The Definition of "Cone"

One of the locker areas at Post Prom this year was a game kind of like Plink-o, except you always got three chips, there were only four slots, and there was no way you could lose. One of the prizes was a $5 Wawa gift card, which I really wanted. I had a 75% chance of getting it, which I considered a lock, so I went to play it and I ended up getting a chip into every hole except for that one. Of the remaining options, I decided to go for the Bruster's ice cream cone because I thought Gina would like it and I could take her for ice cream sometime.

So on Sunday, after hockey, we were both free and decided to go out for ice cream. I told her as we were driving there that I wasn't sure of exactly what the coupon meant. "So uh... this coupon doesn't actually say that you get free ice cream. It actually says that you get a free ice cream cone. I'm not really sure if we're going to get ice cream, so yeah, we might come back just with an actual cone and nothing else."

To which she said, "Let me see that!" So I gave it to her and I remember her specifically reading, "...Sugar or cake cone..." but not really anything else. We talked about it for a while. Why would they give away a cone for free but not the ice cream? Did they really think people would use a gift card worth like $.59? Was it a trick? Would they spring the ice cream on you at the end? We talked about it. I assumed that since it was offered alongside free bowling games and $5 at Wawa, it was probably worth about as much, so probably it meant the ice cream too.

So we got there and got to the window. I went up to the kid at the window and said, "Okay, so, I have this coupon. It says free ice cream cone. Now does that include the ice cream in the cone, or only the cone?" He took the coupon and said, "Uhhh... yeah, a free cone." THAT DOES NOT ANSWER ANYTHING. Kim Lock happened to be in the background so I made her answer the question.

Somehow we decided that we got the ice cream for free. Fudge Ripple. We ate it in my car listening to Hannah Montana, if I remember correctly. By choice of Gina, of course. It was good.

Peace out.

Driving Chills

My car - I think a 2006 Impala - has a monitor at the base of the dashboard that can tell you a bunch of stuff about the car - tire pressure, miles traveled, average fuel economy, oil life, etc. I always keep it on "instantaneous fuel economy" so I can see how many MPG I'm getting at any moment. Alternatively, I can put it into metric mode and see how many liters per 100 kilometers I need.

Whenever you accelerate, your fuel efficiency becomes extremely low - like 2-6MPG - and so every time I accelerate I see that come up on my dashboard. And at the same time you can sort of feel the gas rushing through the car and the engine revving and the RPM meter goes up to 3000, and this weird thing has started happening. I sort of get a chill up my spine every time I accelerate. I can't really help it, and it really does happen a lot, especially if I accelerate from stop up a hill or something like that. I don't know, I guess it's a good thing - it's a strange and visceral reminder of how terrible I am being to the environment and it really does make me want to change how I affect it.

I do try to drive as efficiently as possible (although I know that that's not enough). I do what truck drivers do and slow down long before red lights so that you don't have to accelerate from stop - if you're lucky you can accelerate from like 35mph, which saves you a ton of energy - and I try to be a little better about following distances so that I don't have to brake as much, since that kills energy. Coasting is also a good way to go - for the last mile basically of my ride home, I use essentially zero gas. I have to be really aware when I'm going around turns since I sometimes have to take them a little wide to not brake and not use gas, but it helps a little bit.

Sigh. But yeah. So whenever you drive with me and I accelerate you'll probably see me cringe a little bit and shake my head. I need to do more. Workin on it.

Peace out.

"Fade Away"

So sometime when I was in high school - I'm pretty sure 9th or 10th grade - I started looking for Ben Folds sheet music and I came across this site, geocities.com/benfolds75, which had a whole ton of sheets/chords that were really helpful. I think at one point I was looking for actual sheet music for Smoke or Summer B or something like that and I went to the message boards there and started poking around, and there was a section for people that wrote their own music, so I checked some of it out. Most of it wasn't very good, but there was this one song I found called "Fade Away" that I really really liked. I always just listened to it from the internet by having Windows Media Player open the link. I know that the site was something like "annanddalenordic.com" or something along those lines, but that's about as specific as I can get. I'm pretty sure the song was in E minor, and that the chords were Em C G D in the interludes, but I could be wrong about that.

At some point the link stopped working, and since it was the only song I had ever listened to through its link, it had been a WHILE since I actually clicked on the link on the website. So I went to look for it and I couldn't find it anymore. I had never saved it to my computer. So all of a sudden this song was just gone and I couldn't listen to it anymore. I've been searching for it for a while, every now and then I'll make another attempt, but so far nothing's turned up.

If you ever find it, let me know, I guess.

Peace out.

RA Status

Our RA, Bill, has a little pinwheel basically outside of his room that he changes to let us know where he is. It says things like "Food," "Working out," "Zombie Lounge," "Here," "Out," and "12 O'Clock." He went home for the past two days and somebody took the label that said "Food," turned it backwards, wrote "Beast-Love" on it and put the arrow to that.

Peace out.

The Workers

I wonder a lot about the people that do the jobs that no one wants whenever I happen to run into them. Whenever I get on a bus, I wonder what kind of life the bus driver has. When I was in Wildwood I noticed something of the same sort, I think, maybe a Tram Car driver or something like that.

In Atherton, there's an older guy janitor that I often wonder about. He reminds me a little bit of the Brooks character from The Shawshank Redemption, except this guy is a little bit shorter, a little less frail, and has a foreign accent. I don't really know why I pick to wonder about these kind of workers over so many others. I guess it's because they work the jobs that people always seem to threaten you with - "What, you wanna grow up to mop floors?" I wonder how he grew up and I wonder if he sees it the same way. I wonder if he has a wife and kids and if this work was enough to give them what they needed in that sense. I wonder where his parents are and what they thought of it. I wonder if they know all the other things he does and is good at and I wonder if they're proud of him. They should be, I think. When there's seven feet of snow it's people like him that stay for twenty hours to put the place back together and I'm sure through the week he sees these walls more than he sees his wife and I think there's a lot to be said for what he does and his ability to stick with it. I don't know if I'd be able to.

Peace out.

The Bigler Rinks

If you go out the back of my dorm, turn right on the sidewalk, left up Shortlidge Road, right on Pollock and then left up Bigler, you'll get to a bunch of athletic fields and the Bigler Rinks, which is where we played all of our roller hockey games.

So I think the most ridiculously notable thing about the Bigler Rinks was the parking situation. They were actually in a fairly inconvenient spot for like 80% of the people that played, and considering how much stuff you have to bring with you to play hockey, that's kind of a problem. Specifically if you are a goalie. So if you were across the street from the rink complex and walked into it, first you'd cross a regular old sidewalk like they have all over campus. Then there's a few yards of grass with maybe a tree or two, and a couple yards of it are paved. After this couple yard strip is a tall fence, maybe twelve feet. After that, everything is paved. There are two rinks side by side inside that, set about about twenty feet from the fence. There's a shack on the right and a referee's post in the middle, and ofter there are construction vehicles inside, and a dirt pile on the right for some reason we can't really figure out. In either case, posted on the fence is a sign that says NO PARKING BEYOND THIS POINT. So you are actually allowed to park on the grass outside the fence and the little strip of pavement leading into the rinks, but not in the large swath of pavement inside the rink area where only hockey players go.

However, people still park there regularly. They did it like all season. And basically every other time someone would do it, the parking fairy would come around and start writing tickets. Every time this happened, someone on the bench would yell, "Yo, dude, you're getting a ticket," at which point the person would scream obscenities and then hassle the ticket fairy. Then they would try to stop the game, which sometimes happened and sometimes did not, so that they could go move their car. Sometimes they got a ticket, sometimes not. Sometimes they were threatened to have their car towed, but I don't think this ever happened. Whenever they did move their car so as to not recieve a ticket, they'd have to take it a way away before they could come back which seriously screwed up their playing. Alternatively, they would have a friend with shoes on who just came to watch the game move their car for them, which I'm sure their friends all loved?

At the back end of the Bigler Rinks was a fence, then a little strip of land, then another fence, and then a whole lot of construction areas. On the right of the rink was a raised mulch bed, which we also couldn't figure out, and then a fence and more construction. It really sucked to hit the ball into just about any of these places. If you hit it past the second construction fence, it was basically gone forever. If you hit it past the first fence you'd have to wait until you could get someone with shoes to get it for you. Sometimes you would just declare it not worth it and go for it later.

The rinks themselves were pretty terrible. The surface was very torn up and ripped and just absolutely destroyed your wheels. Like, it was probably as bad as rollerskating on gravel. Plus they rinks were a beach. There was just sand and dust everywhere, and if you've ever skated on anything like that, you know how dangerous and scary it is to come into a turn over sand at full speed knowing that no matter what, something is about to go very wrong. There were also holes in the board where kids sticks would get stuck regularly. Fortunately no one ever impaled themselves on their stick in the process, although I'm sure it's happened or is going to happen sometime. The ball bounced everywhere because of the tears in the surface which was really annoying, but it goes both ways I guess. The boards were shaky and the doors didn't close all the way about 90% of the time.

There were also holes in the nets which made for a number of questionable referring decisions across the board, but oh well, it happens. Nick, our goalie, asked at the end of the season why no one would just invest in a nice net or two for the two goals we had so that there wouldn't be any question anymore, and Tim told him it was because they were going to tear down the rinks next year to make a parking lot for a new medical center. But maybe they would build us new ones somewhere.

Peace out.

Golden, Piaget, and Gauss

In the Stained Glass show we did this year, our xylophone player (Jason) had to hit a crotale and then put it into a tupperware container of water to make the pitch bend in the middle of Cathedrals, the second number. Early in the season, people joked about putting live fish into his water. The week before Dayton, Laura and Brandon actually DID put fish into his water. We all thought it was really funny and we laughed for a while, but then Brooke started to worry that the fish would die. First of all, there were three of them in that little tupperware container and they weren't getting any new oxygen in that water. She started looking around for a straw, but never found one. I started to feel really bad for the poor fish too, so I tried to find something as well. I ended up basically deconstructing one of my mechanical pencils and just blowing air through that from time to time. I'm pretty sure everyone who noticed, once again, thought that I was crazy.

This was the weekend of the Keith Urban concert, so practiced ended early, something like 3PM, so that the battery could get ready and practice and whatnot. The pit was going to go bowling with whatever instructors were free, and Brooke convinced me to take care of the fish somehow. So we went to Wal*Mart, which isn't far from the bowling alley, and got a tank with a bubbler and light and cover and bought some food, too. I think she paid for most of it but I think I chipped in for some part of it... Anyway. We took the fish to bowling and fed them a little bit and we got a straw while we were there to give them some air.

I took them home that night and put them in the tank. We had gotten some gravel to decorate their tank with, too, so I put that in there. I remember I was really unsure of what I was doing and it took me a while to get everything all sorted out, thanks in part to the fact that the nearest source of water from me is like 66 steps away. But eventually I got everything sorted out, their air working and the light working and the gravel in place and I think I even got them a little decoration that night from Kenny down the hall, fed them again and went to sleep.

When I woke up the next morning I remember the three of them were all very very still and I was afraid they had all died and just frozen in position, but then I tapped their tank once and they all scattered. I fed them again before I went to drumline. When I came home, the largest and most gold-colored of them was laying on his side on the bottom of the tank, dead. I didn't know what had happened... I used tap water but I purified it and they'd only been in there a day and I introduced them to the water slowly and they made it through the night and I fed them and I just didn't really get it. I remember it was rainy that Sunday when I got back from drumline, and I put him on a napkin and took him to one of the pretty courtyards in front of Atherton and dug a hole for him with a flat grey rock I found there in front of a tree and looked at him one last time, closed my eyes and folded him up and tried to cover him in his spot as nicely as I could. It was a very sad time for me actually.

After that, we named the fish. Gina and I were talking and we decided to name the small silver one Piaget and the middle-sized orange/white/black one Gauss, after the famous academics. We named the largest one Golden after his color, and the fact that we were very sad about his death and there is a Fallout Boy song with the same name that is appropriately sad. Anyway. Piaget and Gauss were doing well that first week from everything I could put together. I remember telling Gina a bunch of times that Gauss and Piaget were swimming happily and I was happy that they were doing well.

Then, I think on Wednesday after I came back from class, I saw that Piaget was swimming funnily. He was on his side a lot and seemed to have a lot of trouble going to higher elevations in the water. Sometimes when he would swim he would do corkscrews through the water. I looked up what was wrong with him and found out it was his air bladder of course, and tried to find out how to fix it. You're supposed to slowly lift them up and down in the water to try to sort out whatever is wrong with their balancing and adjusting mechanisms. I tried to use a spoon to do this a couple of times, but Piaget kind of resisted letting the spoon lay beneath him, so I couldn't really do that. I noticed, throughout the night, though, that Gauss kept getting underneath Piaget and pushing him to the top and then letting him fall back, like he knew that was what he needed to do to fix him. It was so adorable. That's when I decided that Gauss was the best fish ever. I tried to take a video of Gauss doing this but I could never get it at the right moment.

I had to go to hockey that day and I was leaving for Dayton the next day and I had to pack and eat dinner and I remember I was out of the room a lot and I was sad that I couldn't be there to try to take care of Piaget. I did just about everything I could for him. I had some room temperature pure water laying around, I believe, so I put that in there, and I fed him and I purified the water again just a little bit and I tried to lift him up and down. I don't think there was much else that I could do. I was afraid that he would die when I was out of the room and I'd feel guilty for not being there or something like that. He was alive when I came back from hockey, and from dinner, and throughout packing, and he was there that night until 1AM or so at least. I remember he was laying on the gravel in his tank when I said went to bed and I got one last look at him knowing it might be the last time I saw him alive. When I woke up the next morning he was laying dead on his side in a different spot, and I buried him in the same manner right next to Golden.

Gauss is the only fishy left. He seems to be doing fine. He is a very good boy and he was wonderful to Piaget when he was sick and I'm glad that I saved him. Oh, I should say, we found out later that Brandon and Laura bought the three of them as feeder fish for bigger fish that Brandon had. So I'm glad I saved at least Gauss.

There is a chance Gauss is a girl. To be determined, I suppose.

Peace out.

Pants

When you play hockey, you have to wear skates and shin pads, and to accomodate that, most kids wear a certain type of pants called hockey pants. You could wear other stuff, I suppose, but you don't want to fall and rip your other nice pants, plus they're usually way too hot. Hockey pants are usually pretty baggy and have pretty crazy designs on them. They're a really strange swooshy material that reminds me to some extent of what most tarps are made of, and then have some areas that have holes in it to let lots of air through like basketball shorts. Their color schemes are usually pretty wild, common ones including black/grey/red and white/yellow/blue, usually with lots of sharp, bold lines.

So the first time I went to hockey, I went to dinner right afterward and I didn't change my pants. I swear to god, everyone that noticed that I existed noticed the pants I was wearing and judged me on it. Sometime near the end of dinner, Fin came up to me and was like, "Jeff? Is that you? I thought I saw you earlier but I was like, Jeff would never wear those pants." The people I was sitting with also made fun of me for it, although I forget who they were that night. I remember walking out of the cafeteria and looking at people's eyes and seeing so many of them look down to my hockey pants and just feeling very embarrassed. I was wearing a white sport shirt, I think, so it shouldnt' have looked that out of place, but I suppose it was. From the on, I would always bring my jeans to the game or change before I went to dinner.

I rode my bike to and from the games, carrying my hockey bag and my stick with me. I think a lot of people must have thought I was a total crazyface riding around like that. Even the kids on my team said something about it. It really was the best way to get there though. Oh well.

One time after a long time playing - it was the day before the seasons started, actually, and we just had a pickup game that went from four until about eight and we played in the snow for two hours - I tried to skate to Redifer afterwards for some food. My skate basically broke on the way, so I ended up walking after a certain point in Pollock, I think. I remember walking into Redifer, I could feel people looking at me and I think I heard some people say "Uh, check out the kid with the hockey stick - ???" I think I was wearing my hockey pants, too. I think sometimes I don't understand how crazy the things I do seem to other people. I swear they all make sense to me.

Peace out.

MATH 311W

My class at 9:05AM on M/W/F was 311W, taught by Gary Mullen in (I think) 213 Osmond.

I can't describe how awesome this class was. This is going to be a terrible entry compared to all the rest, I'm just warning you in advance.

Mullen was an EXCELLENT teacher. I don't really know how else to put it. He's taught that class for years and years, so he knows exactly what he wants to say in every lecture. He always is extremely prepared and has lots of examples worked out ahead of time and has all of his notes good to go for every class and never gets caught flatfooted up at the board unable to prove something or work something out. He spoke loudly and clearly and varied his tone and cursed sometimes to keep you interested.

One time we were going over codes. Basically, you have some strings of numbers that are codewords. So we'll say our codewards of 000, 001, 010, and 100. If someone tries to send me a message and I get something other than those codewords I just listed, then something has gone wrong and we have to find a way to find out what has gone wrong. When Dr. Mullen was talking about this, he introduced the codewords and then said, "And someone sends us something and we get the message 110. And we look at it and we say, 'Well... oh, shit!' ". I suppose I just thought it was funny that a math teacher found a reason to say "Oh, shit!" in math class. He also did it in a very signature way... he has a really distinct voice that's kind of low but kind of not, and he often looks towards us but down at the same time and holds his arms kind of inward. It was a very funny experience overall, I wrote it down in my notebook.

I think the one thing that he could have done but didn't really have us do was make us work together in class. I think I have weird opinions about that... I remember I hated it in high school for the most part, but I know I wished he had made us work together in this class. I think it would have drilled the stuff into our heads right away instead of waiting till whenever we studied again, and it would have gotten the kids in the class to know each other better. But oh well. Some people think that's inefficient and a bad use of class time. S'alright.

The stuff we learned in this class was the basics of what's called discrete math, which is basically math that deals with integers. We learned about the division algorithm and a lot of things having to do with greatest common divisors and the Euclidean Method, then some stuff about modular arithmetic and congruence classes and inverses. Then we learned some stuff about functions but not too much, I forget what else was in that chapter. We also learned about encryption and stuff like that using Euler's Formula and the Phi function and such things, too, and we learned about permutations and order and sign, then we learned about groups. Then we learned about cosets and LaGrange's Theorem and subgroups and stuff and then finally about codes.

I think, after the first test, a lot of people got scared and left the class. I know a lot of people didn't come to class, and I have no idea how they did well. I mean, well, I suppose I could sort of understand since the book (Numbers, Groups, and Codes) was actually AWESOME, but it would be way harder to do well if you didn't come to class.

No one really talked to each other, or at least, if they did, I hardly knew about it. I usually showed up to class early and there was usually another kid in the class when I showed up there. I think I found out later that he transferred from Hazelton, but I might be making that up. We had a group project on primitive elements that we had to write a paper about, and we could work with people on that, but I didn't work with anyone because I never really felt inclined to ask or felt like I had an opportunity to ask. I kind of wanted to, but never felt like I could. I know other kids in the class worked together, and some of them just seemed to form groups natural, so I got the feeling that some of them knew each other perhaps from having math classes together before, but I was never sure.

Anyway, no one EVER talked in class, and never really before or after class until the last day. The kid that was always there really early was talking about the grade he needed to get a C, and other kids were talking about their test scores. One kid I think got a 100 on the first test and an 18 on the second, or something like that. There's a very good dresser who sits two seats behind me that said he memorized all the proofs for everything we'd done in class because that was how he killed himself on the second test. The girl in front of me, who I think was a cheerleader for CB West or South, said that she heard the 3rd exam wasn't as hard as the 2nd exam. There was a very soft spoken girl who sat beside me that gave me a pencil once and who borrowed my notes before class once. The kids talked about a "Squirrel Kid" in our class who always came in late and looked like a squirrel, but I had no idea who they were talking about. They talked about Dr. Mullen and what they liked and didn't like about him. They were actually a pretty funny crew and I was pretty sad I didn't strike up conversations before. I had thought about it but I was always afraid for some reason. I should stop that. The kid from Hazelton said that if he had to decode a code and he couldn't figure it out, he'd just write "G A R Y R U L E S" and hope for the best.

Peace out.

CMPSC 201

My 8AM class on M/W/F is CMPSC 201, which is basically programming in C++ but "for engineers" so we had to learn MATLAB toward the end of the course... that part was kind of scammy, we only did MATLAB for like three days and we didn't learn a whole ton, but anyway.

So the first day of the course, our teacher basically got right down to business even though it was 8AM and the first Monday morning of the new semester. The lecture hall was in this building called Kern in the northwest part of campus, which is as far as you can get from me, and it was probably freezing that day. It's not so bad to bike there, generally, takes about five minutes, but walking there after my wheel was broken was a piece of crap. Kern has a nice little snack shop and cafe and even some sort of restaurant on its ground floor, and the lecture hall was definitely one of the nicer ones on campus. It held probably a little over 300 people, had padded seats (although the writing boards were tiny), and had really good technology for white boards and projections and things like that.

So the first day, I didn't know what to expect with this teacher. She seemed alright, I guess. She's probably about 50 years old, has long blonde wavy/curly hair, glasses, spoke loudly and generally pretty clearly although she took her time typing things perfectly (she admits this all the time). She mentioned a few things during the lecture that I wasn't familiar with, including "Angel," and I remember I went up to her to ask her what it was after class explaining to her that I was a transfer this semester, and she told me what it was and where to go to find it. I forget if we had a lab after that class or not, but in either case I remember I got a 90 on my first lab because I didn't put my name on it, even though its impossible for them to get your lab and not be sure of whose it is.

Well anyway, I was looking at RateMyProfessor or whatever that site is when I got back. Most teachers have like a dozen or so comments if they have any at all. When I found my teacher, who I just call Suzi Q, I found that she had OVER TWO HUNDRED COMMENTS. Which usually means there is something very strange going on. So I clicked and read some of them, and they were full of just the most scathing, hateful, bitter reports on a teacher that I had ever seen, and I mean that without exaggeration. Some of the tamer reviews that I found included the following:

"With out a doubt, the worst teacher at Penn State. I would have rather taken a class from someone who speaks no english. Every time I had a question or problem [Suzi Q] was very un-willing to help. If you can avoid her classes, do so at all cost"

"If you want to relive the days of high school with teachers who hate their jobs and wreak havoc with their unprofessionalism, have [Q] as your teacher. She is the epitome of rudeness and is extremely unhelpful. If you made a mistake which was mostly her fault (i.e. Angel), prepare to be scolded when you visit her in her dungeoun lair. Worst ever!"

After reading those, all of a sudden I was like ((O_O)). But I still didn't think she was that bad, and there were some people who even seemed to like her or think she was okay somewhere in the mix, so I decided to just go with that.

So for a long time I didn't really have a problem with her. Then one day in class we were talking about what input would be needed if you used a program to find the area of a circle and how the radius being negative would be an error, and I asked if you could just tell the user that you would take the magnitude of their input and then find the area based on that. So the magnitude of -7 would be 7, so -7 would be a fine input. And she freaked out for a minute or two and I don't think really understood what I was asking and kids kept just shaking their heads and being like "Sorry man..." So after that I started to see why people didn't like her so much.

After that, I didn't have a problem with her for a while. I didn't do extremely well on my second exam, so I asked if I could see my ScanTron sheet to make sure nothing had gone wrong. I remember the day I asked to see her I was in a rush and I didn't have time to print out the answer sheet, so I put a copy of it on my Flash Drive and planned to ask her to print it out when I got there, or she could just look from the computer if she was going to hand grade it, or anything like that. I sat and waited outside her office in the basement of the IST building after looking for it for about 15 minutes, ended up waiting for her for a long while past when she said she would be there. She didn't say a word to me when she passed by me, knowing that I was there to see her. She didn't know my name and almost found the wrong kid's test. Then she found mine and told me to get out the answer sheet, and I gave her my flash drive and apologized for not having time to get to a printer, and she got very angry with me. I didn't really understand. To be honest I can't even remember her telling me to bring the answer key. And furthermore, what the hell, I already searched for her office for 15 minutes and sat waiting for 15 minutes, now you, my teacher, can lend me a hand for all of five seconds by putting the answer sheet I at least put on my flash drive on the screen for me. Angrily, she printed out the sheet, yelled at me when I almost put a mark on my ScanTron, and watched silently as I regraded my own test.

The "Angel" that I referred to earlier is the Course Management System at PSU. You can turn in homework and print out class notes and see your grades and such things on Angel. That's how we turn in our labs and projects and etc. for this class, which is why it's impossible for them to get a lab without knowing whose it is. You can title your submissions when you turn them in and attach a message if you'd like, so for instance you can title it "Lab 1" and attach the message "I don't think we learned proper commenting formats yet, please don't deduct until we have learned" and then attach your file for them. I usually make my titles and messages song to emo lyrics - Fallout Boy, Panic!, and Academy are favorites - but I don't know if they ever really read any of them. Anyway.

This last project we had in MATLAB had somewhat unclear directions for the last step. Myself and I believe a few others interpreted it as calling for one figure with three graphs on it, then another figure with three graphs on it. Then she sent out an email telling us that it should be a figure with four graphs on it: The first three graphs the same as before, the last graph combining the three from the second figure in the previous attempt. I had already turned in my first attempt, but they generally don't grade them until a day or so after the deadline, so I could turn it in again. So I turned it in and titled it, "Now that the directions have changed..." and attached my file. A few days later I got this in my inbox:

"The directions did NOT change. There was on point for you to use different line styles and legend unless you put different ones on same plot. Be careful of your attitude, it could cost you points!"

I think she sort of misinterpreted my tone. Maybe I should have used a smiley. In either case I'm expecting my next project to have the line "-5: Attitude" in the grading section. [I'm kidding about that last part. I think it'd be hilarious though]

I want to say more about this class but I'm kind of tired of talking about it.

I hated waking up for it. On Wednesdays you only had to go if you didn't complete the lab on your own, and I would always complete the lab on my own just so I wouldn't have to go because there's nothing I'd rather not be doing on Wednesday at 8AM than in Comp Sci doing a lab for Suzi Q. We had unannounced quizzes basically every Monday and sometimes other days, but you go to drop one every third of the semester. I think I lost one point on one of these the entire time, although I'm pretty sure I skipped two. I didn't really keep track though...

Overall the COURSE was good. I learned C++. I wrote a program to find primitive elements of prime numbers with it. However, the instruction was pretty terrible. It was kind of like the textbook, except with lots of typos and a terrible attitude. I really hated the quizzes more than anything else in class because they made you have to go. I wish I could have just gotten the labs and projects and the textbook and done it through the web. It should be a web course. I think that's my recommendation.

Peace out.

Sharer Road

Yesterday, a little before 4 o'clock, I was driving to the courthouse in Centre Hall so I could go to my speeding ticket hearing. I had to go down 322/The Nittany Expressway for a little bit to get there, which is the normal way I go home. After a little bit of time on that road, the GPS system told me to make a left turn onto Sharer Road. So I got to where the turn was and looked at the road and just thought, "Oh, what the hell." It looked like it was a one-lane road, it wasn't paved, there were stones everywhere, it was uneven and bumpy, and I was in Ryan's huge SUV and I just thought, "I can't believe I'm going to drive this thing down this stupid road."

So then I turned on the road. And, somehow, I'm not really sure how, I just sort of noticed how strikingly gorgeous all the surroundings were. There were just miles and miles of farm land all on either side of me, with some very very old-style farm buildings and one very pretty new house. The grass was extremely green and thick and there were mountains in the distance. There were birds playing and hopping around on the road, and then a groundhog scurried past the front of the car. Then another one did. On the way back, I saw two more groundhogs and I wondered if they were the same ones I saw before. Suddenly I felt stupid for thinking that this road wasn't good enough to drive on. I sort of felt like this road was actually too good to be driven on, and felt like a jerk for driving on it. I thought it was so good and right in the middle of so many awesome things that it should just be done away with altogether.

Peace out.

Dr. Thomson

So one of the classes I considered taking at the beginning of the semester was Meteorology 003H, basically the honors version of the introduction to metereology. It was way later than all of my other classes - 1 or 2PM, I think - and very very far away, I think at just about the farthest west part of campus from me, and also very high up in the building - maybe the top floor but I'm not sure.

So I rode my bike over there the first day (it was cold) and wandered around the sixth floor through somebody's offices to get to the classroom, which was really a computer lab. The instructor was a fairly old guy, but he seemed grandfatherly and kind of nice. His name was Dr. Thomson. He had talked to a red-headed girl named Elizabeth before class [she was in 311 and 312 with me too, small world] and used her as an example of his funniness, because she knew that he meant by "The dry Thomson," meaning that there was no "p" in his name. It wasn't very funny but we wanted to like him.

Then we found out that he was freaking crazy. He told us that he had the highest government clearance of anyone at Penn State and that he knew security measures that other people wouldn't know, and assured us that if anything were going to happen near the Penn State campus - LIKE A DIRTY BOMB - he would tell us so that we could get to safety in time. He also told us that the government was tracking his communications, so when we e-mailed him, we couldn't say anything suspicious or else the government would get him in trouble. By that same logic, he was also not allowed to travel as he pleased because the government was monitoring him and would take action if he did something they didn't approve of.

He talked a lot about the Bubonic Plague for some reason, and then talked about AIDS (HIV) and how "they" think that it's going to become airborne and wipe out 99% of the Earth's population or something like that.

He talked about the classroom we had and apologized for the bad location. He gave us a syllabus and showed us examples of weather journals that we wanted to keep that were really, really detailed. He also showed us a bunch of different rulers and got very excited that they weren't the same because one was based on the Danish inch.

When we all left class to take the elevator back down from the sixth floor, we didn't know what the hell just happened. We didn't know each other so conversation wasn't easy at first. I was looking around, trying to guage people's reactions, and I think someone chuckled. I think I said, then, "That was the trippiest class I've ever gone to." Everyone agreed and some people added comments of their own. I remember, walking back out to my bike, that one kid called his friend and commented on how terrible the class was, and said that he'd be dropping it immediately.

Peace out.

Skyler Schneider

So when I went to Governor's School over the summer after my junior year, I knew that I would have to be living with a roommate for the first time. I didn't really have much apprehension about that - I'm pretty sure I can live with like 99% of people so I was sure it would be fine.

When we showed up the first day and went up to my room - I believe it was 208 - my roommate was already there. He was sitting on his bed, which I believe had only plain white sheets on it, and although he looked pretty set up, he had basically no decoration anywhere at all. I think I remember noticing a TON of things underneath his bed, but I could be wrong about that. He was scribbling in a tiny notepad when we walked in. He was probably 6'2", it was hard to tell what ethnicity he was but I'm guessing half-Jewish and half-Asian, and pretty thin, whith shortish black hair that it looked like he gelled at spiked. I can't remember what kind of shirts he wore.

As most people reading this probably know, my dad could charm his way out of the Lewinski scandal if somebody asked him to. He can get anyone to talk and he can do it without putting effort into it. So while my mom and I were setting up, my dad figured he would break the ice for me and talk to Skyler. No matter how long he talked to Skyler, though, my dad just couldn't get through to him. He would only give one word answers to my dad's questions, and he would never look up or make eye contact - he just kept scribbling in his notepad. He did find out he wanted to go to Cornell though. We asked him if he wanted to come look around the campus with us and he said no, he said something else to do, but maybe if we would go another time. We didn't go with him, although I think he did actually ask if we had gone yet at one point hoping to go with us.

The first day or second day that we met, the instructors and administrators were talking to us about the academic honesty policy at PGSS - basically, they expected that everyone would work together and that they wanted us to work together because PGSS is pretty challenging for the grade level we were at, and they wanted us to learn proper collaboration within science communities. They told us to make sure that we weren't plagiarizing or cheating, but to feel free to discuss problems and methods with other people as much as we wanted. Skyler raised his hand and said, "If we don't work with other people, are you going to come after us?" I believe Barry said something along the lines of, "No, but we aren't aware of anyone that's ever made it without working with someone else."

For the first little while, Skyler basically disappeared from my life. I didn't really interact with him in any way, not even when I was in the room I don't thing. He went to bed early and didn't hang out in the same places or with the same people I did. I saw him in class though. A lot of times he had a roll of yellow duct tape around one of his wrists. A lot of people asked him what it was, and he would either not answer or say "To fix things" or something like that. One day, my friend Jenna broke her shoes or flip-flops, and she actually used his tape to fix them during class. I remember that he would walk up the stairs in the class funnily - he would approach the first step, stop, and grandly step both of his feet onto the second step, stop, approach the third step, and repeat all the way up. One day one of the girls asked if they could touch him to make sure he was real, and he said yes, and she touched his arm confirmed that he was real.

Somewhere along the line, I was coming back up to my room around the middle of the afternoon. I went up the stairs and turned to the right to get to my room, and I saw Skyler at the waterfountain on the way there. He had two wastebaskets near him, one turned upside down, and he appeared to be filling a plastic bag with water from the waterfountain. I had NO IDEA what he was doing, just absolutely no idea.

So I went up to him and asked him, "Ummm... why are you getting water out of the waterfountain?" And he responded, "It's cold." [The water from the sinks was significantly warmer]. Then I asked him, "So uh... where did you get that second trash can?" And he said, "From a friend." It turned out that friend was ME. That was MY TRASH CAN. Anyway. Still totally baffled, and afraid that he would suffocate me in the middle of the night or drown me, I finally asked, "...What are you doing?" He responded, "You don't need to know."

((OOOOOO_OOOOOO))

We found out later he wanted to fill the trash cans with cold water and blow a fan over them to make the study lounge temperature more bearable.

One time when we were in the study lounge, we were all working on our chem homework. I think Nate was there, and Skyler was there too. We had to draw models of the molecules we were working with, and someone suggested doing a 3rd grade science project and using jujubees and toothpicks to represent the atoms and bonds in the molecule. I think I ran out to the store on Forbes Street to get some, came back, and put them together with the guys. While we were working, I remember Skyler took the container of toothpicks and made a joke like "Would you like some wood on your [forget this word]?" And I was a little shocked just because it was Skyler.

At the final speech, we knew that Skyler would have to talk. We all wondered how the hell that would work out given his fear of speaking to the rest of us. Actually, when he got up there to speak, he was flawless. He didn't stutter once or shake or get nervous or anything. He was probably just about the best public speaker out of any of us. We were totally baffled.

We found out, I believe on the last day, that Skyler's parents had woken him up at 3am or something to drive to PGSS on the first day, dropped him off with his stuff, and immediately left. The day that we had to go, they showed up, quickly picked him up, and immediately left.

//

So basically all throughout PGSS everyone thought that Skyler was really weird and basically no one hung out with him. I was a little bit nervous around him and he went to sleep early and I didn't have a terribly wonderful roommate experience. I was kind of mad that I was put with him.

We found out later that apparently he had Asperger's Syndrome.

And that sucked. If we had known that he actually had a problem, then we wouldn't have been so cold to him after we had one bad experience trying to talk to him. My entire experience would have been totally different if I knew that my roommate didn't hate me, he just had ASD. It probably would have been a lot better for him, too. It was kind of a tough choice, though. On one hand, people should have known because it would have let us understand him and his reactions to us much better and probably would have made the experience much more positive for all of us. On the other hand, its his private medical information and he has the right to tell us or not tell us, and the admins and instructors probably had no right to tell us either. I don't know, I just thought that wasn't so fun to learn.

Peace out.

The Last Set

This is the last set of pictures taken with my SD600. They're image numbers 2712-2717 respectively.













Taken 3/7/2008 at 11:25PM. Backseat of the car, I think we were going over a bridge that overlooked New York City. Suzi was excited to get to this bridge because she'd never seen NYC before.













Taken at 11:26PM; you can see the really nice radio head set he had in this picture, and the directions we had on the dashboard. I think we're still on the same bridge.













Taken at 11:30PM. I don't know exactly where we were then - I think this was before we got lost trying to get onto I-95 though.













Taken at 7:07AM 3/8/2008. This is the kid we call Mailbox deflating the "mattress" he slept on in the gym floor of that high school. Below his left elbow is the corner where most of the kids from that high school in Maryland slept, I think.













Also taken at 7:07AM, I think this is the corner where most members of the pit were sleeping. I think Sean is leaning forward, and Keith is sitting Indian style, both towards the left.













Also taken at 7:07AM. I think the two men standing are Franco (right) and our director, Brett (left).

I think it's pretty fitting that the last pictures I took with this camera were of driving at night, and in black and white.

Peace out.

Stratford++

So we were supposed to leave for Stratford at about 5:30 the Friday before spring break. Some of the people [Jason and Brian] were going to be there loading at like 2:30, and I figured I should probably be there to help out a little bit too because they had NO idea how they were going to load the truck, basically, and this was the first time. I saw Keith earlier that day and told him that people were loading at 2:30 and that he should be there then.

So I was dragging my feet a little bit and it took me a while to get there, but I think I left my dorm for the Blue Band Building at about 3 that day. I walked up Shortlidge Road to a bus station and took a White Loop bus. I had my backpack with me, as well as a sleeping bag that I kept inside a pillowcase and a bag with all my clothes [the bag I won at GV Post Prom]. In the back of my backpack, in the smallest pocket, closed, and inside its case, also closed, was my camera. Two pockets away from that were my mittens, my hat, and a bottle of water. I also brought three packed lunches and cinnamon rolls and maybe teddy grahams or poptarts, I'm not sure.

So I got off somewhere near East Halls - or at least I thought - because I knew that BBB was somewhere around there. But once I got off the bus and oriented myself, I realized I was VERY FAR from where I wanted to be. Did I mention that it was really cold and it was raining a lot? It was. So I walked down basically a small highway [might as well have been 202] with all my stuff in the rain, then all the way up the BBB driveway - I think it took me twenty minutes in all so it was probably something like a mile. My shoes and socks were soaked through with very cold water by the time I got to the building.

So we loaded and it took a long time but we did actually get everything on the bus. I talked to Justin a lot - the youngest bass drummer - and it turns out he remembered our Synthesis show, which I thought was pretty interesting. At about 5:20, we were all loaded and ready to go, but people were hanging out for a little bit. At about 5:30, people were about to go, but Adam ["rack boy"] and myself didn't go yet because our driver wasn't there yet. We waited about ten minutes, then Mike D called him, and he said that he was picking up Suzi and that he'd be there soon. Ten minutes later he still wasn't there, so we called again, and he said that Suzi was putting her stuff in his trunk and he'd be there in a minute. About five minutes later, he finally showed up, and he ended up taking Suzi and I instead of Adam and I [Adam ended up going with Keith, our timpanist]. So by the time we got everything in order to go, it was 6:00. Already half an hour late.

So we left then, and I was told that we were going to Sheetz for food. I really really wanted to change my socks because they were still wet and freezing three hours later [they were painful at that point], but since I was getting out again into cold wet rain, I figured I'd wait. People took a really long time at Sheetz, but once we got back in the car I changed my socks to warm ones and it was WONDERFUL. We got on the road again. Probably five minutes later, our driver tensed up and shouted an obscenity - he'd forgotten his uniform. So we had to drive twenty minutes back and twenty minutes to the same spot to get on our way again, and everyone waited for us. So now we're like 1h10m late.

The drive wasn't too bad for a while - rainy and foggy but that's alright. We listened to Suzi's iPod basically the entire time, and Dan used his iPhone to navigate whenever we were feeling a little lost. Then, sometime around midnight, we were trying to get onto I95, the last road before getting into Stratford. The directions were a little confusing, so we kept trying to get off at an Exit 8, but it didn't lead to the road we were looking for. So we went down the Exit 9, got back on, came down the other direction, and tried again. We did this a few times and couldn't figure it out. We finally got frustrated and pulled to the side of the road and tried to use our directions or iPhone to navigate, but I just called Cass and Brian and they told us what to do, so we got on our way again. We were probably held up like 30 minutes with this whole ordeal.

So then we got on 95 and were looking for our exit, found it, and got off so we were in Stratford. The school was about five minutes away. But we couldn't see anything, and it was really hard to navigate, so we ended up driving around startford for like fourty minutes before we found where we were supposed to go. We actually had to drive the wrong way on a one way road to get where we needed to - okay, well, we didn't HAVE to, but we chose to because it made our lives about 100x easier and we would have been even later if it hadn't been for that.

So we were supposed to leave at 5:30, meaning we'd get there at 10:30, but instead we got there at 1AM, so we were about 2.5 hours late overall, which was wonderful because we had to wake up at 7 the next morning and we had to sleep on a school's gym floor. Thankfully I brought a sleeping bag - I considered going without it. Our director turned the lights out and it got very dark instantly, and we all pretty much went to bed as soon as we could then.

The next morning, Brett [the director] turned the lights on at 7 on the dot. He turned them on and people moaned and groaned and didn't really move, and then Brett said, "DO IT. GET UP." and all 33 of us jumped up immediately. We had until 7:30 to clear the gym, so we all moved really fast - I ended up eating and brushing my teeth at the same time. We were all pretty tired that day.

I don't want to write too much detail abou the competition part of the day because it wasn't too interesting. We practiced in the morning with Brian Stoudt [drill writer], had to move gyms, then loaded, then drove and got lost again. We unloaded into "a dungeon" at the basement of Brunnel HS because it was raining, and we stayed in an art room. Our first show was okay, but it sounded weird because there was very little echo and that made us play reserved. We didn't go back to the other school as planned because we didn't have enough time because finals got moved up, so we sang our parts instead. I got cookies delivered to me at lunch. Boston was there and I saw Ian Flint and I think I saw Gabe Cobas too, but I'm not sure. There were two schools practicing at any given time. Dartmouth was there and we watched their show in the auditorium on the screen when Franco told us we could and they had a breakdancer and we were confused. I think they made fun of one of our players and I was upset with them. Jason and Sean disappeared and we made jokes about that. A girl in the audience was enamored with Adam. Our second show was more confident and we did a little better but felt like it still wasn't perfect.

//

After our second show, I really wanted to get food I packed and get my coats because I was cold and get my camera and charge my dying cell phone. To do any of those things, I needed to get into my driver's car. So when we were about to perform, I told him about that, and he said we could go later. So I asked him when we were loading and he said he needed to talk to his brother and the snare drummers first, so he did that. For a long time. Then I asked him if I could have his keys for a second so I could go do that, and he said sure. Then he didn't go inside, so I asked if he could get changed now so I could get his keys when he went inside, and he went inside, so I asked for his keys, and he said no, hold on, let me go with you. So he was changing and it was taking a long time and I wanted to help outside and eat and be warm and take pictures so I asked again and fnally got his keys, ran to his car, and got my stuff.

So I came back to the room and got myself in order and put my camera somewhere I could get to it and found my way back outside to where we were loading and I took it out of its case and I tried to turn it on and it didn't respond. So I fiddled with it a little bit and tried again and it didn't work. I fiddled with it some more and it still didn't work. No matter what I did, it wouldn't work. And there were so many things I had wanted pictures of. I wanted pictures of our truck and of all of us loading and of Bryce's face against the red brake lights of the truck and Brook hugging/protecting the bass drum from the rain while holding Rod's sticks because he went to hit on girls for more than an hour but I couldn't take any of the pictures. I was very upset. Of all the times for my camera to break, it had to be at my very first performance with Penn State.

I tried and tried to fix it every way I knew how but it still wouldn't work. I put it in rice to dry it and that didn't work either. The memory card was fine. Maybe I'll post its last picture sometime. I put it in my memory box when I got back to State College. My Canon SD600 Digital Elph from Christmas in 2006. I'll miss that camera.

Peace out.

Sorry!

Sorry for not updating this week. I have to write about drumline and my camera. Soon, promise.

Peace out.

Turbidity!

So Wednesday morning when I was putting water in my hair, I realized that the water was very, very cloudy. I actually refused to use the sink once I filled it with water because it was so disgusting. At first I just thought there was something gross lining the sink I was using, but I tried one or two other sinks and I figured it's probably the water because the same thing happened with them.

At about 3:30 that afternoon, Bill was sitting in the room playing football on XBOX or something along those lines when he got a text message and then said, "Holy crap!" And I asked, huh, what? And he said, "I just got a message from PSU Text saying not to drink water from the sinks or anything."

((o_O)) crap. There was something wrong with the water. About half an hour later I got the same text that Bill did (good thing it wasn't something important, haha!) saying not to drink the water due to high levels of turbidity (cloudiness) from overflowing water in the recent rainstorms.

So ever since then the campus has been going CRAZY about this whole turbid water thing. There are signs everywhere telling you not to drink the water - on every entrance to every dorm on campus. There are bags and papers posted on drinking fountains reminding you not to use them. Kids got text messages and it's posted on PSU's website. The cafeteria's stopped serving water and soda and ice tea and any other drink that uses water and started bringing in cartloads of bottled water and canned sodas. Milk must be about 5x more popular now than ever before. There are bags over the silverware containers in the cafeterias so that you don't use silverware washed with this water - instead we have plastic utensils. We even have plastic cups and bowls and plates. They posted papers all over the soda machines and everything as well, just in case we forget.

I filled the sink up yesterday and today to see how it looked and honestly it looked perfectly clear, but I don't think anyone's gotten official word that the warning's been lifted.

Anyway, just thought anyone reading might find it interesting that the university has been operating without tap water for almost 48 hours now.

Peace out!

STRATFORD!!!

So this Saturday, I'm competing with the PSU Indoor Drumline at the WGI Regional in Stratford, Connecticut. I know this might not seem like a big deal to some people but I've been waiting for something like this for about three years and I am VERY EXCITED.

I don't really know what to describe about it. Back in Garnet Valley we all kind of knew that we would never score very well or succeed other than having fun and trying to do the best with the crap we were given. With PSU at Stratford this year, it's totally different - I kind of get the feeling that how well we place is actually up to ME. Like I have some control over how well we do and if I do my absolute best, maybe it'll make a bit of difference and push us to the top. We actually have a rockin' show and I think we can do well if we all try hard enough - that's a huge difference from GV, where we knew that no matter how hard we tried, our book still sucked. Not to mention, "doing well" with PSU means "Winning Independent Open and moving up to Independent World," which is very different from the definition at GV which was either "Coming in not-last in the lowest school class" or "Doing okay in the lowest school class and eventually moving out of it."

I know it sounds like it but I'm not bashing GV's line. I think all you kids are super talented, I just think we were given crappy shows year after year, sadly.

Well so anyway. We have to pack the truck this Friday sometime around 1PM. We've never packed the truck with all of our equipment this year so far, and when I talked to Jason on Sunday, he said he wasn't sure if we'd be able to do it, and no one would get UHaul to give us anything so he was sort of upset about that. But I talked to him today and he said he thinks he's got it under control.

I don't know exactly how I'm getting up there yet. I talked to Brian Cuce and he said that Dan Rutherford will be sending out carpool information tomorrow for PSU kids... I just hope they don't expect me to drive. The drive from here to Connecticut will probably be about four hours... I hope it's with some cool people, or some cool music, or at least through some pretty parts of Pennsylvania. I think it'll be good no matter who I'm with though, pretty much.

So we'll probably get to CT sometime around 10PM on Friday night. We're either going to unpack and go to sleep, or we'll just go to sleep right away. We'll be sleeping in some high school near Brunnell [the HS where we perform] on a gym floor, most likely. I don't have a sleeping bag, so I don't really know what I'm going to do. I guess I could bring towels? They're pretty compact. I don't know. Anyway, the next day we'll undoubtedly wake up really early, go to our instruments, and practice. We have our first show sometime around 1:20PM, so we'll have to pack up, go to Brunnell, play, and then we have to pack up and come back to the other high school. Then we'll practice again, pack up for our second show at Brunnell, play, then pack up again. At that point, it'll be about 9 or 9:30PM, and we'll be in CT. Instead of getting us a motel or hotel or house or school floor or rides home, the drumline is just releasing responsibility and telling us to go home. For a while I didn't know that was coming, so I thought I would just take a train home the next day or something, but that messed everything up so now mom and dad are coming to pick me up after watching the show that night.

OH MY GOD. I'M PERFORMING WITH ONE OF THE BEST LINES IN WGI INDEPENDENT OPEN. I'll probably even be on wgi.org a couple days after the show. This is so exciting. I hope we do well >_<

Peace out!

Compression Shorts

Yes. It means *EXACTLY* what you think it means.

So Penn State drumline, unlike all you losers at home in Garnet Valley, actually has their uniforms already, and would have had them in time for the first show we actually competed in if it hadn't been for the weather. We still got them before our first actual show, and due to schedule changes we got them on a rehearsal weekend too, so we could check ourselves out in them and fix what we needed to before we had to rush on the floor to perform.

I guess overall they're not too bad. The battery's uniforms are multicolored, with red, blue, and grey mostly if I remember corrected. I remember one of the snare drummers - I think we call him Bryce - held up his uniform's pants part and said "Oh my god, I'm wearing a sun dress." It did kind of look like that. The bottom piece goes all the way up and straps around your shoulders, and with those colors, it did look quite like a sundress. You have to step into them and pull them all the way up your body exactly as they are - no zippers, no buttons, nothing. Just step right in.

The tops only go down to about the bottom of your ribs, and they're the same colors for the battery. For some reason these have a zipper in the back - I think that's probably to help the battery with their harnesses but I'm not exactly sure, the zipper seems unnecessary. Anyhow, the tops have seams that pop out a little bit and sweep around your rib, basically. It kind of makes a hemicircle with the center at the far side of your fifth rib and the circle reaches out to your sternum. The girls in the pit were complaining about this because our uniforms are all black, silver, and gray, and the color and design together accentuates one side and sort of downplays the other, and they thought they looked funny. I didn't really think so but I didn't really look. I thought the pit uniforms looked good overall.

There's one thing about our uniforms though. They're very, very, very tight. Extremely formfitting and custom tailored. You can see the outline of my abs through my uniform, even though I don't even have notably defined abs. Thankfully the color and the sweeping design sort of hides my freaky chest thing, I was a little concerned about that.

However... it does not hide what we in the drumline like to call "your package." In fact, it accentuates it. It's ridiculous. Keith put on his uniform and we all swore he was smuggling a small animal in his pants [that's NOT a compliment]. Tollie was sitting against the wall and Keith came out in his uniformed glory, right near Tollie's face, and exclaimed "Hey Tollie!" and she just about died. Keith is an extreme example. Generally, for thinner people, it was less of a problem. Myself, Rod, and Zach are probably the smallest-built guys on the line and for us it wasn't much of an issue as it was for larger-built guys, but it was still an issue that we're going to have to deal with.

At one of the practices - the week we were supposed to play at CB West but instead had rehearsal - we were talking about our uniforms. Cass asked if they were going to require that we wear compression shorts, to which Brett [our director] said that yes, we would have to. For some reason I thought that wouldn't apply to me and I just though, feh, I'll be okay without them. But once I put on my uniform I knew that I would definitely have to get some. So I asked Cass where to get compression shorts, or if they were basically just UnderArmor's underwear brand, and he said yeah, just go to Wal*Mart and it'll be with the rest of the UnderArmor.

Today, reluctantly, I began my search in Wal*Mart for compression shorts. I walked in and looked around for a few minutes, but didn't find anything that looked like UnderArmor or compression on my own, but a woman working their quickly noticed I looked lost and asked if I needed help, and I said I was looking for UnderArmor. Wal*Mart doesn't actually sell UnderArmor, but a rip-off brand called Athletic Works, so I just looked at that, but they didn't really have anything that looked like (compression) shorts. I figured this store would HAVE to have it, so I kept looking around.

It was terrible. I had to look at like EVERY pack of men's underwear there was. I wanted to cry. I've never looked at so many half-naked men in my life, and it was terrible. To make it worse, did you know that they basically make male thongs now? They were on a rack with all the things that looked something like underwear for atheltic purposes, and then I saw those and I just wanted to crawl under a rock and stop living.

So I kept looking around, looking for UnderArmor, looking for anything that looked like athletic garments, looking for compression shorts, looking for someone to help me, anything. It took like twenty minutes and I didn't find anything I thought I was looking for and NO ONE came around that entire time to see if anyone in the men's section needed help. I didn't want to go to the women's section or the electronics section or anything to ask for help with this, but eventually I had to go over to the changing room to ask for help.

The woman there was very very short, with short gray hair, talking on the phone. She asked me what I needed but I didn't know if she was talking to me or the person on the phone. After I figured it out, I said, "Hey, I'm on a drumline and I wanted to know if you had compression shorts we need?" And she said, "Muscle shirts? Yeah, let me show you." To which I said, "No, no, compression shorts." I wanted to add on "...for my balls," but I didn't.

She took me to the same old woman that had shown me the Atheltic Works things before. I swear to god she did NOT understand what I was asking. I had asked her the first time for UnderArmor because I didn't want to say "Hey, I need to squeeze my private parts against my body for long periods of time and still have free hands, could you show me underwear that does this?" but I think she took that as I just wanted to find UnderArmor. So I kept trying to tell her, No, no, I'm not looking for UnderArmor, they clearly don't have it, I just need compression shorts, I just need those, do you know if you have any? And she kept showing me their stupid UnderArmor rip-off stuff. Eventually she did find shorts, but they were definitely not was I was looking for.

So I have a show this weekend in Connecticut for WGI and I am still compression shortsless.

In conclusion, on a scale of helpfulness from 0 to 10, I hate Wal*Mart.

Peace out.

Ice Scraper

I swear that just about every time I've had drumline rehearsal so far this year, when I came to the car, it was covered in snow. Well, actually, for the first couple practices and maybe one after that, I rode my bike to the Blue Band Building, but then I figured out pretty quickly that that was a terrible idea and I should drive. One time I got a ride with Keith, who also took Mailbox, Emily, Justin, and Adam, but then I got access to a car on my own and that was much more convenient, so I just went with that.

The problem with that was that it was Ryan's car, which first of all is enormous, and second of all DOES NOT CONTAIN AN ICE SCRAPER. This was a very, very big problem, because it's snowed about 75% of the days so far here, so every Saturday, there's snow on the car that you have to get off. I remember the first time, I tried to clear it off with my hands. I usually wear a t-shirt, my blue jacket, and my big black AE jacket, and I thought that cleaning the snow off with my hands would be reasonable. It was certainly not. First of all, there's a slit in my AE jacket sleeves to make the whole button thing work, so snow gets in there when you try to clean it with your hands. Second, I don't know if you've ever just stuck your hands in snow for a minute at a time, but it hurts. Extremely, extremely quickly. After about a minute I could barely feel my fingers. I actually had to just put them in my mouth to get feeling back in them. After that, I opened up the car and found some stupid plastic container that was sort of rigid and cleaned the car with that - you know, the kind of plastic container a pair of scissors or a CD player would have come in that's impossible to open on your own. So after a long, long time, I finally cleaned the car with that.

The next time I went to practice, I had the same problem. Snow and ice all over the windshield and no ice scraper in sight. I wanted to ask other people near me if I could borrow one, but there were either no people or I was embarrassed, I forget which. In either case, I decided the stupid plastic thing wasn't working, but I still wanted something rigid, so I used my drumline binder - thank god I listened to directions and got myself a binder, right? So I started using that to clean and thought it'd be okay since all the pages are in plastic protectors. It did an okay job, but after I finished I took a look at it and was just like.... aww crap. The cardboard that strengthens the front and back was soaked and pretty much still ruined, and snow/water got into the plastic page protectors and ruined some of the corners of my pages. But oh well.

Later, I got an ice scraper. Finally! All my problems would be solved and I could remove the eight inches of accumulation without a problem, right? No, not at all. Once I started doing it, I realized that was no effective way to use it without getting your hands on the snow, which lead to once again having my hand in snow for a minute straight, me losing feeling, and sticking my hands in my mouth to try to get feeling back. I think this was actually the case when I drove home last week because drumline was cancelled though... Oh well. Still drumline related in some sense. Count it.

It wasn't until JUST TODAY that I *FINALLY* got everything under control. T-shirt, jacket, other jacket, ice scraper, and mittens [no, not the pink mittens, ones for guys]. And I cleaned off the car almost without a problem. Some snow still got in my socks and that's sort of a pain, but it's not a big deal - I actually have an extra pair of black socks with me. I wanted to go to my room and change, but I saw Bill in the lobby before I left and he didn't take his key, so I just gave him mine... and the room is locked so I'm locked out and can't get socks.

Also, I went to practice an hour early today. I swear the schedule said 9:00 was the start time but I guess I was wrong. So that's why I'm here writing this.

Peace out!

Baby's First Speeding Ticket

The ride to and from Penn State usually takes me about two hours and forty five minutes. To be honest, I usually don't speed that much - generally not more than like 15mph over the speed limit. Mom and Dad are always really surprised at how fast I get there, but that's just because I don't have to stop for food and/or to pee every twenty minutes, so if you think about it, a 180 mile trip should take a little less than three hours if you're average speed limit is 65 and you're going maybe 10-15mph over that.

I see a lot of people going really, really fast, though. I've seen people going 90, 95, 100, 105 miles per hour as they pass me. There was a little black car on my way home once that stayed at 95mph for as long as I could see it. There was a red Lancer on my way back up this weekend that was going somewhere between 95 and 105 for as long as I could see it [until it got backed up by traffic and I felt vindicated going slower than it].

So anyway. I left at about 3:24 and I looked at my clock at about 5:24 and though, okay, it's been two hours and I am probably a half an hour or so away, I guess this was a pretty good trip. So I kept driving - I was on the two lane section of 322 West just before you get to the part where the trucks have to put on their lights, stay in the right lane, and only go 20mph for 3 miles. I was singing, I think, and I came down a hill. There was a car in front of me going exactly as fast as I was, and I believe a car behind me, too. Then I saw a cop car on the right side of the road put on his lights and pull out. I was pretty sure it wasn't me - I wasn't watching my speed, but I wasn't going any ridiculous speed, not any faster than anyone around me, so I figured there must be some crazy going 95 about to whiz by and he was going after him. Instead, he pulled out and pulled up behind me. I couldn't believe it. Really? Okay.

I'm afraid of pulling over on highways - probably more afraid of that than getting a speeding ticket - because I'm afraid someone will hit me and kill me, especially if it's on the downslope of a hill. I didn't know whether to pull to the left or right, so I signaled with my hand and he pointed to his passenger side so I pulled over and stopped. I don't remember if I put my emergency lights on or not - probably not, I like never do.

I was sort of afraid of the cop. From all those ACLU videos I thought he was going to accuse me of smoking pot or selling meth or ask to search the car or ask me to get out or pat me down or something like that and then arrest for me having an ice scraper in the back seat or something. Instead he just came up and said that he got me with radar going 76 in a 55 zone, so I would be getting a traffic citation and then I was free to go. He went back to his car after I gave him my license, insurance, and registration.

I'm pretty sure at that point I texted Gina that I was getting a speeding ticket. She got back to me really really quickly and asked how bad it was, but I just said I didn't know yet. I didn't think 21mph over in a 55mph zone would be that bad. My camera is always in my car's console when I make that drive, and I realized that the sunset was really pretty. I put it on color accent and picked the orange near the top of the mountains and took a couple pictures. Looking back I should have taken them as panoramic shots, but I was a little nervous.

Shortly after that he came back - my window was all the way down the whole time, and I can't remember if my doors were locked or not. He gave me the ticket and all my papers back and said I could go. I looked at the ticket - $160 !!!

I'd like to take a minute to reflect on how ridiculous this whole thing is. First of all, PA doesn't even have a penalty for going 1-5mph over the speed limit, so they already admit it's really not even a speed limit. Furthemore, when's the last time anyone went down that highway with a speed limit 55mph going less than 65mph? What if someone was going 68mph? would they be arrested? So let's assume the realistic speed limit is 65mph. So I was going 11mph over the limit. Okay. Whatever. I'll take that. But $160? That's ridiculous. I could understand if I was driving wrecklessly, or on my cell phone, or drunk, or something like that, but I wasn't. I just don't really see the crime part of speeding. Oh well.

When I pulled back onto the highway, I think I forgot to use my blinker and I was afraid he would pull me over again. I went to get gas because I was pretty low - it was a really sketchy gas place where you had to go inside, give them your credit card, fill up, and then go back in later, and it didn't feel very secure at all. I took some pictures with my ticket while I was there to celebrate my very first time screwing up my life (!).

I looked my ticket over a little bit later, after talking to my dad about it. (He said it wasn't a big deal, the money's not an issue even though I offered to pay, we just have to make sure I don't get too many points on my license or anything.) I thought it was ridiculous though, because in the part where it tells how much money I have to give it says:

Fine: 67.00
EMS: 10.00
MCARE: 40.00
COSTS: 33.00
J.C.P./A.T.J.: 10.00

??? Emergency Medical Services? Medical Care? I didn't require any of that... I don't really understand why I had to pay $50 for it, or why there were $33 worth of costs incurred by the state when they gave me that ticket. Really?

I realized now, looking over it, that the time of the ticket was 1745. I was a little disappointed when I read that to think that he probably rounded.

Peace out.

A Few Sentences from my English Paper

When I sit at my piano with my Christmas lights on I can feel all the good things just flow into me, things like driving at night and Smithbridge Road and candles and bonfires and rivers with blue water and the perfect wave, the perfect note, the perfect song; NPR and Tastykakes and hermit crabs and red lights and she-likes-me-back and the interplay of rhyme and rhythm and running your fastest mile and baby books and parents and children and friends and being in love; memories and futures and shutterbugs and Orion and seeing Haley’s Comet once in your life and winning both showcases and solving your first Rubik’s Cube and sunrise on the beach and staying up talking way too late and kittens and first kisses giving you butterflies, opened eyes so you can see her smile because she is happy to be with you in a field by a stream and wondering if maybe, yes, she does feel the same way after all these years of thinking no! she is so far above me; teacher and student crying on the last day because they actually care and crying over loss but at least there was something in the world good enough to care about losing in the first place; hugs and heartbeats and sleeping in on snow days and being young and believing you’re invincible and having time and being alive. I know that sentence was long and that you probably won’t believe me that these all just come into me when I play my piano, but I promise they do. And if those things aren’t what define home, then I don’t know what is.

Peace out.

Lighter II

My lighter broke. First it wouldn't spark to ignite, then I toyed with it trying to get it to work, and the thumb piece broke. About half the fluid was left. I put it in my memory box.

Peace out.

Missed

I'm often overwhelmed with sadness and regret when I think about all the things I never wrote down.

Peace out.

Synthesis 004: Souderton

I went to Souderton, I think, three but possibly four of the seasons that I did drumline. I remember the first year, it was one of the first competitions, and it seemed impossibly far away. We spent the entire day there and we were all exhausted. I think that was the time that I pretty much fell asleep next to Sarah Cory on the bus and that started the joke about me "sleeping with" all the girls in the drumline. This was my freshman year, when our show was The Devil Went Down to Georgia, and we lost every single competition we went to. I remember what the school looked like - for some reason, I have an image of it in my head as very thin but very long. I know this can't possibly be the case but that's how I remember Souderton. I also remember when I was sitting and watching other drumlines perform, one of the snare drummers from Souderton started talking to me. He was really nice, but I couldn't remember his name, even though it wasn't strange at all, probably something like Kevin. He was a senior, white guy, with short brown hair, not too tall but not very small either.

We went back to Souderton the next year with Synthesis. I think it was a little bit later in the season this time. I remember that entire competition day it was raining furiously. For some reason, both unloading and loading the bus occured at night in my memory. I guess it was just really gray... although I guess if I think about it hard enough I can remember moving in during the light now. I knew we were there because I saw a school that I thought looked really long.

So like I said, it was really really raining that day. Like, extremely, extremely rainy. My hair was soaking wet by the time we were done moving in. I don't know how we got the instruments off the bus, but it must have been in a wild rush and an absolute mess. Gina's synthesizer, I think, was taken inside the nearest door we could find even though it wasn't the one we were supposed to go in through. We never plugged her synth in like we were supposed to - we just had her hook up to a car battery. We were really afraid of that battery getting wet, and I remember we wrapped it in a trash bag and booked it indoors as soon as we got it off the bus.

I remember walking down the long thin part of the school after loading towards the unit's room sometime that day. My hair was absolutely soaked. There were two girls walking in the opposite direction down the hallway, and one of them held up a camera and flashed a picture of me and then said "Thank you!" and laughed with her friend and walked away. I didn't know whether to be flattered or embarrassed. I forgot what they looked like two seconds later so there was no way I could find them again to ask.

The snare drummer that had talked to me last year had become an instructor for the Souderton drumline. I remember they called themselves the Mirage indoor drumline, and we were jealous of their super cool name [at least, we had been when we were just the Garnet Valley drumline].

The competition ended and we were all standing outside just before the bus, waiting to go home. I can't remember if it was still raining at that point, but I'm going to assume that it wasn't if we all decided to wait outside. I suppose I was pretty good friends with Marc and Brian at that point. One of them jumped on top of the other, and then someone shouted "boy pile!" and I jumped on top of them, too. So one of them was holding the other as well as myself on their back. I'm pretty sure Viv has pictures of me doing that, sticking my tongue out, on top of a boy pile with Marc and Brian in the dark outside of Souderton.

Peace out.

Synthesis 003

One day the pit was practicing with Miss Papa right outside the chorus room. I forget where my instrument was, or which instrument exactly I was playing at the time, but I remember I was against the wall that the back door to the auditorium is on. I remember Marc and Brian were sitting down with their backs against the same wall, too. Miss Papa told me to play my run in part two, or just to play part two, or something along those lines, and asked them if they thought it was crazy or something along those lines. I remember Brian didn't really say anything, and Marc just said, "It's a lot of notes." I was still afraid of Marc and Brian then because they were from Chichester and Marc never smiled and always wore a hat. He thought I was a senior for a long time, and I think he told me later that he wasn't impressed with me because he thought I was a senior, but then when he found out I was a sophomore he thought I was a lot more impressive since I was so young. I'm not really sure on how that came about though.

//

Like I was writing about before, our sets had a "frame" basically for some drawings to be held in - of clocks and clock designs, of course. At first the plan was to have blinds that we could just quickly flick from one side to another, from design to actual clock face. I remember Evan Gibbs, the only black member of the drumline [who played bass], was an extremely good visual artist and was always pulled out of practice to help design the artwork on the props. Whenever I would walk through the band locker room in the beginning of the season, Evan would be in there bending over some huge canvas and trying to draw something. I think mostly he was there in the very beginning when we were trying to get the blinds idea to work, and I think it was partly his influence why we decided we couldn't use them and they were just unworkable. No matter what medium he tried to use, he couldn't get it to go on the blinds right, and he just knew everything would end up looking all wrong. We ended up using large bedsheets instead, I think.

Another interesting thing was that the clock we used on everything - our shirts and our props, etc. - read an impossible time. The minute hand was just a couple minutes past vertical, but the hour hand was halfway between two hours. I forget if we knew this was impossible when we designed the clock, but I remember they designed it that way so that the hands would be displayed properly on the sets... Oh well. I don't think the judges took points off.

Peace out.

Lighter

I bought my first lighter the other day at McLanaghan's. It's a blue/purple ACE lighter with two "compartments" for lighter fluid in it. You can adjust how high the flame goes. It cost me $.63. When I went to buy it, the cashiers were talking about 4/20, which is only slightly more than 2 months away. The oldest cashier - the woman I was talking to - was somewhat scandalized by the concept as a younger girl at the register told her about it. She said 4/20 is the day when everyone smokes pot, and the older woman I was buying from said, "How long has that sh*t been going on?" To which the younger woman responded, "I don't know, forever? Decades?" And my cashier said, NO, NOTHING could have been going on forever. She wondered if it was going on forty years ago when her daughter was born. Her birthday was 4/19, and she wondered what the people in the hospital would have thought of her if she had smoked pot the next day.

In either case, I got my lighter. My bike lock freezes a lot of times when it's cold and there's precipitation, and my dad suggested getting a lighter to unfreeze the ice inside of it so I could stick my key in. I tried it the next morning. The plastic around the metal key insert started smoking, but I held it there for a little bit. I put the key in and the plastic basically melted around it [no major damage, don't worry]. Then I tried putting the lighter up to the key to warm that up, then tried that, but it was useless as well. The lighter idea didn't work. I got to walk to class.

So now I have a lighter and I have no purpose for it. I keep it in my pocket. Sometimes when I walk and I don't wear gloves I just take it out of my jacket pocket and start it. I'm not really a pyro, I don't really like to be stupid with fire, but I think it's pretty and sometimes I just like to look at it, kind of like snow and lights. I wonder what people think of me when they see me doing it - do they assume I smoke? I wonder if anyone's noticed that I never light anything with it. If I were walking right next to myself, I'd have noticed that. I don't know what I would think of myself. Probably not much.

Sometimes I don't let the flame go for long and I just enjoy the sound and the look of the spark. Sometimes it's too windy to have a flame so I have to do that. Sometimes I let the flame go really high and really long - the metal gets hot, and I can see the body of the flame and a spike of flame that goes way higher than the rest. That's from the mechanism that brings the fluid right to the hole where the flame comes out of.

I went to the Simmons piano lounge today after I ate dinner. I had a card in my hand from my mom and two ice cream cones full of stolen Reese's Pieces and my lighter in my coat pocket. I set all of them down on the table before I went to play so I could have my hands free - that big jacket makes it hard to play. I played Samson.

I noticed that there was a girl sitting opposite the piano looking out the huge bay windows at Simmons. She had blonde curly hair and it looked like she was studying. I never realized it before, but that window actually has a beautiful view. It'd be a wonderful place to sit with a friend and watch snow or a thunderstorm or a clear night. I plan on doing this just about as soon as possible.

I wondered if I was annoying her. I wondered if she noticed me at all and I wondered if she would remember me. If someone in ten years asked her, Do you remember that time you were sitting in the Simmons piano lounge studying and some kid came and played this song called Samson on piano and came and left quickly, would she remember? What if they asked, Did you wonder what the card he was holding was for or why he had two ice cream cones full of stolen Reese's Pieces or a lighter in his pocket?

I made a list in my head of things to get when I went back to McLanaghan's after playing piano, and I forget to get milk. I don't know what I will do for breakfast tomorrow.

Peace out.

Piano Lounge

You know what I hate?

There's a piano lounge here in Atherton Halls. It has a shiny but used/worn black baby grand piano of some sort over in the corner near the huge mirror far away from the three chanedliers on the ceiling and generally far away from the chairs in the room. There are two doors to get in here, and the piano is in the corner on the wall opposite the door that actually opens. One is closed for security reasons. There's a little alcove opposite the other door that also has a door, but I don't know where it goes and I'm afraid to find out. Some people were in there when I was playing once and they went there to make out and then other people in there pointed at them.

Anyway. What I hate. There are lots and lots and lots of quiet places to study in Atherton. There's an entire basement full of silence, a computer lab, and a "zombie lounge" just ten feet away from the piano hall where you can go get quietness if you need quietness to study.

Note that there is NOT A PIANO in those places. But there is one in the PIANO HALL.

So, from my perspective, if you want a quiet place to study, you should go to a study place where there is not a piano. Why? Because pianos are much rarer than study space, so if you can find study space that does not occupy very limited piano space, you should do what you can to make sure you don't occupy piano space when you are not using a piano. Does that make sense? Don't waste a piano by requiring that it not be used because you're studying. Someone wants to play that piano.

So basically: I hate it when people study in the piano lounge. There are SO MANY other places to study and so few other places to play piano. WHY DO YOU TAKE UP THE PIANO. WHY. YOU'RE NOT USING IT. If you're not using the piano LEAVE THE PIANO LOUNGE. Okay thanks.

I get really angry about this. I hate it. I want to play the freaking piano.

Peace out.

Showers

There are some pretty significant differences between the showers here and the showers at Brown [and the showers at home, of course].

The showers at Brown - at least the ones in West Andrews - were enormous. There were only two of them in the boys' bathroom. I think each of them must have been about seven feet by seven feet and probably a nine foot ceiling. There was only one curtain on each of the showers, and it was REALLY REALLY difficult to move the curtain to cover up the shower, but really really easy to move it back to expose the inside of the shower, which made for a healthy dose of paranoia. There was only one handle you could use to adjust the flow/temperature of water, and only one "compartment" of the whole thing, so you got dressed in the huge 7' x 7' shower compartment deal.

At Penn State the showers are MUCH smaller. I think they're probably about 4' x 4', and one of the showers has this stupid overhang thing right above it so it has like a 7' ceiling. I think that shower also doesn't have hot water - at least, it didn't the last time I checked. The showers here have two compartments though. First you step in and you close the curtain for the first compartment. There's a tiny little stool there for you to put your shower caddy on, and this is where you're supposed to get changed. It's supposed to be dry but it is ALWAYS wet. Then you step forward again and close the curtain and then there's the actual shower part. There's a hot spigot and a cold spigot and you need to adjust them and it's not a very fun game. The showers here also have a ledge to hold your soap - I don't think the ones at Brown had that.

The water in these showers gets SCALDING HOT if someone flushes the toilet - that never happened at Brown. Strangely, both of the showers have the same weird, semi-sweet, semi-dank smell when you turn the hot water on high... I don't know what it is but it seems specifically reserved for college showers. I guess you probably know the smell or will soon enough.

Peace out.