked so fetching I had to take a picture of it.
-I learned about nine that night that Wednesday (the seventh) was a snow day. I also measured the snow after it had finished falling: seven inches.
-Keith had given me an idea. I got up at 0700, borrowed a snow shovel, and started offering to shovel people's driveways. It was 0815 before I got a customer, but I ended up shoveling five driveways and building up a good amount of warmth in the process. All told, I made $81.25 on the day and stayed warm, and also worked up an appetite. After that I walked up to Warder to check out how everything was looking. Looking out onto Burke's Pond, I noticed there were footprints halfway out onto it. Now, when Micah and I had played krokay there, we had only gone a little way out. But here, clearly, someone was daring enough to go out all the way to the middle of the pond; indeed, there appeared to have been a group of them. I decided to go out too. The whole time, I kept telling myself: "I must be a dang fool. I'm an idiot." But the ice held. I became the first person this winter (and probably for several winters, because this is the best cold snap I remember) to walk all the way across. I spotted a promising empty spot near the middle, so I went and made a Vitruvian snow angel. I also dropped off some pictures at Walgreens. I was extremely satisfied for the day; it was the best day I'd had in a really long time, perhaps years.
-Yesterday, that weatherman was at it again. Originally we were forecast to get five to ten inches overnight and today, but then it was downgraded to something like four to six, if any. The system could miss us, he said. This morning I had almost forgotten about all that, but my alarm was luckily tuned to 700 WLW, where they were reading school closings. The guy stopped at the end of the E's and said, "Let's take a break and we'll start with the F's." So then they took five agonizing minutes to do a weather report, a traffic report, a sports report, and an airport report. Then the guy started reading again. Fayetteville, Felicity, Finneytown, Franklin. All closed. Ha! I went back to sleep. Ha!
-Later today, Micah and I walked up to Panera. He wanted to eat somewhere else, but I had the money, thanks to last Wednesday. On the way, we admired the exquisite havoc. Our street wasn't even plowed yet; it didn't get plowed until 1430. We saw a pine tree that was severely droopy. Winton was fine, to my dismay. I took my camera along and stocked up on pictures of the ice everywhere. There was an especially interesting layer that had formed on a sign and partially slipped off, leaving a clear replica of the sign.
-Panera was good. I have a tradition of using names that are not actually mine at Panera. In the past I've used Spock, Vladimir, and Ivanhoe. Today I used Santa Claus. The guy who called it out said, "A little late for that, isn't it?"
-We walked back. I should note that the sidewalks were not even visible. There was of course a thick layer (well, a quarter inch or so) of ice on top of the snow. I was extraordinarily happy. Snow days are the best days ever.
-Back in the house, I contemplated how to spend the rest of the day. I was reading Calvin and Hobbes, and I suddenly realized what I needed to do. It was heavy snow, but I was determined. I started by building up a very large pile of snow with a shovel. Then I started shaping it by hand. I got the shovel and carved a big hole in the pile. I added features and sticks. And then I took pictures. It's a replica of the famous Calvin sculpture "The Torment of Existence Weighed against the Horror of Nonbeing". It is the greatest thing ever, especially for a Calvin and Hobbes person such as myself.
-"Look at that kid's snowman! What a pathetic cliché!-"Am I supposed to identify with this complacent moron and his shovel?? This snowman says nothing about the human condition! Is this all the kid has to say about contemporary suburban life?!
-"The soulless banality of this snowman is a sad comment on today's art world.
-"Now come look at my snowman.
-"I call it, 'The Torment of Existence Weighed against the Horror of Nonbeing.'
-"As he melts, the sculpture will become even more poignant."
-"I admire your willingness to put artistic integrity before marketability."
COPYRIGHT BILL WATTERSON. REPRODUCED HERE ONLY FOR ILLUSTRATIVE PURPOSES. (PLEASE DO NOT SUE ME, MR WATTERSON; I HAVE NO ILL INTENTIONS AND I LOVE YOU DEARLY. AND I'LL TAKE IT DOWN IF YOU WANT ME TO)
Saturday, February 3, 2007
Studies Show Finneytown Secondary Campus Not a Real School
This was Keith's discovery. I remember it well: one day, he sat down in first bell and just asked me, "Is this a real school?" He had determined that it isn't. The first and best tip-off is that it doesn't even call itself a school. Up until my junior year, we had a wooden sign out front that animatedly proclaimed, FINNEYTOWN HIGH SCHOOL. Then they renamed the school to "Finneytown Secondary Campus" and received a new sign: it's stone and has engraved (in Times New Roman, small, and aligned to the left, not centered as it should be) FINNEYTOWN SECONDARY CAMPUS, and, below that and almost the same size, GIFT OF THE CLASS OF 2005. It's an exceedingly disheartening and half-assed sign. Another clue is that the State of Ohio rated us "effective", not "excellent". So that means I'm learning effectively. That explains why Mrs Otten was loath to teach the class the correct way to solve the phone number problem last year. And why, the day before exams started last month and Miss Miller was doing review, she gave in to the class's clamor and let us all play Heads Up, Seven Up. If this were a real school, nobody in high school would have wanted to do that, and the teacher wouldn't have let them anyhow. Besides these rather major things, there are subtle clues all over that Finneytown isn't a real school. When Keith and I find ourselves wondering why something in Finneytown is, the answer is usually that it's not a real school. For example, at lunch Keith asked me, "Why does that clock say 8:24?" I told him, "Because this isn't a real school." Why did Mr Crawley mark me wrong on a question for which there was no correct answer? He told the class it was because, if none of the answers seems quite right, you should pick the term that's most related to the issue raised in the question, even if it's wrong. That is to say, if the question is "2+4=?" and the choices are "dasanki", "Massachusetts", "13", and "efflorescence", the correct answer is 13. Keith and I quickly realized that the real reason I got the question marked wrong was that Finneytown isn't a real school, and, additionally, Mr Crawley isn't a real teacher. He's just a monitor who makes sure we all do psychology-related sorts of things. Most of the teachers at Finneytown are actually monitors, in fact, excepting only Dr White, Mr Volz, and Mr Rahn. Mr Rahn still isn't a real teacher, though, but more of a computerized correspondence course. In a real school, the English teacher wouldn't spend twenty minutes one day talking about her cats, and she would actually read the journal entries she makes us write in our composition books (I believe she has yet to open one of them). Our school lunches are obviously not real--hot wings drowning in vinegar, chicken patties made bulkier with rubber, and sandwiches with one slice of meat. Our mascot is the Wildcat, which isn't even a real animal. Coming up with it required zero thought; the person whose job it was clearly had heard of some other team named the Wildcats and copied off of them. The Wildcat logo we have everywhere is just a ripped-off version of the UK Wildcat, and it's been copied so many times by such inexpert artists that it no longer even has a nose. We've made some other discoveries, too. For example, the sidewalks at Finneytown Secondary Campus aren't really paved with concrete, but with children's broken dreams. In the bathroom, Keith regarded the sink water and said, "You know this isn't a real school; that's not really water, it's the saliva of all the students." Then he made a disgusted face and said, "Ouhww!" thus becoming the first person I know to gross himself out. We assume that on May 31st, we won't actually graduate; instead of a diploma we'll just receive a blank piece of paper plus an unemployment form. Since realizing this, we've taken a pretty dim view of our education in general, and we're kind of depressed that we haven't actually been going to school all these years. It's also sort of freeing, though, to be enlightened while everyone else still has all this school spirit and thinks they're getting a real education. That doesn't make up for it, of course.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Seems about right
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.
-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.
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.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Correction: Life is Good
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.
-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.
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.
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