Academia Nuts

Today I was an honorary member of the Academic Team! Half the varsity team was at home puking, so the other half decided I should join them. It didn't go so well. We had two matches and got utterly smoked at the first and pretty much gave up on the second. In the first one, we would've done a lot better if the other team wasn't so trigger-happy, but the second round was just flat out bad. Both teams scored extremely low. Our advisor said that the questions for the second match were harder than he's ever heard. The math questions were about computing numbers in base 8, hexadecimal, and all that other fun stuff. I was the only person out of both teams who knew what it meant, but I couldn't do the problems in 10 seconds. In the life sciences category, the questions were about calculating changes in entropy, which is totally not my definition of life sciences. The fine arts questions were all about where certain famous pieces of art were kept, and quite honestly, who cares? One question was actually about the city where The Scream by Edvard Meunch is located, but unfortunately my team didn't get any points for the fact that our captain pointed out that the question was invalid considering that the painting is actually somewhere on the black market right now. For the American Literature section, we were told that the answers all contained the word death, so the other team tried suing "The Death of a Salesman" for every answer, even though I pointed out that it was a play and the questions were about books. I'm fairly proud of how I personally did, considering that it was my first experience with the academic team. The JV team lost too, but that's mostly because two of them are ignorant, annoying freshman and the only girl on the team hates them with a burning passion. Plus she was bitter that our advisor chose her best friend to fill the other slot on the varsity team rather than herself.

There were some good points to it too. I got to sit on a window ledge and stare out over a garden, and from there I solved the Mystery of the Newly Cut Ornamental Grasses. Halfway through the first match, the scorekeeper's dry-erase marker stopped working, but I was there with my magic purse to save the day, even offering two different colors of dry-erase marker. That was pretty much the highlight of my day. Going between matches, the other three varsity members and I all linked arms and skipped down the hallway while Anna and I sang songs from The Wizard of Oz. On the bus ride back home, I got the privilege of staring out at the slowly darkening cloudy sky with practically no intrusions on my reveries. Once we reached the school, I got to feel the cold wind toss my hair around and rush across my bare feet and arms while I waited for my ride. It could have gone better, but it could've been much worse too.

Unfortunately, my friend Joe now thinks I should just join the academic team, and he doesn't seem to understand the idea that I have more things to do than I have hours to do them in.

Well, my friends, I must now bid thee so long, farewell, adios, and goodnight. And perhaps adieu, adieu, to you and you and you (or would "yeu" be better, rather than "you"? They pronounce it weird in the song so that the rhyme works). I now get to work on a biology lab report! *grits teeth, twitches, and makes that smile/grimace expression...you know what I mean* Our results are... interesting. I've actually called all the members of my class, and we're pretty much agreeing to all make the same mistake since our data doesn't work. We aren't fudging the data, mind you, just making and assumption that we know is incorrect. And we all know what happens when you make assumptions. We'll just have to keep our underhanded collaboration under wraps.