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Peace out!

HEYAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Right now I'm sitting in the lobby of the Barus & Holley [Engineering/Math classroom and lab building], and I was working on my APMA0330 homework, and ... I don't know exactly when, but I started to hear a little sound. It was really squeaky and annoying and repetitive, but it was one of those things where once you notice it, you can never un-notice it, and you'll be forced to deal with it forever.

Basically, I'm at a long lit table in the middle of the B&H lobby, and about twenty feet away from me is this Asian kid with long hair, glasses, a white t-shirt, black gym shorts, and black socks... not sure where his shoes are. He's also wearing a silver watch. And listening to his iPod. AND I CAN HEAR IT. FROM TWENTY FEET AWAY.

Now, when I said, I can't remember how long it's been, well... I can't. But I can remember it's been a LONG time. And it's been the same song this ENTIRE time. Just now, as I was writing this, the song took a break, and then started again. It's hard to describe, but it's pretty much a bunch of really really high pitched annoying voices speaking in [I think] an Asian language. It has a really strong two-beat feel to it and it is SO repetitive. It kind of reminds me of that song Katie Ross listens to, that's like

"Pretty little boys, little boys, little boys!"

Imagine that kind of feel, but at the end of the third "little boys," and a really nasally "heyaaaaa."

So for the past like 20 minutes or so, I've been listening to

"Pretty little boys, little boys, little boys, HEYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Pretty little boys, little boys, little boys, HEYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Pretty little boys, little boys, little boys, HEYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"

on repeat. And I want to strangle someone. There it goes again. Oh my god, someone kill all iPods in the world please.

Peace out!

The Final Four Posters

Peace out!

Update on Work

1. Math 17 half-way problem set due tomorrow XXXXXX
2. Math 17 problem set due Monday at 3AM
3. Math 18 problem set due Friday XXXXXX
4. Math 35 problem set due Monday
5. Math 33 problem set due Tuesday XXX
6. Education paper due Sunday XXXXXX
7. Math 33 exam on Wednesday

Peace out!

Posters 5

Posters 4

Update

Completed so far:

1. Math 17 half-way problem set
2. Math 18 problem set
3. Education Paper

Update

Completed so far:

1. Math 17 half-way problem set
2. Math 18 problem set
3. Education Paper

Mark Soens

When we were younger - probably when I was in 3rd grade or so - my brother and I used to go and play with some kids named Matt and Tony Leonetti, who lived in the cul-de-sac at the top of our neighborhood. They were pretty cool kids - I remember always liking Tony a whole lot because he seemed like such a nice guy, but I realize that part of it may have just been the age gap - and I generally liked hanging out with them, except for when we played football, because they could both kill me. Tony, it turns out, is in the military. I guess he was built for it?

In either case, two instances of hanging out with them stick out in my mind. The first is when they showed me Red Alert: Command and Conquer, but the other was the time I talked to Mark Soens.

They called us and invited us up to their house (how we would get together), so we went up, and when we arrived there were a couple other kids there, including one whom we had never met, named Mark Soens. I can't remember a whole lot about him, except that he was tall, thin, white, had short hair, and I remember him being very pleasant and nice at all times.

Most specifically, I remember as he was leaving the Leonetti's house to go to his house next door, he said "Thank you so much for having me!" to the kids and the parents before he left. We all commented on that line after he left. I think that was the last I ever heard from Mark Soens.

I learned later, though, that apparently he was homeschooled, and furthermore, that it was a fundamentalist Christian homeschooling environment. He had told the Leonettis before that on Halloween, the souls of demons came to the world and roam freely, and also that holding together the nucleus of an atom was not the strong force or protons and neutrons, but the hand of God.

I don't know why this experience came to mind recently. I guess I just thought it was interesting that the first memory I have of a fundamentalist Christian was a very good one.

Peace out!

Completed

And so far:

1. Math 17 half-way problem set is done

Just for Bookkeeping

And so you can feel the stress of four college math classes, too!! =P

1. Math 17 half-way problem set due tomorrow
2. Math 17 problem set due Monday at 3AM
3. Math 18 problem set due Friday
4. Math 35 problem set due Monday
5. Math 33 problem set due Tuesday
6. Education paper due Sunday
7. Math 33 exam on Wednesday

Feeellll itttt. MMMMMMM.

I'll tell you about my progress as I go? Heh.... I can do this.

Peace!

Posters 3

The final one

Posters 2

Another one

Posters

I made three really cool posters tonight that I hope to hang in my room sometime soon...

Neat, Stapled, and On-Time

My Math 35 teacher, Dr. Steven J. Miller, has the following policy about turning in homework:

1. Neat
2. Stapled
3. On Time

As long as it meets those three criteria, it will be graded. What's missing from the list?

...

Name?

It turns out that papers without names do get graded. Then, the points are evenly distributed to all members of the class.

I thought that was a really interesting policy.

Peace out!

It's Real Easy!

Just so you all know, you can leave comments even if you don't have any sort of Google or Blogger account. Just say that you're posting as "Other" and go from there. Much like Cheese Chockadados, it's real easy!

[But of course, just talking to me about any comments you have is also totally cool and awesome and you should do that too]

I'm coming home in, I think, 4 days 9 hours. I'm very excited. You all should be too because I'm bringing you cool things from collegeland!

Peace out!

Military Time

The other night after I had dinner with some friends at the V-Dub (so this must have been Friday), Chaz and I decided to go the CVS across the street on Thayer Street. So we walked in, and he showed me where the NyQuil was (I got a night and day pack, actually), and I got some skim milk. Then we went to the register to pay. There were three workers - a white girl, a latino guy, and a black girl, all probably aged 20-24. As I handed the guy my card, the white girl asked,

"Do you know how to read military time?"

So there are three people in front of me, who work right next to an ivy league school, all aged 20-23, and one asks me if I know how to read military time. Now, I think I know military time, but... if these guys don't know it, then maybe I don't! So I say, "Yes??"

But I looked very inconfident, so the guy asked, "You know?" And I said, "I mean, I think I do..."

And then the white girl asked, "So what's 1624 in military time?" And I said 4:24PM. And she said, "Whooaaa.... how did you know that?" So I just said if it's 13 or higher, you subtract 12 and just say it's in PM. So then she pulled up a receipt and asked, "So what time did I take my break?" It said 1824, so I told her, 624PM.

They were all very amazed, for some reason. As in, shocked. Shocked! How did you know that? The white girl asked:

"Are you in the military?"

Since you're reading this, you undoubtedly know me, but just to illustrate: I'm 5'10", lanky, pale, scrawny, white, I wear tiny t-shirts and tight jeans and sandals and I have long hair. I could not look further from the military if I tried. In between some bad coughing and a little bit of laughing, I got out, "coughcough no i cough go coughcough to Brown."

And they all said, "OOHHHH!!! Yeah, I get it!" And the black woman said, "Yeah, they teach you math like that at Brown, right?" And very seriously, I said,

"Yes."

And I left the store.

Chaz and I went home to study for our Military Time 1350 course after that - we had a quiz the next day on all times from 0000 to 1159.

Peace out!

Fever Dreams are Made of These

At home, I was always really strict about my bedtime - no matter what I was doing, I was in the shower before 10:48PM and I was in bed watching The Daily Show at 11:ooPM, and usually I was asleep by 11:30PM. I usually woke up at about 6:30PM, so I generally got 7 hours of sleep, give or take. On the weekends, I guess I would sleep a little more, but I never really kept track.

When I came here, I decided to shift everything back two hours - in bed by 1AM, wake up by 8:30AM, etc., still getting seven hours of sleep. But on the weekends here, I was only getting six to seven hours of sleep, which I guess I didn't really notice was significantly less than I got at home.

In either case, my point is this: I've been overexerting myself at college just a little bit so far and it got me a little bit sick.

On Wednesday night, I started to get a bit of a sore/dry throat. It's hard to describe it... but basically, my throat just becomes dry constantly, and then when I swallow it would become painful. I mean, this isn't really anything to deal with, and if it were all there was I wouldn't complain or even talk about it. The only reason I note it is because it essentially always portends of far worse things to come for my body. So at home I usually take some Echenacea and Goldenrod [placebos that I <3], but here, there is no such comfort. So I just had to live with it.

The next I woke up and the dry throat thing was still going on, and I realized I had a stuffy nostril - meaning I would have a stuffy nose that day. This was Thursday. I remember going to class and sniffling the WHOLE time through Dobrushkin's lecture and wanting to kill myself because I knew I was being "That Kid" who was sniffling the whole damn time in the back of the room... but there really wasn't anything I could do!

Anyway, after class, this guy named Paul stopped to talk to me. He's a sophomore, and he was talking to me about a really strange percussionist who I should listen to/probably like, because he would lay over polyrhythms and flams and crazy time signatures, etc. He seemed really nice and easy to talk to, and hopefully I'll see him in class/around. He rides his bike a lot.
Anyway, the point is, I ended up doing my work in the BH lobby. When I do my math work, I lean over my paper just a little bit - as I'm sure anyone does. But when you have a stuffy nose... this becomes a problem. So I sat there doing work for probably 20-30 minutes, and then started to sniffle an uncontrollable amount, and knew I needed to stop. But I was in the damn engineering building, and where am I going to find tissues there???? Thank god, it turns out there's a "Cart" [food cart] there ["Carts" is a scammy part of Food@Brown] and they had napkins. So I walked over and I got a napkin and I blew my nose.

Holy.

Crap.

I never knew so much stuff could fit in my nose. I used one napkin to blow my nose, and with the next four napkins I cleaned up my face. It was gross and I have no idea how it happened. Yes, I know, it's messed up and wrong. And people kept looking at me and I was like, "Noooo, stop judging me, I'm sick!!!!" But whatever.

Over the course of the next 70 minutes, the same thing happened about three times. The Cart worker changed and they thought I was crazy.

Well anyway, I took it easy that day, did some work, a lot of Math 17, I think - it was a hard problem set and there were some problems I couldn't solve. I worked on one problem for about an hour before I got on AIM/talked to Gina/went to bed. I think it was about 11:15 when I started to get ready for bed, which is like two hours early for my schedule here. I think I got in bed around 11:45, knowing, oh god, I'm going to have to do the sit-up-in-bed-so-you-can-breathe thing. So I did that, and it was going okay - my nostrils were clearing - but I was like... I'm not falling asleep like this. So I had to lay down, and I thought, well, one of my nostrils will stay unclogged, right?

Wrong. Left nostril facing the ceiling, somehow blocked. So I had to breathe through my mouth for a while - not a problem, though, because Danny wasn't in the room so I wasn't annoying anyone. I think I sat there trying to fall asleep like this for about 30-40 minutes. Then down the hallway, I hear... ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR! Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da ... and it's a drunken a capella group singing Sweet Dreams are Made of These to welcome their new member, Kayla, the songwriter next door.

Noooooooo, I thought! I was actually, honestly really excited for Kayla and really hoping she would make it and was like WAITING for her to get the phone call so I could be there for her big moment, but it happened while I was sitting there mouth breathing nostril-stuffied and like, dying. And I felt like a bad friend because I wasn't there for her big moment, but like... I couldn't go. I apologized for it later, and I guess she understood? Ah well.

In either case, after that I just laid on my side trying to go to sleep. But I was having fever dreams. While awake. And everything became math. Piano, Gina, songs, college, life, school, everything was math. I tried to meditate and it became math. I tried to sleep, and it became the result of an integration. I couldn't stand it.

Also, I tried to go to the bathroom at 2AM, but tried to keep my eyes closed... and I hit the bathroom door with my head. And scared Morgan, who doesn't like me. Oh well.

Peace out!