Happy October!

Today is the last day of October, and it's finally acting like it. Hurrah for mornings when I can see my breath and I have to scrape the frost off my windshield!

Since today is the last day of October, it's also Halloween. Normally, I pay a negligible amount of attention to this holiday, but it was more interesting than usual this year. The high school and middle school orchestras played a Halloween concert last night (in which only three out of the eight songs played had anything to do with today), and today we went around to all the elementary schools and played the music there for the kiddies. It went pretty well, but not super exciting and atrociously horrible or anything. After two weeks of trying, I finally got my stand partner/friend's little brother to voluntarily talk to me. That's pretty much the only noteworthy thing that happened. Can't you tell how incredibly exhilirating it was?

As part of this, we were all expected to wear costumes. I was super geeked about mine. I haven't quite decided what I was/am (I'm still wearing it because I love it and it smells delightful). The original goal was to be the personification of autumn/a tree in autumn, which is what most people interpreted it as. There were a couple other thoughts on it though, including a forest goddess and a fairy. I wore a long flowing brown skirt (pretty much the only skirt I've actually liked since 5th grade), my orange crush shirt turned inside out, and brown tank top on top of that. My hair was in two braids, and pinned to the shirts and braids were dozens of beautiful fall leaves (there's currently still a fallen oak leaf right next to my face and it's smelling really good). To add to the effect, I went barefoot for most of the day (which I normally do anyway), painted dark brown spiraling vine patterns all down my arms, wore bracelets of all sorts of fall colors, and wore four pairs of fall colored earrings at once. I currently have two hooks through each earring hole (it wasn't a pleasant process and my earlobes are still kind of sore) and hanging from each of those hooks is another hook. I'll have to post pictures because it was a fun little get-up.

Gathering the leaves for my costume was quite an interesting experience. On Tuesday afternoon I got a phone call from my friend Morgan who told me that she was bored out of her mind and wanted to come over to my house. I told her I had to go on a stroll to get leaves to stick to myself. She called me "such a freaking hippie" and said she'd be over in a few minutes to come with me. When she pulled up, we didn't go walking right away. In her car she had a bunch of leftover baguettes from the Panera where she works so we had sword fights with a couple and then each took one to chomp on while we walked. So we walked around my neighborhood (which consists primarily of Catholic families who send their kids to private schools to avoid the depravity of public education) singing and talking about random things while picking beautiful leaves off trees and carrying whole baguettes which we occasionally took a bite out of. To make matters even more interesting, halfway through her bread, Morgan decided she didn't want to eat all of it so every once in a while she would tear off a piece and see how far she could drop-kick it down the street. I was walking around barefoot in rolled-up jeans and a vintage t-shirt with my signature purse trying to hold all the leaves we picked, and Morgan had on a mismatched pair of chucks (one was purple and the other was leopard print) an old pair of jeans with a hole at the knee, and a hoodie that belonged to her dad. We probably looked like we were on something. Some of the looks we got were priceless.

The only thing I did that I normally do on Halloween (ever since freshman year) is what my school calls Treat the Hungry. Small groups of people sign up to walk door to door on a certain street and collect canned goods for the Free Store/Food Bank. I went with Amy and Erin, two of my friends. The experience as a whole was unusual, and not always in a good way. All three of us had unorthodox costumes. I've never heard of anyone being fall (there was one girl in the orchestra who said she would've done it if she had had time to collect leaves), Amy was a Christmas-y elf, and Erin was something from some British movie called Clockwork Orange that I hadn't heard of and nobody got the reference until we dropped the food off at our school.

First we'll make some general statements. The street we did was very long (in fact, it was called Long Lane, but we only did the short part of Long Lane, which was still pretty long), and most of the people who live on it didn't pass out candy. There were therefore very few kids trick-or-treating so whenever we got to a house they were very eager to give us candy in addition to cans. And they were handing out the good stuff too. It was mostly chocolate and there were a lot of Reese's. Mmmmm..... There's also a little valley to help water drain away from the yards between nearly every house, and my 10+ year old wagon really wasn't handling it too well. My wagon had other issues too, such as the fact that it tipped over easily, was excessively noisy, and only had three sides. We managed to fix the last problem to some degree with a plastic bag and some thread and rubber bands (which I of course was carrying with me in my purse).

Now for some specific instances. We all met at Amy's house because she lives close to Long Lane. Once we actually started going to the houses, our adventures began. The first house gave us Reese's, which got me extra pumped because I love Reese's and the people in my neighborhood normally pass out the cheap stuff since there are so many kids running around.

The next house actually had candy bars for each of us. Not the little fun-size snickers, but decent sized candy bars.

The next house with people at it had a little girl and her mom sitting on the front porch. When we told the woman we were there to collect the canned goods, she told us to hang on a second and talk to Hannah (the little girl) while she went and got something. I had no issue with that as I'm around kids all the time, so I proceeded to say hello and ask her what grade she was in at school. No response. I asked her what her favorite game to play was. No response (I have to admit, at that point it was reminding me of a random encounter in Dungeons and Dragons where we fought a mindflayer and its thralls who didn't respond much to anything we said). So the three of us just stood there awkwardly glancing around and every now and then looking back at the kid. The poor thing looked absolutely terrified of Erin, and I can see why. Her costume was a bit dark. Eventually, we stopped trying to start conversation. Out of nowhere, Hannah just yelled "Hi!" and looked vacantly past us and didn't say anything else. It was weird. Finally her mom came back out and we went on our way waving to both of them. I think the little girl had some sort of mental deficiency. I wish we had known that before so we wouldn't have responded so awkwardly.

Nothing overly momentous happened until close to the end of the first side of the street. The three of us walked up to a house with a strobe light on in the garage and music blasting from a CD player. The song was, of all things, "My Humps". Standing in front of the garage was and old man with a pipe to smoke in one hand and a bottle of strong liquor in the other. He directed us towards the house where we were greeted by a handful of adults who looked, smelled, and acted completely intoxicated. They also had a toddler with them, and I felt very sorry for the tyke.

By the time we headed down the other side of the street, it was dark and some of the unlit houses looked very menacing. After knocking on a few on the darkened doors, we decided that it was best to just skip them. Who knows how many adventures we might have missed out on because we didn't have the time and my two comrades were unwilling to go up to each house.

The second side of the street didn't really have much worth telling. All the people wanted to get rid of their candy so we got like two handfuls each at every door. There were however two things that might deserve mention.

We split up towards the end to go quicker, and one of the houses Erin and I went up to had an adorable old man living in it. He urged us both to take the rest of his candy (a lot of it will probably end up feeding Tim, Amy's older brother) and then proceeded to give us a little history lesson about the origins of Finneytown High School. It was interesting to meet someone whose grandson had been part of the first class to graduate from our high school.

There was another house that provided us with quite an unpleasant, awkward, disturbing, etc. experience that the reader could do without knowing.

When we arrived at the school to drop off our collections, Erin's costume was recognized for the first time all evening. One of the history teachers (the best history teacher)/coordinators of community service stuff had seen the movie. He's a rather unusual person, and what's even more unusual is that his name is Lynn, until last year his mom (whose name is Gay) worked at the same school he did, he went to college with both my parents, he gave my older brother his first nosebleed, and his best friend grew up in the first house my family owned in Finneytown. At the school I also got to see my friend Anna's final costume (she had been trying to decide what to be for weeks), and another argument broke out about what specifically my costume was supposed to be.

That's just about it. I don't have any nice concluding statement to finish with, so there you go.

Dipodism

This is what happens when a friend and I talk on the phone for too long while we're both sleep-deprived. The fact that she kept on laughing only made us keep going because there are few things I like better than making people laugh.

The gist of dipodism can be embodied in a single phrase: "Life is best when lived with both feet."

Of course, this only applies to bipods. If you want to make it apply to all creatures, you'd have to make it "Life is best when lived with the number of feet you were born with." And that would imply that mutants born with too many or too few legs are living life to its fullest potential, which isn't exactly what we mean at all, so you'd have to change our motto even more to "Life is best when lived with the number of feet that a non-mutant member of your species would be born with." That's just too long, so we leave it at "Life is best when lived with both feet," and if anyone asks we specify that this only applies to bipods.

Two scenarios have been brought up to challenge this view thus far. I have countered them only as far as I desire, because if you pushed it farther or tweaked the situation, it could be shown that at times living with an abnormal number of feet would be preferable, but that would undermine our entire philosophy. We just can't have that, now can we. The only way to maintain an untenable philosophy is to pretend that the opposition was never voiced or say that fruit does not grow on that tree. Or you can say that the critics don't have enough "faith", but we haven't incorporated "faith" into dipodism just yet.

• Opposition 1: What if someone was provided the means to live because they had a disability?
  The specific story we use for this case is of a veteran who lost a leg in a war, came back, ended up unemployed and homeless, and was taken into a shelter because of his/her handicap. Our response to this is that if he/she hadn't lost the leg (and thus the foot) in the first place, he/she would've been able to find a better job and he/she wouldn't have had to live in a shelter.
• Opposition 2: What if, after losing a foot, someone settled down to a life that ended up being better than the one they led before the loss?
  While we recognize that this is completely possible for someone to be happier after losing a foot, we believe that this contentment isn't the result of having lost a foot. Wouldn't they be even happier at that time if they had both feet with which to enjoy their life?

So there you have it. Dipodism defended in a fairly shallow manner, but defended nonetheless.

So far we've only come up with two practices for our cult, both of which haven't been enacted yet. First, we really need to make up a dance move that celebrates both feet, but after more than a month we still haven't come up with anything truly amazing. Second, our cult meetings will involve sitting in the back of our French classroom drawing parallel lines across our wrists with a red pen to simulate cuts (don't worry, we aren't disturbed or depressed or anything, the reason for this practice comes from a completely separate story). Seeing as how we haven't had any meetings yet, we haven't gotten to scare the living daylights out of our French teacher so that he will go out of his way not to offend us in any way for at least three or four days.

As a last note on dipodism, an addendum was recently added. It's as simple as the main point of our philosophy and even more easily debunked: "It is always the right time to strike a pose." More specifically, it's always the right time for a group of people to count to three, spring out of their desks, and strike a pose (one that effectively demonstrates the use of both feet if possible). Unlike the two practices mentioned in the last paragraph, a group of my friends and I have actually done this on a couple occasions.

Characterization

I'm kind of disappointed with myself for not coming up with a title for this post better than the name of the English assignment I'm putting up, but nothing came to me. We have just been assigned what may very well become my favorite english project of all time. My teacher had pulled several random names from a phone book, and we got to choose one and create a character based on that name. The next day she handed us a list of quotes both amusing and serious that she had heard throughout her life and we were to come up with a person based on one of those as well. At the end of the project, the class will compile their compositions and we'll give a name to the town where all these fine people live. I actually ended up not using the name I originally chose for the one or the quote I chose for the other, but she doesn't mind as long as our creations are well-crafted.


First up is Naomi Brookmeyer. She is actually a mish-mash of at least ten of my friends and relatives, which I didn't notice until after I was done writing it. Here she is:

Naomi Brookmeyer awoke to the sound of her red-eared slider, Gershwin, knocking against the side of his aquarium/terrarium in petition for some breakfast. She swung her lanky, five-foot-nine, one-hundred-and-nineteen-pound figure out from underneath a tie-dyed comforter, planted feet with purple-painted toenails on a brightly hued shag rug next to the futon, and tripped over a well-worn denim bean bag as she clumsily made her way across the tiny, cluttered apartment bedroom and through the bead curtain that spanned the doorway. Rubbing the sleep from large hazel eyes and pushing strands of straight, shoulder length, light brown hair behind her ears she searched the fridge in the single-habitant apartment’s multi-purpose room that served as entryway, living room, and kitchen. She walked over to Gershwin’s home by the half-light provided by a lava lamp and a night light that let out pinpoints of light in the configuration of Ursa Minor, her favorite constellation. Only jumping a little when her sleek, lithe ferret named Linnaeus leapt onto her narrow shoulders from a nearby bookcase and fondly nuzzled her cheek, she gingerly lifted the screen from the turtle’s case and placed the leafy green within easy reach of the hungry reptile. After replacing Gershwin’s screen and stroking Linnaeus’ fur, she glanced towards the fish tank in the corner and, even in the dim light, her fear was confirmed. John Lennon, a minnow with an extra fin, was floating belly up like his deformed predecessors, Rachel Carson and Persephone, had within the past month. Her rescue mission for the mutated fish from the chemical choked run-off pond behind the apartment complex hadn’t fared too well so far. The twenty-one-year-old woman sighed and made a mental note to conduct a funeral for the ill-fated fish before interring him in the compost pile she had started next to the building’s trash bin. She flipped the light switch on and off several times with no effect before remembering that she had unplugged all her lamps. Someone had told her that unplugging your light conserved even more energy than leaving them off, and she believed it wholeheartedly. Giving up on the futile act of flipping the switch, she rolled hand-woven bamboo curtains away from her apartment’s two windows and suddenly noticed how late it was. She chided herself for staying up so late working on her term paper about the relationship between global warming and world peace and began tunneling through a heap of laundry on a quest for her Tidy Paws Pet Store uniform. With an exclamation of joy she darted into her bathroom (the third and final room of her living quarters), shrugged into her work clothes, applied a dash of mascara, and swept her hair into a bun precariously secured with a pair of chopsticks. She checked on Dalí and Emerson, hermit crabs, and swung her vibrantly hued patchwork purse onto her shoulder and headed out the door. Halfway down the stairs from her second story apartment she realized she had forgotten shoes. She half ran, half fell back up the steps and grabbed the first pair of shoes she saw, her mud-speckled hiking boots. Later when she sat down at the pet store to pull on her shoes she would discover she had neglected to bring socks, but for the moment she speed-walked the two blocks to her hob in her bare feet and pondered things like what she would add to her tofu soup for dinner or the lamentable fact that the customers she sold precious animals to couldn’t possibly love or care for them like they deserved of understand them the way that she, Naomi Brookmeyer did.

And next we have Claude Witherspoon (I'm not completely satisfied with his first name, any suggestions?). The writing style I used for Naomi fits the description of the assignment better, but I like the way the author interacts with the reader when describing Claude.

A pudgy, solemn-looking man of medium stature clad in garments that had probably seen better days strode proudly through the town square. His name was Claude Witherspoon, and believe me, he made sure you knew it. Though he was unemployed and seventy-two years of age, he carried himself with a dignity that somehow seemed to fit, perhaps because of its irony. You see, Claude had a gift. It was a gift that only a handful of the town’s more superstitious women gave any credence to (and even them only reluctantly), but a gift nonetheless if you asked him. He was an expert in the prediction of calamities. Of course, his predictions were very rarely destined to be fulfilled within the next decade, but he also had an uncanny knack for predicting that anvil-shaped clouds would bring storms, and that terminally ill persons would die. Some grumbled that he never predicted anything in between because he couldn’t really foresee further than the end of his nose and wouldn’t chance an unfulfilled prophesy before the end of his life, but he scoffed at these silly criticisms and continued to foretell doom, gloom, and despair. After all, who can control what the future chooses to reveal?

I hope you've enjoyed my character sketches. I hope to make more. If anyone can think of a random name or quirk, I could try to create an identity for it.

Happiness

My English class got into a debate on this subject earlier this week. Do people have any control over their degree of happiness?

From my perspective, they do. It's impossible do enjoy life without trying at least a little bit. Contentment is a choice. This doesn't mean that I don't think people should ever be sad, but that if you dwell on your misfortunes, you'll be a miserable person. You have to choose to work with what you have left and move on with life.

On the other side of the argument, they agree that you have to choose to be happy, but they think that that's unrealistic and rarely applicable to life. They said that you have to think about the bad things that happen too, it's impossible to just ignore them. They also brought up the topic of clinically depressed people, and how they can't really choose contentment.

In response to this, yes I agree that you're going to have to think about the bad things sometimes, but it's unhealthy to obsess with them. Yeah, it's hard to choose to get over your circumstances sometimes, and people may even think you're insane or you don't care, but if most of the world is unhappy, why should you listen to people telling you to act like every other normal person when your goal, in this case, is to be something that they aren't? As to clinical depression, yeah it's a lot harder for them to have a bright outlook on life. But a lot of clinically depressed individuals aren't born that way. The chemical imbalances in their brains are due to them thinking miserable and dark thought over and over again until those pathways build up in their brains and it's harder to think any other way.

Another point that was discussed was that some people are raised in such a way that it's easier for them to look past tragedies. Does that give them an unfair advantage over other people? Well I suppose it does, but that doesn't give people raised in less optimistic circumstances a good excuse not to try. Happiness (or rather contentment; I think that word fits better here) isn't based on whether good or bad things are happening to you, it's based on making a serious effort to live with whatever comes to you. True, it's easier for some than others, but that doesn't mean it's not true.

And contentment doesn't necessarily mean you're constantly frolicking about. As I like to say(but rarely get the opportunity to), "I'm usually happy, and sometimes I smile about it." In general (particularly in the last few months with the exception of last week), I have an internal peace thanks to God that doesn't exactly make me gleeful, but it makes me okay with life.

Maybe that sounds like I'm being too harsh, but I'm not trying to be. This is just what I think, and I have a really hard time sympathizing with people who live by their instinctive emotions.

I mostly typed that just to get what's been living in my brain out there, but does anyone have any thoughts on the subject?

Fall is Coming! (fo real this time)

So maybe I spoke too early the last time I said fall was here. Although I did say that we would probably still have some muggy days, the past few weeks have been a bit more than a few warm days. Here's a disgusting fact: on Monday we tied the record heat of 91º that was set during the Dust Bowl for the Cincinnati area on the 8th of October. The Dust Bowl! What is the world coming to? I suppose many would say global warming. Whatever is causing it, the tri-state region was certainly experiencing some warming.

Now, I think, it can officially be deemed fall. It's the first day of the season so far where people were cold enough that they realized how much I love the cold and find it exceedingly comfortable. Of course, with that comes the general consensus that something is loose in my head, and maybe something is, but I like it that way.

But watch. Now that I've said that, it will be like 90º again tomorrow.

Oodles of Doodles

And there's even a poodle!
I am ashamed that I even typed that, and I would like to apologize, but I think I'll leave it anyway. The heat is making me loopy, so hopefully that gives me a bit of an excuse.

To get to the point, I've noticed this year that my doodle output level has greatly increased, and some of them are very interesting, so I've decided to post some of the highlights here.

This is Horatio the Splendiferous. He's a talking turtle I created in precalc while the teacher spent like 15 minutes trying to communicate a concept to a student who needed it put into different terms. Little did I know that he was going to collect our work from that day, so Mr. Jacob, who didn't know me very well yet, probably wondered what on earth was going through my head.

Here we have a thunderstorm (complete with sound effects brought to you by onomatopoeia, which I think I spelled wrong). It happened during a sermon one Sunday when I was distracted by the fact we were supposed to be getting a storm that week.

This is an m&m, as you can probably tell. It has some nice shading, but I wouldn't count it as a highlight of my doodles except for the fact that it led to my next one, which is one of my favorites (you can see a smidgen of it to the far right on this picture)...

The Death Star! I was drawing the m&m during math class (most of my lovely drawings have been born in that class so far, and nearly all my masterpieces too) while my friend Mike looked over my shoulder and tried to guess what I was drawing. He thought it was a moon at first, so he told me I should draw the death star next. The girl on the other side of me didn't know what it was, so I decided I'd try it. It actually turned out pretty well, to my surprise. I think it's my best so far, but Horatio and the Annelida Lumbricus 3K (coming up next) remain the most popular among my colleagues.

And here it is, the Annelida Lumbricus 3000, also known as the invertible. We were talking about invertible functions in precalc, and the word invertible automatically makes me think of an invertebrate as a convertible. So I drew it. The text around it is a little hard to read, but it says "It's a convertible... It's an invertebrate... It's an INVERTIBLE! I call it the... Annelida Lumbricus 3K" Annelida Lumbricus is the Latin name for the family that earth worms come from.

This is yet another masterpiece from math. The part in pen it the unit circle with all degree and radian values for the specified points plus the coordinate pair for each on a cartesian coordinate system.

Here's the poodle I mentioned earlier. Not all that exciting, but I figured that if I used it as part of my little rhyming thing at the beginning, it might as well get a place of honor. I really don't like poodles all that much.

Here's some of the less exciting pieces of art.