Games of the Future

From the imagination of my youngest sister I bring you a game of the future. It has no name yet, but my six-year-old sister taught it to us with such great enthusiasm that it's preposterous to think that it won't be the next "thing". Here's how you play:

1. One person (we'll call them person A) starts it off by asking the person to their left (who we will cal person B) the question "odd or even?"
2. Person B answers by saying "odd" or"even"
3. Person A then asks person be to say a number.
4. Person B replies by saying a number, but it doesn't have to correspond with their earlier answer of "odd" or "even" (ie. if person B said "odd", they can say "four" in response to the second question even though four isn't an odd number).
5. Now person B repeats the question from step 1 to person A.
6. Person A must choose whichever answer person B did not choose.
7. Person B now asks person a to name a number, and the same guidelines from step 4 still apply.
8. Person B now turns to the person on his/her left and starts the process anew. This is repeated indefinitely. It is sure to provide endless hours of distraction.

No goal or end point is clear, but Amanda assures us that it's fun. After being stuck at the dinner table for a full cycle through my family of nine people, I admit that the intrigue still escapes me, but it must be something revolutionary.

Chlorobat

I've decided I really don't feel like going on about how much the combined forces of french, art, biology, and now english as well are preparing to boot me into a chasm of despair. Instead, I'll introduce you all to my little friend Chlorobat.

You've probably seen him chilling on the right side of my blog, but if you haven't you should look for him there. He's a dark green bat that I adopted from some online thing linked to Ellen's blog. Unlike other virtual pets, he doesn't require any attention or feeding. You can feed and play with him, but he evidently doesn't need that to "survive" considering the fact that I didn't know you could do such things until about a week after I adopted him. The little fellow will follow your mouse pointer around if you click on him, and if you want to watch him catch a fly (using echolocation, of course), click on the little button on the bottom right corner of his habitat that would probably say "more" if it wasn't cut off.

As you probably know, I put at least a little thought into every name I give, so it shouldn't be surprising that Chlorobat's name means something. Chloro- is the Greek prefix for green, (and as you can doubtlessly see, he is a lovely shade of that color) and bat means bat in English (and he is, in fact, a bat). In addition, his name sounds like chloroplast, the cell organelle responsible for giving plants their lovely color along with synthesizing the carbohydrates that fuel life.

About Digging Your Own Grave

It's generally a bad idea. However, I very nearly managed to do that very thing (figuratively). And who knows, I could very likely still pull that off in a different fashion by the end of this week. Instead I just dug a very deep hole and I should be able to climb back out by tomorrow morning, although a bit sleep deficient.

What I did was this: I created a complex, detailed photo montage of a surrealist landscape that I was to later ("later" originally meant by Thursday, if my art teacher hadn't decided to be amazing this morning, which I'll explain later) reproduce in an accursed style known as photorealism. Photorealism is just what is sounds like - drawing and coloring so that the final product looks realistic enough to be a photo. Normally, I'd have no issue with this method. Sure it's incredibly tedious, but it can be fun in a challenging, make-your-head-want-to-split-open kind of way. I mentioned earlier that I made my own "photo" to copy, but I think I'll mention some of the detail I was stupid enough to put in.
-a unicorn 3/8 of an inch long (yes I measured)
-a school of narwhals that easily fit into a one-inch square
-a wisteria bonsai
-a gorgeous sky full of clouds with indistinct boundaries
-a grove of bonsai, each plant being about 1.5 inches tall
-and an orange-ish colored river (or blood-colored if you're my slightly disturbed friend across the table) with more contrasting hues than you can shake a whole bundle of sticks at
-you get the picture, it has massive amounts of minute details (I wish "details" started with an "m", because I had a neat little string of alliteration going there)

This 9"x12" piece of cruel, beautiful masterpiece was orginally due this Thursday, but Mrs. Ficke is pretty much one of my favorite people in the world right now. It's now not due until next Friday! We don't get any more class time to work on it, but I always do more work on my projects outside of class than inside anyway so that doesn't impact me much.

Unfortunately, I've spent the last three nights staying up late (like 2 a.m. or so) to work on it, and I can't regain that sleep until winter break. Plus I still have a 50 point bi-weekly (full projects are 100 points) assignment due tomorrow, which I started this morning... I made quick progress, but I'll probably be up until 2 again because of that combined with the homework I didn't do last night.

That was "Part I: Art from Art Class" of my near disastrous week. "Part II: Art from French Class" and maybe "Part III: Why A.P. Bio Sucks My Life Force Away" will come in the next few days, if I still feel like writing about them. For now, I need to make sure Part I remains simply a hostile visitor, start diminishing the postponed doom of Part II, and make sure that the immutable dangers of Part III don't come up push me back into the grave I so ignorantly began to dig.

Happy Day After Thanksgiving/Black Friday!

In the Gast house, Thanksgiving preparations started Wednesday. We cooked pies, turkeys (yes, plural, we had about 30 guests and made enough bird for everyone to take home leftovers), sweet potatoes, cake, homemade cinnamon applesauce, a cheese ball, and I think that's it.

I got the supreme joy of dressing the turkey. I had no idea that playing with the raw poultry could be so fun, but, surprisingly, it was. There was just something about the texture and the way it was kinda squishy and rubbery that was unexpectedly simply delightful. I also got to look inside it's ribcage and pull its neck out of its backside where the turkey slaughtering company had stored it in the event that you wanted to use it to make gravy, along with a packet of mystery flesh from some organ that the bird once used.

I also got to make the most delicious sort of cheese ball, and I'll admit I ate quite a bit of the "scraps" after I was done "thoroughly scraping" the mixing bowl onto a cookie sheet.

We always sprinkle cinnamon on top of our pumpkin pies, and we frequently make it more interesting by making a stencil out of paper, laying it on top of the pie, and filling in the uncovered portion with cinnamon, leaving the shape of the stencil. I was in charge of making stencils for the pies. The first one was a perfectly normal, fall-esque sugar maple (Acer saccharum), but the second stencil was a sea serpent. I get a strange sense of elation from weirding out my extended family. I actually made a little story for the dragon and wrote it out in calligraphy and French, because it was a remarkably stupid story, and I would rather nobody else could read it.

Then came Thursday, the official Thanksgiving Day. I woke up at 7 when the sun started coming up above the trees to the east of my house and then proceeded to do what I've done every Thanksgiving for as long as I can remember: start the traditional jigsaw puzzle. Every year we get a new jigsaw puzzle of a thousand pieces or so (this year we got two, because I have a habit of finishing one by noon) to be solved as a family on Thanksgiving. I'm pretty much the only person who does it now, but after dinner I sometimes get some help.

There were no specific episodes that were especially interesting, but things followed the same pattern as normal. My uncle Mike showed up just in time for dinner (which is actually unusual I suppose, since he's normally at least a half hour late) and then got picked on for the entire time he was there without realizing it, my uncles and my grandpa all ate Reddi-Whip in strange ways and taught two of my sisters to do the same, my aunt moped around like the apocalypse was coming and she was the only one who knew or cared, my youngest sister threw a fit about something completely trivial, and one aunt and uncle decided to stay well past their welcome. I think they were having some sort of stand-off against the Corbins to see who could stay longer. They weren't even doing anything. They just sat silently on a sofa until they took the hint that it was time to go.

And so now it's Black Friday, and I pity anyone who has to work today. I also question the sanity of anyone who tries to shop today. Later today, my family and a couple from church will go pick out a Christmas tree from a tree farm, and we'll each pick out a new tree ornament like we do every year. Then we'll stuff the tree into the van (and I'll sit as close to it as possible, because surprisingly they make good pillows, plus they smell like frost and sap) and drive back home being forced to listen to the Partridge Family Christmas Album while me and at least three of my other siblings wish we could gouge our ears out, or stuff them with someone else's or something like that. Once we get home, we will drink hot chocolate and get out all our decorations to make the house all festive looking.

For now, I get to just sit here occasionally stirring some homemade chicken soup with rice and staring out the window at the delightful snow. This has been your host, Maple Gast, with a full report on a Gast Thanksgiving.

A General Rant at Several Aspects of Society

Particularly high school society, and even more specifically the society of high school girls. Even though I belong to both those categories, my many faults rarely include the ones I'm sick of right now.

First off, why on earth are my school mates so mean to those who are a little departed from the norm? They don't despise everyone who's unusual, which is good because if they did I'd be screwed, but you've all been through high school, so you know who I mean. Yes, they're often socially inept, they sometimes do or say awkward things, and some of them even try to get on your nerves, but that gives you no excuse to make fun of them at every opportunity. There are two girls in particular who everyone teases without reason. True, they do some pretty odd things, but not only are they incredibly sweet people if you ever meet them - they also have had rough lives. And the things that people target them for are things they have absolutely no control over and are things that really don't make a difference in them personally. Seriously. Do teens have some sort of sensor that tells them who's hurting most so they can jab at their wounds even more? For all the other people who are despised, I can generally see a way in which they've brought some of it on themselves, but that still doesn't give anybody an excuse to treat them like trash.

Now on to the more specific category of girls. Can somebody please explain to me why on earth life has to be a drama-gorged gossip fest? Come on. Does it truly matter who fought with their boyfriend last night or who got wasted at a party? Does that have any bearing on what meaningful uses you or anyone else could put their lives to? Why does there seem to be a need to create worthless drama when you could be doing something worthwhile?

The girl issue expands to the world in general: why the obsession with celebrities, particularly once they end up arrested or in rehab or something? Nobody even knows these people, yet there are so many individuals that make the life of some big-shot the focal point of their life. I can't even comprehend how that could be at all satisfying. Maybe they just want to ignore their own lives because something there is messed up. Well here's a newsflash for them: it's never going to get better if you keep shoving it out of sight.

That's all for now. But I can assure you similar things will be cropping up every now and then. I tend to detest society during the winter.

Captain Jack

My beloved little Finneytown High School is currently in its second year under the reign of the iron-fisted Cpt. Jack Fisher. While it's true that we needed a principal who would actually discipline students and keep the school a little more in line, sometimes Mr. Fisher can be a bit ridiculous.

His most recent decision was that locker signs are tacky, silly, juvenile, unprofessional, etc. and should be removed. So he took down every single sign from every single locker, be it for birthdays, sports, fun, or any number of other random things that we decide to make signs for. How on earth can it matter that locker signs are "unprofessional" when professionals wouldn't be storing their work in long hallways of lockers? Silly? Yeah some of them were silly and even tacky at times, but for goodness sakes, we're high schoolers. Cut us some slack. Silly quirks don't spell out a future of failure and academic slacking. If they did, all their brightest students along with most of the rest of the school as well would be headed for doom.

Several of us have serious issues finding our lockers if we don't look for the signs on ours or on our neighbors' lockers. If my locker number hadn't ended up being one of my favorite numbers, there would be no way I could find it without the adorable sign that my friend Anna made for me (it was brown and green with a panda bear and leaf rubbings that were actually part of one of my art projects). Colors and shapes stick in my head a lot better than numbers, so when all the lockers are the same shape size and color, the only thing to depend on is the signs that are hung (unless your locker is the last in a hall or something).

Furthermore, our signs show a variety of things. They announce tryouts for athletic and musical groups, tell the school when somebody should be wished a happy birthday, encourage performers (be they athletes, musicians, whatever), show team and school spirit, express pieces of a person, and much more. They have even been used to celebrate the lives of the two students who have been killed within the past two years. Does Cpt. Jack really want to take that away? He's always saying that we need more school and team spirit. More unity. We've got class tension down to a fine art, but he'd really rather we supported Finneytown rather than the class of '09 or '08, but he could help by not tearing down what things we do that are aimed towards his ends.

Mr. Fisher has also made several other regrettable decisions (such as the possibility of eliminating AP courses, but that's a rant for another day). Fortunately, we do get a lot of personal amusement out of his existence. Thanks to my mom who first noticed this, it's fairly common to hear him referred to as Grimace the milkshake monster from McDonald's due to the fact that he wears a lot of purple and has a physique much like that of our purple fast food franchise friend. There's also the myriad of jokes relating Cpt. Jack and rum, such as the ideas for t-shirts saying "Where's the rum gone?" or "If it was a dream, there'd be rum" along with others. The chief anti-Fisher movement right now is discussed with the coded phrase "Have you seen page 82 of the yearbook?" I can't really explain this one without a diagram, so ask me about it sometime.

It's Days Like Today That I Dream Of

It's quite lovely out today. All I want to do is throw my window open wide and sit on my bed listening to music and reading or sketching. But alas, this can't happen all day long. Eventually my mom tells me to close the portal to the brisk outdoors, the physics book calls to me to sketch vector diagrams instead of faces, and my biology book wants me to read a history chapter about Darwin rather than Foxe's Book of Martyrs. But I've decided, for some reason I really can't explain, that what I spent several minutes trying to write would do well as a poem. I'm no accomplished poet, but I think this one's okay.


It's days like today that I dream of
It's true I suppose that I dream of
Unnumbered types of ideal days
But for this time all I dream is today

Grey skies hang so low by the treetops
The dark clouds now send rain in fat drops
Preoccupied winds bring northern air
All that I want is to sit and to stare

To sing till my voice becomes weary
With window wide open see clearly
Phalanges and face embrace the chill
If only if only the time I could still

But nazis* do come shutting windows
And textbooks do beg to be unclosed
This day like today now runs from me
All I can hope is that more will soon be



*I hope you've realized I don't mean the actual German Nazis or anything, but my mother can be a nazi of sorts in my eyes for her very anti-open-windows sentiments.

Pavlov Strikes Back!

I made an interesting observation (well I think it's sorta neat anyway) today that further proves what Pavlov demonstrated with his famous dogs.

Today we had what we call an "early release day for staff development" which means students get out of school at 1:00 PM and the teachers stay to bond and grow together or something like that. We students love it, our teachers dread it. Apparently "staff development" is one of the stupidest things ever invented in the little suburb of Finneytown, if you ask my science teachers. Since two hours are cut off of our day, all the bells have to be shortened and we go to lunch during 6th bell instead of 5th bell. On normal days high schoolers eat lunch at 12:00 or 12:30, and on days like today lunch is at 11:30 or 11:00. So we're actually eating lunch earlier even though we go in a later bell. When sixth bell rolled around, the majority of my French class expressed that they were hungrier than they normally were by that time of day and welcomed lunch.

I hypothesize (and it may be purely coincidence, but who knows?) that we have become so associated with associating our fifth bell classes with the coming of lunch, that our bodies begin anticipating food once we enter our fifth bell class, even if it's earlier in the day, and by sixth bell we are more than ready to eat despite the fact that it's earlier than we normally have lunch.