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.