The Duck

Rigatoni's got rid of the fake plastic candles on their tables. Today was the first day I noticed. I stayed late to talk to Hortense and a friend of hers visiting from Cornell at a different table, one towards the window and the back. When we were eating, Hortense looked over my shoulder and shouted "DUCK!" and I looked out the window behind me and saw a cute mallard walking up and down the window that went all the way to the ground, quacking as it went, even though I couldn't hear it. It wanted to come inside because it knew there was food here, but it couldn't figure out the way in, architecture was simply too complicated for it to handle. Other people got bread on their way out, and we saw them break bits of bread and throw them towards the duck, and he ate them, and I decided I wanted to be like them and feed him too, so on the way out I went to get some bread from the very quiet bread girl who never gives you enough oil or cheese, right next to the cute Chinese girl with the well-defined jawline, and asked for a slice of bread, she asked which kind, and I didn't know which one to go with, but I thought the baguettes would be too tough for the duck, so I got rosemary instead because it looked softer. It was softer. But when I threw it to the duck, he ignored it, and the ignored it again, and then I threw one that I know he saw, and he put his beak up to it for a second, shook it, and ran away. It was too strong for him.

Peace out.

I Don't Know

I came back to visit the high school during my freshman year of college to tell Mr. Trabocco that I had transferred from Brown to Penn State, and his reaction was an incredulous, "What is wrong with you?!" I didn't have a defense prepared. He said, "You just wrote yourself a one-way ticket to the proletariat, buddy."

//

Today I went to talk to a random computer science honors advisor about a career in software engineering. I told him that I was interested in computer science, specifically in being a code monkey, just sitting down at a screen and writing programs that do cool stuff, and his response was, through chuckles, "What is wrong with you?" Again, I didn't know.

Peace out.

Joe

Just so that I remember: I asked the folk singer Joe Crookston at a house party how I could actually get into the music scene without my parents killing me for wanting to be a starving artist, and he said to work at music camps. Residential, work with other artists, get paid, do something cool, meet the big times. Good advice.

Peace out.

Throwing Away

We cleared a bunch of stuff out of the basement today. Included: A puzzle of three white kittens that my mom completed and framed when I was in middle school sometime. A tiny kid-sized drumset that my dad got me for Christmas when I was in elementary school, and I thought that a drum solo consisted of hitting each drum once, in order, as fast as you could, and I thought that you could march a concert snare by tying a length of rope around it. A styrofoam "bubble" that you could strap around my back when I was about five years old, because I was afraid of swimming, and I think I only used it once or twice; I remember one of them was a sunny day in my mom's friend's backyard pool.

I have a tiny bit of hoarder/pack-rat tendencies. But not too bad.

Peace out.

Coldstone

Tarik: What's "Ayn Rand?"
Collin: Satan.

Peace out.

Pointers

Oh man! I just encountered my FIRST REAL LIFE POINTER!

>>> Last

<function Last at 0x00D39C70>

yyyyyyyyeeeeessssssssssss

Peace out.

Status

With all of these bridges I've burned

And these badges I've earned

And the pages I've turned, well

You'd think that I'd learned.

All of the marvels I've seen

And the oceans between

And the stories I glean.

It's a shame

That I still feel the same.

Peace out.

Let it Out

I walked into McLanahan's the other day, I forget what I was going to buy, probably milk or something like that. It's cold and I think I had somewhere else I wanted to be, so I walking as quickly as possible. Like usually of late, I was wearing the black zip-up sweatshirt that Ryan got me this Christmas underneath the black paramilitary jacket that Jess got me Christmas of 2007. Right as I walked in the door, I saw two employees walking down the aisle toward the front of the store. I didn't hear anything of their conversation except for when the one in front said to the other, as he was walking away from him, "You know what I always say man: If you've got hate in your heart........ just let it out."

Peace out.

Whoaldorf Schools

A 2007 study in Sweden comparing Waldorf and state schools reported that Waldorf pupils were more likely to have a positive learning attitude, less likely to have passing tests as the goal of their learning, and had a "more in-depth study style" in higher education. They also showed more tolerant attitudes to minority groups and less tolerance of racist ideologies, were more involved with social and moral questions and were more likely to believe in the social efficacy of love, solidarity, and civil courage as opposed to legislation or police control.

(In addition, Waldorf students tended to wait longer before attending university.)

Peace out.

A Secret

When someone really likes you, they kiss you with their eyes open.

Peace out.

Sadness of

The sound of high heels clicking against the ground has always made me sad; it reminds me of girls not thinking they're pretty enough, of stumbling back "home," of mom going out on the weekends and being left alone.

Peace out.

The Comet

When I was really little - like before 2nd grade - my dad got me this computer game/information game thing, I don't really even remember, but it was all about dinosaurs. I think it was just called "Dinosaurs." I can recall that there was one part where you could just click on different little icons, and it would take you to a new window/screen that just played a short animated movie about some part of dinosaur history. Dinosaurs in the air, large ones, predators, herbivores, whatever. I don't actually remember any of those in particular.

The only one that I do specifically remember is the one about dinosaurs going extinct. Most notably, the image of the comet crashing to the earth and how incredibly scared it made me. The image was of a bunch of brontosauruses chillin' like villains on a reddish plain, eating from some trees, with a stormy looking dusk sky in the background. It was mostly a reddish and orange image, possibly with some grays in the sky. Then something started lighting up behind the clouds as it moved closer to the earth and the dinosaurs turned their heads. The image of it behind the clouds really sticks out - it was well done, you could see an amorphous colored orb dilating in size and brightness as it went through different thickness and gaps in the clouds. Finally it touched down, and there was just a flash of white. Then everything changed, and it talked about the eventual extinction of all the dinosaurs, but when I remember most about this part is an emaciated t-rex stumbling to take its last few steps, and then falling over sideways and dying. Everything in the frame was grayish, gray dinosaur, gray sky, gray sands, and it was very eerie and scary to a 6-year-old me.

For a long time I was very very afraid of the earth getting hit by a comet and everyone dying out. I would look up at the sky - especially when it looked like it did in that video - and wonder if some light would start to shoot down the sky and be followed by a flash of white, and then I'd walk around and stumble to take my last few steps before falling over and dying in all gray. Sometimes I still worry about the first part. Sometimes I'm walking or driving or doing homework and I just imagine that orb of light crashing down in the sky wherever I can see the sky.

("Did anyone ever teach you to visual success?")

Peace out.

ArbitRage

This is the story of how to get screwed by Amazon. I think this is going to be another post that lands near the top of Google searches for related terms, which is unfortunate, but oh well.

So I was looking for a book called A History of Cambodia by David Chandler, which is supposed to be a really great history book that focuses on people instead of just great men and also focuses on times before Europe got there, instead of treating them as a prologue to Cambodia's real (white) history. A new copy of the book can run anywhere from like $35 to $100 depending on hardback and edition and all that jazz, but new copies were typically in the range of like $10 - $20. I found one in Amazon Marketplace for like $4 (+ shipping) and considering the description of the condition, figured it was the best deal I could find and went for it. Hooray! I couldn't wait to read about the people's history in Cambodia!

(To explain why: the orphanage I'm working at said that I may have an opportunity to teach history, and if that's the case, I want to make sure I have a thorough knowledge of Cambodian history in particular)

Anyhow, I came back to my house from a New Year's Eve party at about 2:00AM and saw a manila package with my name on it. A book! Hooray! Except it didn't look big enough to be the history book, nor did it feel heavy enough. I opened it up and found Mad Mary: A Workbook for Groups or Individuals, from the Bad Girls of the Bible series. I wondered what the hell had gone wrong. I went to my computer (keep in mind this is 2AM on Jan 1) to check what I had purchased. Definitely A History of Cambodia and definitely NOT anything close to Mad Mary. I kept looking through my email accounts and the Amazon account and my debit card's payment history to see if I had bought anything like this, but nothing was turning up. I looked through the package and saw the order slip inside, which seemed to imply that I had ordered Mad Mary, but I was putting together that something wasn't right here. I then noticed on the order slip that it appeared the seller was some name I had never seen before, and milde4 was the listed buyer. I wondered briefly if this was a joke gift from milde4, and wondered, "Whose initials are MIL that I know who lives in Delaware?" After running through my mental rolodex and coming up empty, I decided to try other options.

This was after I had taken a shower. It's now about 2:35AM on Jan 1.

I went to the sites for the listed seller, I thought about trying to contact them, I even went to the live help section to see if I could find what was going on. It was too late at night for that, so instead I typed milde4 into Google to find their page.

This is where I started to put it together.

People had posted questions often in the past on Amazon forums and jazz like that about milde4 and who they were and what they were doing and why they had so many sales and why something went wrong with their sale and why they got the wrong item. People who knew what they were talking about more would respond to them and claim that milde4 is a prolific drop-seller. I kept reading on for a little while, trying to figure out exactly what the hell was happening, but even after a number of pages and forums I was still a little confused. It was 3AM now, and I crawled in bed still trying to figure out exactly what had happened.

It was actually in bed that night that I did lay out the truth of the situation, which is like this.

Milde4 is one of the many names of an arbitrageur who operates a few sites. Arbitrage is when there exists a price difference for a single good in two different locations at the same time from different ends of the transaction. That is to say, suppose that Alice want to sell Book X for $3 and Bob wants to buy Book X for $10. This is an arbitrage situation, and a skilled arbitrageur would jump in, buy the book from Alice at $3, sell it to Bob for $10, and keep the $7 profit.

That's exactly what was supposed to have happened here. Alice was selling "History" for $.75 on Half.com and I was buying "History" for $4 on Amazon.com, so milde4 was supposed to make $3.75 by just buying the book from Alice but telling her to ship it to me, when I had just paid milde $4 for the book.

The only issue is that this operation is all carried out by software, is rarely ever checked by humans, and they make bugs a significant number of times. Like, from 3-10% of the time. In this case, the software's issue was that it thought Mad Mary was the same item as History. I don't know why it got this wrong - no parts of the book are similar at all - but it did.

So now I'm stuck with a book I don't want, and I want to correct this. I also feel pretty pissed off because arbitrage is a sort of juvenile thing to do in the first place and a way that leeches in society can make money, and I'd like to get back at whoever is behind the milde4 account. So I talk to customer support at Amazon to see if I can compel them to give me a copy of History. After all, the deal was I give you $4, you give me History. I don't care if you screwed up, I'm not liable for your mistakes, I held up my end of the deal and now you have to hold up yours. On top of that, you're a scammer and deserve to be punished, so I'd like a new copy of the book, hardback, please.

Unfortunately it's not in my power to do that. So I just have to settle for sending it "back" to him (for the first time) and get a refund. And hopefully get a refund on the shipping too. He asked me to print out a copy of the email saying that I had a defective product along with the product.

However, my printer was having serious issues. I don't want to go into too much detail, but it involved waiting for my mom to return from all her errands with the ink, changing it, putting the printer back online, sharing it, seeing what was wrong with our network, calling the computer guy at my dad's office, and waiting for him to fix it, all of which took about 5 hours. And I get tunnel vision with things like this, so I did nothing else all day.

Knowing that I have tunnel vision though, I personally gave up on the printer at 3PM, put the email on a flash drive, and decided to print it at Kinkos. The girl there, who was about my age, definitely thought I was a little bit crazy. I justified my actions to her by saying that "I'm away from home and my printer is broken," which are sort of disconnected and doesn't really make sense if you think about it, but I didn't really care. It cost $.11, which I don't think will ever be recouped, sadly.

Then I went to the post office, which I thought was a sleepy place for old people, but it was JAM PACKED. Seriously the line was like 20 deep. I couldn't believe that I had to try to fix my printer for 3 hours, step into a Kinkos, pay to print something, and then wait in a 20-person line all because this milde4 asshole had screwed up their algorithm and never bothered to check. I texted a few people while I was in the line - Kristin to see if I could hang with her; Tarik to see if his mosque was fixed; Haley because now I was bored in a long line.

Eventually, twenty minutes later or so, I had bought the necessary envelope and gotten it shipped. A girl who I had noticed on the way in - who I think was a senior in high school, judging from the "SENIOR" written on the back window of her car - walked in and out at the same time as me. She looked at me, definitely clearly as surprised as I had been that there would be 20+ people in a dinky post office at such a time of day and year, and we exchanged a few words about how trippy that had felt.

I went home.

And this is why I will always Google the people I'm buying from before I buy from them.

Peace out.

We Suck

"In his book The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson contrasts law in the Congo in the early sixteenth century with law in Portugal and England. In those European countries, where the idea of private property was becoming powerful, theft was punished brutally. In England, even as late as 1740, a child could be hanged for stealing a rag of cotton. But in the Congo, communal life persisted, the idea of private property was a strange one, and thefts were punished with fines or various degrees of servitude. A Congolese leader, told of the Portuguese legal codes, asked a Portuguese once, teasingly: 'What is the penalty in Portugal for anyone who puts his feet on the ground?' "

[Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States]

Peace out.

New Years Eve

New Years Eve this year was a party that Chloe took me to, where I knew some of the people, and didn't quite know the rest, but in many cases had heard of them. I was rather worried when I showed up at first, but ended up having a really great time.

//

"DUDE. THIS GUY DID THE BEST STAGE TRICK. HE WAS SMOKIN A CIGARETTE -- HE ATE THE CIGARETTE!"

//

Talking with Dave about history and why America sucks and health care and morals, and everyone sort of paying attention and talking for the first bit, and then people slowly filtering out, and then realizing that Gab I was completely engrossed in the conversation and listened intently without saying a word until Dave and I were done talking.

//

"I hope they don't ruin Tron!"

"...Did you see the first Tron? It sucked. You can't ruin Tron."

//

His family tried to have an intervention on him to get him to stop drinking... while he was high on shrooms.

//

Oh man, the strip club story. They paid the cute girl in the strip club $40 to get their friend, K-hole, into "The Hot Seat," which they were not sure what it was. And yes, you know there's a problem because I said they got the cute girl in the strip club. The next thing they hear is "K-Hole to the hot seat, K-hole to the hot seat," but he freaks out, so they made another roommate go. He goes up on stage to the chair, and they tie him up in it. Then the cute girl says, "Alright Trisha, come on out."

And Trisha is not the cute girl. At all. Apparently she's some Amazon-sized Vietnamese girl with a not-so-great face, and she proceeded to beat and humiliate the kid in front of everyone. Apparently the worst move that she did was put whipped cream on her thigh right on the edge of her underwear and then force the kid to lick it off, which made him gag and almost throw up.

//

I was the first one to buy from the Wawa on Route 1 this year! $.20 for a Peppermint Patty.

Peace out.

Untied States of America

It's sort of funny how America, perhaps the only nation to be founded on the extermination of one race and the enslavement of another, fails to recognize the irony of making its creed "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Peace out.

Gingerbread Wat

Edit: Ginger Wat was JULIA's idea. JULIA's.

There was a gingerbread house study break recently in the dorm. Jen had asked me to go as part of our night of exciting things (!), plus I kind of wanted to go anyway, so I said I’d see her there. Since I actually had time to think about the fact that I was going to it, I had time to think of ways to “do it wrong.” In the early evening I had thought about building a replica of F. L. Wright’s “Falling Water” (Waters?), but upon inspecting the plans of that, decided it would be nigh on impossible to make a recognizable facsimile from the materials at hand. I think because of the painting Julia had made for me, I thought of making a gingerbread model of Angkor Wat instead. I got a few nice pictures of it up on my computer, and we went upstairs when it was time.

The crew consisted of Jen, Haley, Julia, Matt, Nick M, and myself. Matt and Nick both have engineering backgrounds, so that was nice. We were given a paper plate as a foundation, but we immediately knew that was NOT good enough. So I went to my room and got the base piece of cardboard from the pizza box Tarik and I had used last night. The person running the program thought we were kind of crazy, but we knew it was worth it.

We worked on the border first, using the graham crackers they provided. Jen and Haley worked on the inside square pagoda, which we realized was not going to be sufficiently tall at some point, so they needed to work on yet another base for it, and then a support column, which Matt and Nick also helped with. I worked on the spires with Julia, which were made out of Dots, and when that was finished, Julia used my Pokey Sticks to make the columns, and a candy cane to make the gate.

We were the last ones there. When we were done, it actually did look somewhat convincingly like Angkor Wat. Julia made a banner/plaque for it, two graham crackers next to each other, covered with white frosting, with “ANGKOR WAT” written in red, and a line of nerds at the top.

When we were done…

We decided we were the coolest.

Peace out.

Hits and Mrs.

Shortly after the second creeper-peeper incident occurred in Simmons Hall, the police decided it was time to start taking this thing seriously. Papers with descriptions of the suspects and crimes were posted all throughout Simmons Hall, people went in to discuss leads, and cops and RAs roamed the halls frequently.

I, being my normal self, continued to visit friends at night. At this point in the year – possibly October? – that meant a mix of going to see Julia/HK, Hortense/Haley, and Kerry. I forget exactly why on this particular night, but it was around 1AM and I felt like saying hey to either of the last two rooms. Perhaps I had already seen Julia/HK.

So I ran up the stairs to the second floor and popped out of the stairwell to see two police officers walking past. Surprising, to say the least, and I was immediately sure that they would suspect something was going on. “Hey,” I said to them, trying my best to be not-inconspicuous, before continuing down the hall to see Hortense/Haley. I saw that the lights were dim in their room, but figured I’d knock softly anyway. No response. Knocked again a few times. No response. No big deal, hadn’t seen Kerry in a while, so I went down the two hallways to see her.

As I approached her room, the two cops saw me again as they walked their way back from the wing of the building. Definitely suspicious by now. “Do you live here?” they asked me. I didn’t really understand the question. “Yeah – I mean, on the ground floor yes, but not on this floor.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m visiting my friend Kerry, so…” I looked at Kerry’s door. It had her name on it (score! Eat that, cops!), and she always stays up late, and the lights were still on. I knocked, and she came to the door quickly and opened it. I was standing there, with two cops behind me, looking in.

“Oh, uh… hey,” she said. She was clearly thrown off by the situation. I asked her how it was going and stepped in to close the door behind me, letting the officers go on their way and explaining this strange situation to Kerry.

Peace out.

Multiplication Fables

A lot of times when I go to cafeterias, I think about the tables. Yes, I’m aware this is weird. But I think it’s strange how an object can just sit there and have so many things happen on top of it and remain totally unchanged in their wake. People break up, people fight, people fall in love, people tell secrets, people become friends, people scream and shout, and nothing ever happens to the surface, you could never even tell. It almost seems unfair. I feel like everyone’s life is made worse by the fact that when you look at the tables, you can’t see the stories that have happened on them.

Peace out.

AAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY!!

My friend from the Third Floor Girls named Emily W had this thing she always did. Whenever anyone made a sex joke or sexual innuendo, so we would a circle with one hand and then put vigorously put her other index finger in and out of it while shouting, “AAAAAYYYY!!!!” If it was a gay joke, she would do it with her two index fingers, or sometimes one index finger coming in “from behind.” If it was lesbian, sometimes she would make two circles, or sometimes two pairs of legs.

At Ceci’s party, I had been sitting with Chloe for most of the night, on the opposite side of the room from Matt. At one point I decided it was time for some horrible jokes, so I got up from where I was seated to join Matt on the table he was sitting on. And the rest is history. Terrible, terrible history.

I forget exactly what the first joke was, but me and Matt both did the Emily move. Then there was one more bad innuendo immediately following, and we did it again. Keep in mind that everyone laughed both times, quite heartily. Then I said to Matt, “Get it? It was an innuendo,” to which he dutifully responded, “You mean, an in your end-o!” And then we both did the AAAAAYYYYY again, and everyone laughed. I’m glad that he picked up on my telekinetic signals. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been funny at all.

Peace out.