Jury Duty

About a month ago I got a summons in the mail for jury duty. There were two pieces of paper you had to fill out. They asked you to fill out your name and address and race, etc., and then another one asked you if you or anyone you know is a lawyer, if you've ever been convicted of a crime, etc etc. So I filled them both out and my dad forgot to send one. Fortunately I didn't get in trouble. The piece of paper, from what I thought, said to call on July 23rd to see if you'd need to come the next day. On the 22nd, my dad came up to me and asked me if I had called. I told him that no, I hadn't, I needed to call the next day. He asked if I was positive, and I said I'd bet my life on it. "I wouldn't do that again, " he said, and then showed me the paper which said I needed to call on the 22nd.

So I called the number and a recording of a girl's voice said that jurors of all type needed to come in that day (I was a "Standby" juror).

The next day I was going to wake up at 8AM so I could drive to Media in time, but my dad woke me up at 7:55 somewhat hurriedly asking, "Are you getting up now? You have to go to Media." And I said, I know, I was going to wake up at eight. But he said that I had to take a shower and shave. It made me sad when he said I had to shave because I had a lot of facial hair at that point and I HATE shaving and it takes a long time, but he said, "Look, I know everyone there and they know who I am and I can't have my son walking around that building with a tshirt and scruffy." I got up then and ate my cereal (Cinnamon Life, which my mom accidentally bought instead of regular Life) and while I was eating it, my alarm started going off. I thought about going upstairs to turn it off, but I just let it ring figuring I'd turn it off when I went back upstairs for the bathroom. No one even said anything about it, so I think I was the only one that noticed.

I took a shower and shaved (shove? ...). As usual I cut myself and didn't do a very good job. My hair is white in some parts and you can't see it at all when it's wet, so I never find out how terrible a job I did until it dries. Some of my hair goes up and basically over/around my cheek bones. It makes me look like a caveman and I forgot to get some of that. So I had to go to court as dad's caveman son.

It was really easy to drive there. I thought about The Morning Commute while I was driving and concluded that the drive from here to Media isn't that bad. It was about 25 minutes, which is a great amount of NPR's Morning Edition to listen to. Hopefully my commute will be something like that long, if I have to commute. When I got there, a cop was standing on the street and I showed him my jury summons and he let me into the parking lot for free.

For some reason I parked on the top level of the lot even though I think there were spots open in the bottom level. I walked down and walked over to the front steps of the courthouse. The courthouse was way bigger and more grandiose-looking than I remembered/expected. Big pillars and columns and everything. I walked in and there were two lines for security, so I put my stuff through and saw a woman with a red pin that said "JUROR" in white and thought, Wow, this woman is really into being a juror. After I got my stuff back I asked a cop where the jurors were supposed to go and he pointed me to the jury lounge, which was down the hall and to the left. There were two signs for it (oops). When I walked in the first thing they did was give me a red button that said JUROR in white, and then I felt stupid for thinking that other woman was a loser. They also gave me a clipboard with a lot of papers on it and told me to NOT fill out the survey until we watched an instructional video on how to fill it out.

The jury lounge was pretty big. When you walked in there was an "office" for the selection workers, and then it opened up to a large floor of chairs. It probably went back 20 rows and was about 15 wide, with aisles on the right side and in the middle toward the left. The chairs were red with gold buttons on it or whatever you call them and were all free-standing so you could move it if you wanted to bad enough, but they were very organized in rows and columns so no one would think to do that. The chairs had a rounded back and a sort of puffy bottom and were made of either leather or pleather. I picked a chair that was next to a seat where the person had gotten up to go to the bathroom, figuring it was much less awkward than taking the seat beside her when she was actually there. When she got back she took her coffee and moved it over, taking the seat two away from me instead of the one right next to me.

The seats were very, very uncomfortable. I tried to read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, an Indian history of the United States, but finding a comfortable position in which to read was so difficult that I couldn't read the book for nearly as long as I wanted to be able to. I think it was the rounded back that made it so terrible. It was very rounded. I tried hunching over away from the back, and leaning to the sides, and putting my foot up, and putting my foot under me, but in all cases my back started to hurt/get really uncomfortable, so after a while I'd have to stand up or something like that to make it hurt less. All in all, though, I did get about 70 pages into the book.

When we first got there, a younger, heavy blonde woman moved a podium with a microphone to the front of the room and started talking to us all. I forget what she said, but she read from a script and didn't seem to be enjoying it at all. It was just some welcome speech. After she finished the script she just started talking and seemed a lot more natural, but still like she hated her job. After that she introduced a judge who came to speak to us and remind us that what we were doing was very fulfilling and our duty and necessary and gratifying and important and things like that. After that I think we took a break because we were all exhausted.

They told us to take the elevator downstairs, but I didn't want to wait for 30 elevator loads so I started looking for stairs. After looking over the entire floor, I found no stairs that I could access, so I had to go to the elevator. We were headed to the cafeteria, which I then found, but all the dougnuts had been eaten. So I got some Tastykake doughnuts which I suppose were just as good.

When we went back up we watched the instructional video on filling out that survey. It asked, again, if you were an eyewitness to a crime, if you committed a crime, if you or someone in your family was a lawyer, etc. The video was about 30 minutes long, which I think was a little overkill for 16 yes or no questions.

We were all probably hoping that a judge would come early in the morning to strike a jury so that we could get out of there - there were only two judges waiting so if it happened quickly for both of them, we'd be done in an hour - but none came. At 11:35, the blonde lady said we were on lunch until 2. TWO AND A HALF HOUR LUNCH BREAK. Seriously? Do all judges get 2.5 hour lunches? As I was walking out of the building with everyone else, I heard a lot of them talking on their cell phones saying "I'm just going to go home!" One teenage girl wearing a gray shirt that said "FITCH" on it was talking to her dad on her cell phone and I heard: "What happens if you just don't come back? .... I'd rather just be arrested." I called dad and asked him if it was generally understood this meant you could leave, but he said no, but that I could talk to Mr. Montella and maybe he could tell me what he thought or get me off the list for the rest of the day. I went to look for him, but he was also on a 2.5 hour lunch break.

I sat outside eating my peanut butter sandwich and apple that I brought. I sat on a hard cement bench, but at one point moved to a round thing so I could lean back. I remember three black kids walked by me while I was sitting there eating. When I was done I wanted to walk around Media. I called Jenn to see if she was in Media by any chance, but she was still asleep. So I just walked around. I walked to the right first and saw the Coffee Club where I used to play, but the Planned Parenthood next to it appeared closed. I don't really remember any of the other stores down on the right, and so I turned back to go left. There were a LOT of restaurants. I passed the ice cream store I went to last summer with Chaz and Sarah with the big staircase in the front, and passed Cold Stone and thought that I saw Mr. and Mrs. Bank talking with potential buyers behind the counters.

There were also a lot of banks. There was a Trader Joe's in an old church it seemed, though maybe a barrack. There was a nice restaurant called Under the Stars. I saw the Towne Hall or whatever it was where we often have Christmas dinner, and I saw the Iron Hill Brewery where I think we went for dad's birthday this year. When I was walking I saw a store called "Deals," so I went inside. There was a woman talking to the owner, but I just looked around at the prices. Everything seemed ridiculously expensive. 4 AA batteries was 11.99, but they claimed the original price was 16.29. As a Walgreen's employee, I can tell you that is not the truth. That is not a deal at all.

There was another Deals store I went to further down. The first one was gray and white, but this one was large and open and brown and dark. I walked up and down all the aisles, and at one point had to walk through three older women talking. One of them had just had a stroke two weeks ago, and made a comment about quitting smoking. One of the women looked at me and said, "Hear that young man? Quit smoking!" I said, "I don't smoke, but thanks," and kept going. They were weird. The deals in this store were actually sort of deals, but they didn't have a lot. Specifically no back to school stuff. So I kept going.

After that I walked back, checked out a toy store real quick, and went back to lay on the grass in my nice collared shirt and call Gina. After a while of that I decided I was just going to go to my car and listen to NPR.

On my way over I saw a black pick-up truck parked on the sidewalk with cages in the back, and I heard a cooing/chirping noise. So I looked and I saw animals in the cages. There was a raccoon keeping himself very low and almost lunging forward. There was also a badger, I think, in a cage to his left. There was food in his cage. He was making the sad sounds. It was very very hot outside and these animals had a lot of hair and were sitting in direct sun. The badger was leaning on the side of the cage and looked very tired. There was food in his cage but I don't think he was interested. I took some pictures of them on my cell phone. When I went to the other side of the truck, I saw that there was another raccoon below the badger. At least he was in the shade...

So I moved my car to a spot on the first floor for shade, realized it was reserved, and moved it again. It was really hot (I wouldn't leave the car running with air conditioning!), so I opened the windows. Still too hot, so I unbuttoned my shirt. Still too hot, so I just took my shirt off and leaned forward. So for me, jury duty included about forty minutes of sitting in my car with my shirt off listening to economic news on NPR. Do you know what the Ted Spread is? I do. And it's very important in economics. It's basically a measure of fear regarding the economy and is usually at 50 points and hasn't gone far from that in a century. Now it's at 150.

After that I went back and tried to find Mr. Montella again, but he was still at lunch by 1:40. So I went back inside. I kept doing the security thing wrong, and the police man there said, "Dude, I don't need to x-ray your phone!" At one point he did look at my white flash drive to see what it was though. I went back and read, and at about 2:30 they said they were going to strike a jury for a criminal case, so they'd be calling 50 people I think.

They started calling in groups of five. She'd say 1, a name, 2, a name, 3, etc. She got to 45 and I still wasn't picked. 5 people left, I looked around the room, must have been like 75 people in there. So she got down to 50 and I still wasn't picked, and I thought, Whew! I could be done right now! But then she said 51, a name... and I thought, WHAT. God. 4 names left and 69 people so my chances are still like 1 in 17. Got down to two people left. 2 names and 67 people. 1 in 33 chance. 54, me. I was number 54 out of 55. Everyone gave all the terrible glory to #55 though. I think at least three people commented to him. He commented to me, "We almost made it!" He was a middle aged white guy with short blonde/brown hair and seemed nice. I saw that the man in front of me was a chemist/engineer on the survey we had to fill out earlier.

We went upstairs. The judge introduced himself and then asked us a bunch of questions after a while, which was basically the survey all over again. Only a few people stood for any of the questions, including the guy next to me who said that he might not be able to be a fair and impartial juror in this case (#55, that is). After they did the full survey, they started calling up individual jurors to the sidebar. They put on static noise throughout the court so we couldn't hear what they were saying. They started with 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and we though it would take forever, but then they jumped to 9, 13, 25, 28, and then I think they were finished. A court clerk then took a paper multiple times between the defense and prosecution's attorneys, agreeing on who to pick.

The first time I saw the guy accused was when I walked into the courtroom. He was standing there with his attorney, who was young, heavy, white, and red-haired, and looked sort of dejected. He was Latino. His last name was Martinez, I think. He wore very large and very thick glasses, had short brown hair, a mustache and almost a unibrow. He was wearing a yellow shirt with some green writing near the breast pocket, probably for some club he belonged to, and khaki shorts or pants. He was accused of driving under the influence. Apparently on December 24th, 2007, there was an accident that he was involved in and the police said they smelled alcohol and arrested him for driving under the influence at 2:13PM. That was a pretty bad time to get caught for that, I suppose.

Anyway, they called the 14 jurors and I was not one of them. I had talked to the people to my right a little bit, including a very talkative black woman and a much quieter older white guy (the engineer). She was a student and adjunct professor of English at Temple, he was retired. It was nice talking to them - we talked mostly about school and the kids that she had as her interns. He spelled "crooked" as "crookted." He was an athlete, she said.

We went back down to the jury lounge, and everyone else had gone. We wondered when they had left and felt jealous. Everyone turned in their juror number which we had clipped to ourselves in the top right part of our shirts and their red juror badges, except for me because I lost mine sometime around when I took my shirt off I suppose. I'll have to look for it in my car.

Peace out.

Exciting Things

I finished a song the other day. It's called Miracle and it's on my MySpace and you should listen to it. You can also get to my MySpace by clicking on the two lines of dots right above this post. So you know.

In other piano related news, I've realized that the only things that make me want to go back to Brown/miss Brown at all are things related to the piano. The songs I heard and played there and wrote there and things like that.

In other news, I joined a hockey league. My first game is today (Monday) at 7:30 PM. I'm excited and a little scared.

Peace out!

Peckermints

So Nicki had her Rocky Horror Picture Show party on Friday night. I wasn't doing anything that day, and sometime around 1PM I got a text message from Nicki saying, "Are you busy at 2:20/do you want to be my best friend ever?" I wasn't busy, and of course I want to be Nicki's best friend forever, so after a couple of texts we got it sorted out that I would go to Granite Run and meet her around 2:20. She said that I had to buy her something but wouldn't tell me what, but that she needed someone older than 18 to buy it for her. I thought she was working at Granite Run for some reason, forgetting that she worked with Joe Sestak in Media.

So I drove very fuel efficiently to Granite Run at 2:20. I called her from the parking lot while I was coasting to save some gas to find out where she was. She said Entrance 2, but I had no idea where that was, but when she said near Ruby Tuesday's I knew where to go. I parked in a pull through like I always try to now, and found her waiting near her new car, which was something of a surprise because I thought she was already in the mall. She was dressed up really nicely because she was just handling the phone at the Congressman's office.

So once we got there I asked her what the deal was, and she told me that I had to buy some things for her at Spencer's Gifts that were going to be prizes for the winner's of the virgin ritual at RHPS. She told me that we were going to go in and find them, then she'd give me the money, walk out, I'd buy them, and that'd be it. So we looked around the store - she called Kacey - trying to find a phallic lollipop. After a few minutes of looking, she found them next to breath mints called Peckermints (guess why!) and decided she wanted those too.

We had to go to the ATM, and I think it was while we were looking for this that Nicki told me the story about her day. She was working on the phone and some woman called and started to complain. They get out a complaint sheet to take the name/number/location of the caller and write down what they wanted to complain about. So Nicki gets one out and starts writing, but the woman goes on for like half an hour. About things that Sestak can't even control, although I forget the specific example she gave. So at the end Nicki asks for name and number and location and the woman says, "I'm not giving that to you!" So she tells her it's just so they know where the complaint is coming from and finally manages to get the woman to tell her what city she's from and she says, "Pittsburgh." Nicki responded, "Um, are you aware that Sestak doesn't have any control over what happens in Pittsburgh?" and she said back, "Yes, I just call everyone in the state."

So we got the money from the ATM after waiting behind a guy for a minute and went back to the store. I looked for a little and finally found the light-up lollipop and the Peckermints and took them to check out. When I got there - holding Nicki's $20 in my hand - there was a woman in front of me wearing a huge dark cloak, a far-too-large wooden cross, grey and black long dreads, a painted white face, I think vampire fangs and probably many more things I didn't even have the time to notice. Immediately when I come up behind her she turns to me and gasps/moans, "Fiiive?"

Huh?

"Can you spare fiive?"

[[ Far too conspicuous about the $20 in my hand ]] No, sorry, this is the only money I have on me (LIE) and it's my friend's, so it's not really my decision

"Can you spare fifty six ceeents...?"

No, sorry, I only have my friend's money...

So after she sorted out something with the cashier, I threw my stuff on the counter and ironically exclaimed, "Well that was weird!" I don't think anyone appreciated my utter genius but oh well.

As the cashier was ringing me up, she asked if I had an e-mail and I said "Yeeeeaahhh.. buuut not one I want to give to Spencer's." She asked why not - "Because I don't want to get vibrator emails all the time?" There was another girl working at the front - both of these girls were about 18 probably - and she said "They're just coupons." Yeah, vibrator coupons, okay, for vibrators I'm not really interested in. Then she said, "What, are you embarassed of what you're buying?"

ME?! Am I embarassed?! You're the one that works at the penis store! Not me!

I didn't say that but I should have.

Peace out.

Customers 2

There was an older woman who came in today. My guess is that she was not quite 60, with short black hair that she said her husband liked and black eyeliner and blue or green eyes. She only bought one thing but I forget what it was.

After we finished the transaction she headed for the exit, but she ran into someone that she knew on the way. Turns out they were old friends, I suppose from working with each other sometime around 1970 in a department store. I think they said that at first it was Strawbridge & Clothier, then it was taken over by Federation (or something like that, the woman that I rang up first said), and then by Macy's. They both seemed to agree that Macy's was a terrible place to work and they both seemed happy to be out of there when they could retire. They talked about their pensions a little bit - one of them would have gotten some more if they had stayed for another six months or something I think they said, but didn't want to stay around for another Christmas. I guess Christmas is a terrible time to work for department store employees. I never really thought of that.

At one point they started talking about their personal lives just a little bit. The woman I rang up is with a guy named Ray, to whom I believe she is married. It turned out that her husband died about eight years ago, I think she said. She met Ray sometime after that, and said that they met by talking about lung cancer and that his wife had died of lung cancer too. The woman lived in Fox Hill Farms, which she thought too small, and Ray was living in the same house that his wife had died in and didn't want to live with this woman in that house, so they decided to start anew. I think the second woman was married a second time as well, after her first husband died.

What really struck me and the reason I remember this is because of how cavalier they were when they were talking about their deceased spouses. I suppose that after eight years or so you might be able to talk about it passingly when catching up with an old friend, but it was still surprising how they mentioned "Oh, the man I loved and married died eight years ago" literally seconds before talking about how they hated taking care of their feet in basically identical tones.

The second woman came up to the register afterward and addressed that I probably heard their conversation and laughed because she figured I just latched on to the funny parts, but I was actually kind of disturbed. I don't know, though. I've never had a spouse die, or had a spouse.

//

A man came in today and asked for Marlboro Menthols. He had short hair and a bit of stubble and looked very young, so I asked him for ID. He said "Aww CRAP, man. Come on! I'm drinking over there!" I could kind of smell the alcohol on his breath so I was inclined to believe him but he looked under 40 and there wasn't really anything I can do. I actually thought he might be about 18 so I definitely needed to card him. I told him, "I'm sorry, but the law won't allow me to sell these to you without ID." He got a little bit angry and said he'd go to his car to get his ID.

He came back a few minutes later and showed me his ID. He was 23. The first words he said when he came in were, "Man, I am PISSED." I just said that I was sorry and there was nothing I could do. Then he lifted up his arms - he was wearing a beater - and said, "Look at these man. You know what these mean? I'm 18." And I said, "Not if you used a fake for those." I wasn't being rude, I was trying to politely justify what I was doing. I don't think he heard me in either case. Then he said, "There you go. There's my ID. Tells you I'm 23. I've been in Iraq for three and a half years." I just said I was sorry and I did what I had to do.

If I had known he was a soldier I would have given him military discount. Oh well.

There was another couple that came in the store before him that I carded. I thought the guy was about 20, but after I saw him more closely, I saw he was probably closer to 30. His girlfriend came up to join him and was going to buy her own cigarettes and excitedly said, "That means you have to card me too!" and happily put her ID on the counter. She very eagerly asked me how old I thought he was and why I carded him after he left the store. I guess it was her boyfriend and it was sort of flattering for both of them.

Peace out.

First Friday

It was a year ago today, on Sara's birthday, that my mom didn't let me go to First Friday with her, Chaz, and Kim and I believe Nupur. She said I would have lots more First Fridays that I could go to with them. It's been a year and we have one remaining First Friday; we haven't been to one yet. Chaz and Nupur are both in Providence for the next First.

This is a note to myself that when my hypothetical kids ask to do something reasonable that they can do later... let them do it now.

Peace out.

Winchester

The intercoastal waterway is the system of little river-ettes and whatnot that goes up and down the entire east coast of the US. Our beach house is right on it (as are, basically, all eastern beach houses) and if you go out from our "alley" into the bay, at low tide, you'll be able to get to Peanut Island. It's not really an island. It's really just a sandy and shallow part of the bay that looks something like a beach, with water on one side and the dunes and marshes behind it. The sand is very hard in some places and very soft in other places, with just about no inbetween and no way to tell. It's very staunchly ridged in either case, and hurts your feet a little bit to walk on. A tiny "river" cuts through one part of the island and goes back into the marshes - we tried to explore it but there were too many flies today because it was extremely windy.

As we were walking back from that river, we walked by four chairs inhabited by what was presumably two husband and wife couples. As Sam was passing them, suddenly, a small little Dachsund jumped out and started yipping at him. He said he loved Dachsunds so he didn't really mind, but as he did the owners kept calling him - Winchester - to come back.

There was a boat that was beached on Peanut Island just beyond where Winchester was sitting from where we set up. It was clearly just there that day and the person would be fine when the tide came in a little bit. At one point we actually saw the guy and his two young daughters - maybe 8 and 10 years old - running back to the boat. He was wearing a dark blue swim suit and no shirt with a very tan back, and his girls were paler with shortish curly hair and wearing light blue and pink swimsuits, I think. As he ran by, I believe Winchester came to attack him. Of course his daughters were trailing behind him, and Winchester came after them too. I believe one of them safely escaped his yipping, but the other ran in a circle. From where we were observing, it looked like Winchester had taken her over a small hill and tackled her on the ground to consume her. Which was pretty funny considering the dog was about 7 pounds max.

Turns out she was fine, of course.

Peace out!

Whistling

I play hockey some Sunday mornings with a group of adult guys from Delaware. They talk about divorces and their wives and kids and real jobs and being old and things like that. It's an interesting change. One of the guys is a heart surgeon I believe.

On the way back, when I was making a left turn onto (I think) Barley Mill Road and I had to stop at a red light. I don't know why but I looked into the car to the left of me in the other turn lane, and the people caught my attention. It was a dad, I think dressed in a collared shirt, and his daughter, maybe twelve years old or so, looking like she about to go to a pool party. He was teaching her how to whistle by putting your fingers into your mouth. I suppose he knew how to do it pretty well. I didn't look too much because I didn't want to be a creeper but she looked like she was having some trouble. I think I remember seeing her one time try and then just give up laughing very hard, her dad doing exactly the same. I don't know if she learned it in the time that I was there or not - it seemed like a very long light - but I remember catching them again when the light turned green and she wasn't trying to whistle anymore, they were just talking.

Peace out.

Customers

One day about a week ago when I was working, a customer came up to the register as I was signing on with four two liter bottles of Diet Coke. As he was walking I said, "Oh, the four for five dollar deal, yeah?" And I think he nodded or said yes or something like that, and I rang him up and it came to five dollars. We did the cash exchange thing and as he was putting his change away I started putting them in a bag. The bags we have are surprisingly strong, so I tried to put them all in one bag at first, but clearly they weren't that strong, so I put two in each of two bags. Then he said passingly, "Can I have two bags on each, please?" So I asked, passingly, "Two bags on each?" as if to say "If that's not what you asked for, here's your chance to tell me something else," and then went to get the extra bags. Then he snapped at me and said very angrily, "Yeah, look, I know it's a revolutionary idea but I don't want these to fall on the ground, okay?"

I forget what I did, but I should have called him an asshole and refused to give him any bags.

Yesterday a woman came in and asked me to help her find a certain type of battery, so I lead her to the watch batteries she was looking for and started looking, when I was called to photo. The woman looking for the batteries was right beside the photo center, and as I was called to help the other woman, the one looking for the batteries called my attention and said, "Oh, I found them! Hmm... do you know if they have an expiration date?" So I was telling her that yes, they do expire but probably in 2012, just look around the package and I'm sure you'll find it, when the woman at photo threw her bag of film onto the desk and muttered "I'm in a rush, okay, I don't have time to wait around for you to talk to people."

I apologized to her a lot, although I wasn't sorry. Other customers have needs and the battery customer was there first. I thought about doing a lot of things to her photo order, but didn't do any of them. I probably could have gotten away with them, too, but oh well.

My old hockey coach came in the other day and got some cigarettes. You could never mistake his face for anyone, and to top it off he's missing part of his left arm. I don't think he recognized me - or if he did he didn't say anything - but on his way out he called me "pup" which is what he always called his hockey players. I don't know if it was habit or he knew.

Peace out.

Embers

The summer before my senior year, Viv hosted a bonfire at her house during band camp and invited all the pit kids and battery kids that would generally come to such things. I remember showing up that night when it was still sunny and going, I think, though Viv's house and then out the back door and seeing Chloe playing with a stick on a rock, like trying to draw on the rock or something. I think this may also have been the night that Viv's parents weren't home, and I went into the house at some point and someone rang the doorbell so I answered it. It was Chloe's mom, and she asked if Chloe was there and I said yes and started to close the door but then she started to walk in the door and I knew that if she did she'd find out there weren't any parents home. So I blocked the door and told her to go around out back because that's where everyone was. Crisis averted.

Anyway. We were making smores at the fire that night. Of course, some kids like to set their marshmallows on fire. And some kids set their marshmallows on fire even if they don't like setting them on fire. In either case, Trisha was roasting a marshmallon at the end of a long stick and it caught on fire. I forget exactly where she was sitting, but I think it was with her back to the house. I would be sitting on her right, then, with my back facing the Bohr's house. When it caught on fire, instead of bringing it to her mouth calmly to blow it out, she started flailing it around in the air at the end of the stick. Which is great, because exposing things to oxygenated air is a surefire way to put fires out. Anyway, a bit of flaming marshmallow came off of the end of her stick and managed to land at the inside base of my left middle finger (between my knuckle and the lowest joint in the finger). It wasn't too much, like maybe a square centimeter. When it landed there I remember just being like "!!!!!!!!!!!" in my head, and I think I said "Oh, f**k!" I know that I definitely recoiled a good bit and ended up leaning backward till I could touch the ground (I was sitting on a bench).

When I sat back up I thought everything was pretty much okay. I looked around my hand and saw a couple little spots of black/brown stuff and started to pull it off slowly, but it was really hard to pull off. Viv asked me if I was okay and I said yeah, it didn't really hurt too badly at that point. I kept trying to pull it off and then about two minutes later the pain really kicked in. I had been caring for my finger more than talking for those minutes and then I remember loudly interrupting and begging for water or something to make it stop hurting so much. It really was fairly intense pain at that point (thank god it wasn't much area). I went up with Viv to get some ice and water on my hand as soon as possible. We got a big pitcher full of ice water for me to stick my hand in and brought it back down to the fire, telling people not to flail flaming marshmallows through the air anymore. Numbing my hand was also painful, so I would alternate between leaving my hand sitting out and numbing it to try to hit a middle ground that still cancelled out pain, which mostly worked.

At some point I remember Viv and maybe a few other people came inside and went on the computer with us to see what we should do about treating burns. I don't think it said much, and I don't think we found out later that ice wasn't a very good idea (although water is recommended).

I drove home - I forget if I brought ice or if I just tried to deal with it - and asked my mom (a nurse) what the hell I should do, and she basically just told me to numb it. I forget how late I stayed up that night but I had a pack of ice with me the entire time. I got myself a new pack of ice for when I went to bed and kept my left middle finger in it while I slept. I remember waking up with my finger resting on a ziplock bag of warm water under my pillow, which for some reason surprised me, but really isn't all that surprising I suppose.

I think we might have wrapped my finger the night before, and I remember when we looked at it in the morning my skin was raised about a half a centimeter over that entire area and filled with fluid. It looked like if you breated on it funny it would pop. I'm the type to pick at scabs and scars, but I was so afraid of what would happen if I picked this I actually managed not to touch it. We wrapped it and put ointment on it and I did my best not to aggrivate it.

I would like to thank Trisha right now for deactivating my left middle finger through band camp my senior year. Great time to lose it.

In about a week it was probably 95% healed and the swelling had gone down. It was very pink for about a year, though. Now I can see a slight outline of where it was, although no one would ever see my hand and realize that I had second degree burns there.

When I was wincing in pain and numbing my finger, instead of saying "Sorry," Trisha said, "You deserved it."

//

Pit kids really like bonfires. The January of my senior year we had a bonfire at Viv's house while it was snowing. I think there was even like an inch of snow on the ground prior to the snow that was coming down that night, but we decided to have a bonfire anyway. We were all outside and sitting around the fire, some strange combination of burning and freezing, and somehow my socks got wet. I hate it when my socks get wet, plus I know it's terrible for your body heat and whatnot, so I took my socks and shoes off and laid them near the fire where it was dry. It was my first pair of Asics that I had bought, the orange running shoes that I bought after Alex Laun said that they were The Only Serious Choice. Someone else also put their shoes by the fire but I forget who, although I think it was a guy.

We were all talking and having a good time - the temperature and winds weren't so bad - when someone said "Jeff, your shoes are on fire." I said, "No, it's okay, I wanted them to get warm," not really understanding what they said. Again they said, "No, Jeff, your shoes are ON. FIRE." So I looked at my shoes and, of course, they were on fire. I think it was the right shoe's right lining that was actually melting away when I looked down, and I screamed and picked it up and started grounding it into the snow until it went out. Fortunately the shoe was still wearable. Come to think of it, I think it burned some of the heel as well.

I never really did anything to hide my shoes but my parents didn't notice for months. One time my mom asked me what happened to my shoes and I said, "Uh, it caught on fire." Sometimes other people would notice and I would give the same answer.

//

Nicki's next door neighbor is her uncle and he has a nice patio in the back with a firepit that we often use when we go to Nicki's house. Her dad told us it was a really nice night around the time we were finishing up Juno, so we went over to his house and started a fire. As Nicki was going inside to get s'mores materials, her uncle came out was like, "So uh, who are you guys?" And we told him that we were Nicki's friends so it was okay. He got us mechanical marshmallow roasting sticks that rotated the marshmallow for you. We made them climb around the logs.

Anyway, it was a pretty big fire for that fire pit. Every now and then an air pocket would burst inside a log and send embers flying through the air. I think both times that it happened it went away from the house. The second time that it happened I remember Gina kicked one away from herself and it ended up going right beneath my feet, but thankfully I avoided it. Soon after that I realized it was time to go home though - 10:54 - and got up to go around and give people hugs. As I was walking around the fire - further away from the house rather than towards it - to give Hetty and Abby a hug, I stepped on an ember. I didn't notice it at first, but after maybe a step and a half I started to feel a burning in my foot, which quickly got a lot more intense, and of course was followed by me hopping around and shouting and trying to clear it off of my foot. Everybody laughed at me, knowing it was my third such incident.

I could actually feel a hole in the outside sole of my right foot when I was walking back to Nicki's house to get my things. I could feel it during the drive home, and I could feel it on my sandals when I came back to the house to watch The Daily Show and have a bowl of Life.

I thought I was going to have second degree burns again but it turns out it wasn't so bad.

Peace out.

Beth's Last Day

Today is the day that Beth moves, at 10AM. I saw her yesterday (Saturday night). I drove over to her house at about 8:30 after dinner and after plans fell through. It wasn't raining much anymore but there was still lightning. There was a very intense strike of almost red lightning as I was heading up Temple Road, just before the left turn. It was one of the only time lightning actually made me feel a little uneasy - my heartbeat quickened for a few seconds.

We went to Target to buy face wash and hair dye because it was easier than Beth buying it in D.C. Tina was there and she had her tonsils out on Monday; Beth said that she sounded like herself but like maybe she was a little deaf. Jen and Sumi were also there. We talked about The Happening and Lindt and an old employee that was a liability and how Beth loves books more than people and being a cashier. She had a copy of Perks of Being a Wallflower and we felt sorry for her. She had a copy of Siddhartha, I don't know if she wanted to keep it or not. She gave her red squarish CD racks on the wall to Jen, as well as the cubes that she put in the corners of her room and the Asian lanterns hanging in the corner, red and white. We ate some Ben & Jerry's Caramel Sutra ice cream, for Tina's tonsils. She had to leave early because she wanted to rest. We talked about how we don't understand how some people can be late all the time, and how Beth walks fast, and whether or not the girl on the Garnier box was black. Tina was going to leave if Beth ran out of stories so I filled the silence so Tina would stay by talking about my day, like Sam's comments about Fat Arts Repetory Teaching School and Malcolm XL. Beth put her legs over Tina's legs to keep her in place. Tina said it was too warm but Beth said she was fine. Eventually it got way too warm in the room and Jen and Beth talked about sweating. Tina found pockets in Beth's shirt. Beth said that Ben Kweller was totally impressed when she brought up the movie where he got the line "Sex reminds her of eating spaghetti." She only got two hours of sleep last night because her flight was cancelled and in between she went to see David Sedaris with her friend Jenna.

A little bit before 11, she said that she wanted to go to bed, so Jen and Sumi stood up to go. I was a little hungry at that point so I stayed sitting for a second, and then I just realized that it would be the last time I was in that room, the last time I was at Beth's house, and the last time I drove home. And I thought of all the wonderful times we all had there. And I was incredibly sad that this was the last time. I hugged Beth when we were outside and told her that I would miss her, and she told me that she knew I would come see her and that I'm reliable, and I said Yes, I'm good about stuff like that.

Peace out.

Driving Chills Part 2

Apparently my driving chills are actually a somewhat common happening that has created a style of driving called hypermiling. There's a name for the obsession - nempimania - which I don't believe I have. One guy called "Lightfoot" got 100MPG in his hybrid. There are lots of methods that are really interesting for increasing efficiency.

Some of the methods are illegal.

Stop signs are the enemy.

Peace out.

CMPSC 201C Part 2

I checked the schedule of courses today when I was figuring out which general education requirements I had fulfilled and which I had left to complete. Suzi Q is the *ONLY* teacher available for CMPSC 201C this semester. I cried [laughed] a little bit when I saw that.

Peace out.

EDPSY 010

My Tuesday/Thursday 8am-9:15am class this semester was Educational Psychology 010. I forget what the actual title of the course it but the description was something along the lines of child development in relation to education and pedagogy with emphasis on individual differences, which sounded pretty sweet to me as a possible future math teacher.

It was the classroom in the southeast corner of Willard on the first floor. The teacher was J Foor, a 29-year-old doctoral student in the department who had grown up in the State College area and gone to Penn State for undergrad as well. He often told us about how the admission standards for PSU are tougher now than they were when he got in and that he didn't think he could get in these days; I don't know if it was in his best interest for him to tell us that.

He mentioned that he had early-onset arthritis a few times. Every time he did it made me feel really bad for him because it seemed totally unfair. Later he mentioned that it was really only in his hands, which made me feel not quite so terrible, but then I thought about how for me that would mean inability to play piano, which would basically ruin my life, and it made me feel bad for him again. I wonder if he would like to play piano or guitar.

[[Did I ever mention that the most terrifying semi-probably fear that I have is losing perfect use of my hands in any interpretation of "perfect use"? I don't know if I could live. When I was in 8th grade, Bobby Dingle and I would try to get through lunch without using our thumbs sometimes just to see if we could do it. Opening a milk carton without your thumbs is a nightmare. We sat with Kyle M and Dave B and Danny B that year. It was before Joey split the table and ruined everything good at lunch. Kyle and I would compete to see who could make Bobby spit out his drink laughing the most times throughout the year; at one point I was winning but I don't know who won at the end. We would save the good jokes for after a nice big sip.]]

He did seem to be very happy with his family. He talked about his wife fairly often and his kid in probably every lecture I went to and he would always smile a little bit when he told us the stories. He was a very low-key guy, so even a little smile from him showed you that he was actually quite happy to be thinking of a given topic.

In retrospect I feel like I kind of let the guy down and I feel somewhat guilty about that. In the first couple lectures I sat in the front and right of the room, probably second row and second seat in, close to where he would stand when giving lectures (PowerPoint, like most lecturers used; class of about 60). I didn't want to answer every question because I didn't want to be That Kid but when he was really hurting for someone to raise their hand or shout out an answer, I would do it. After the first or second test, I kind of lost faith in the class. I knew that I could get by with minimal effort and so I just stopped trying. I started to sit in the back left of the class, as far away from him as possible, and would find other things to do like math or a paper or homework or thinking or anything. The only reason I would ever go was because we had attendance assignments, basically. Once I finished the 9 of them we were required to do over the semester, I didn't go to class anymore - so basically I didn't go to class in April. In March, I left class the second the assignment was handed in. I never raised my hand or answered questions, and often neither did anybody else. I think a lot of people could have answered the questions so I guess it was all of us, but I feel bad knowing that I could have participated but chose not to.

He wrote on the blackboard one time. He was demonstrating the use of networks of neurons and categorization as a learning strategy over rote memorization.

Salls was in my class. We talked about hockey, how useless the book was, and his crazy sleep schedule. He sat behind me when I moved to the back left corner of the class, and one girl I think named Rachel usually sat in front of me. One time she turned around and asked me if you could get walk-in appointments at Ritenour, the campus medical center. I guess she thought I looked like a sophomore or junior and not someone who had transferred weeks earlier. I had been there once at that point for the flu and it seemed to me that you could walk-in if you had your student ID, so I told her yes. I never confirmed; I'm not sure if I ever said anything to her again actually. I wonder if I was wrong?

There was a guy who wore long white t-shirts in the class who was a Kinesiology major that Salls knew who spoke a lot during class discussions. There was a guy who looked like a street-vet version of Morgan Spurlock who I saw in the gym the couple times that I went. Most of our class was white. I think we had one Indian girl and one black girl.

I checked the gradebook online one time for the classroom activities we had to do. I don't believe anyone who turned one in ever got anything less than 100.

We had to make a 'brochure' about child development at one point in the class. I lost 20% because I somehow did it on the wrong chapter. The wording was a tiny bit ambiguous but I suppose I should have asked. I didn't care. It looked new-agey and clean and I liked it.

The only other grades we got were tests. He gave us outlines of what was on the test about a week before. On the last test, after having not gone to class for a month, I looked at the outline and found the relevant sections in the book and the chapter outlines and just read that. I think I studied for about two hours maximum. I don't like to talk about grades but I guess I could say it would convince you the class time was useless.

In one of the first days of class, the professor was talking about different personality types and how people can be introverted or extroverted. Someone raised their hand and asked "Sorry, but what exactly are you referring to when you say 'introverted' or 'extroverted?' " I remember thinking the response wasn't sufficiently clarifying, but I suppose that question threw him a bit.

[[I reread this post after I hit the publish button and realized that I didn't mention once the material that we were supposed to learn in this course. I think that means I'm supposed to leave it like this though]]

Peace out.

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.