Electrocution

is really, really fun. I know I've told all of you about it already, but, really, I want to record this for posterity, seeing as it was, you know, completely f**king awesome.

Yes, the two asterisks are necessary. Just as necessary as they were last week when somebody modified my science research paper to say some very rude things about my mother. Then again, they said f***e. I'm still not sure what the "e" is for.

So, today in physics, Mr. Mubble comes in with a giant metal ball on a big plexiglass stick ("Oh," said Kathrya, when I told her this. "Was it...big?"). "This," said Mubbs, "is a Van de Graaff generator."

Mr. Mubble poked at the generator and asked, "has anybody ever been electrocuted?"

"On a lamp," I said. "It hurt."

"Me too!" said Umber. "Well, it was basically a lamp, but it, like, wasn't making light, and I was going to change the bulb, so I put my thumb in the socket, but there wasn't a bulb."

"Did you get shocked?" probed Mubbs.

"Well it hurt a lot, so, like, yeah."

Nobody bothered to ask why she bothered to put her thumb in it anyways.

Then Dino went into his bit about sticking a paperclip into a socket in eighth grade (I always knew he was daft), but Caroline started telling me her electrocution story, about a live wire she had to plug into a high voltage lamp for Les Mis, at the same time.

Mr. Mubble wanted a demonstration of what happens when people get charged up. I was selected as the participant because my hair is relatively thin and of a good length. Sergio tried to get a chant going of "Tea, Tea, Tea," but he was, per usual, unsuccessful, and it didn't take much persuasion anyways.

Becca brought over a bunch of textbooks for me to stand on so that I couldn't discharge into the ground. Apparently, that's really uncomfortable, although it seems doubtful that something could be more uncomfortable than getting charged up. I stood on the stack of books, making Mr. Mubbles, who is already shorter than me, look diminutive.

"Put your hands on it," he said.

I slowly extended my hands and touched my fingertips to the metal surface.

"It'll go faster if you add your palms."

I flattened my hands. I stood still for a few seconds, the entire class watching. "Oh my god, my arms are tingling," I said.

Mubbs laughed. "Do you want to stop?"

"No, I'm good, it's just kind of....weird."

Mr. Mubble said some stuff about the science behind it, with me interrupting every few seconds with relevant statements such as "I think my shirt is sticking to me."

"That's supposed to happen." He looked over the progress of the charge. "A few more seconds and your hair should start to stand up. I wonder if we'll get it all the way over your head."

"Wonderful," I responded with a grimace. Predictable, I could see my hair starting to curl up at the edge of my vision a few moments later.

The class started laughing. I stayed there for a while longer, my hair on end, until Mr. Mubble declared me fully charged.

"Anyone want to discharge her?"

Dino, who'd been inching further away from the generator with every minute, scooted backwards another half a foot.

"I'll do it," said Tybalt.

I reached towards him a bit, but I was afraid to touch anything, so he ended up standing and reaching out. I touched his knuckle with the tip of my pointer finger and yelped.

The class laughed.

"Ow!"

"Do it again," said Mr. Mubbles. "She might not be fully discharged."

It hurt more the second time. I squeaked and moved backwards, falling off the books. "That hurt!"

"You might want to touch something metal to get rid of the rest," said Mubbles.

I reached cautiously towards the board and squealed again when I heard the zapping noise and lost some more electrons. I still hurt. I was afraid to do it again, so I went back to my desk. When I sat down, I got shocked again, eliciting another yelp followed by another laugh.

Yes Man

I got home from school today utterly exhausted. There should not have been school today. I don't care how goddamned not-icy the roads were, the online snow day calculator gave me a 99% chance of snow day. I think the problem is the administration. Harsh doesn't begin to cover it. Our frog of a superintendent would simply prefer to pretend that snow doesn't exist. I think Becky's plan is the best- get into a car crash, and put your blood on his hands. Now, I probably will not actually do this, and likely neither will she, but I have a feeling that nothing short of a catastrophe could change the administrative opinion in question.

I just watched Yes Man, which basically consisted of a rubber-faced, not particularly attractive protagonist who never does anything because he's so insecure he thinks that as soon as people truly know him they'll just start hating. Then, he goes through some mystical self-help transformation and says yes to everything and finds his own manic pixie dream girl. The basic idea behind the Yes Man premise is that we shouldn't be letting opportunities pass us by, and if we'd just embrace it, our lives would be fuller and better and a whole host of other positive adjectives.

I can understand that, to a certain extent. I do think that one needs to be careful- there are people who say yes too often, who don't get their own homework done because they're too busy helping everyone else in the entire class, who give so much that they don't have anything left to hold as they fall asleep at night. I'm not sure I really have either of those problems. I mean, I do do some things. There are times when I say no, I'm too busy, no, I don't want to, no, I have a...thing, but most of the time, I do try to be somewhat open. After all, I know how depressing it is to not do anything.

When I was younger, I used to always have absolutely nothing planned for the first week of summer. I would veg, completely and totally, for that time period. Then, the year after fifth grade, all of my friends (granted, I only had three friends at the time, but this is beside the point) went to camp, and I was left alone. I did nothing for a week, and my clearest memory is of lying sprawled across the couch in the kitchen, moaning to my mother, "I'm soooo bored."

So, moral of the story, do stuff, because boredom is boring. On that note, I'm going to find something to do.

I was going to talk about falling over...

but Kathrya has it covered, although she did miss the one where I fell off of my own chair during math.

In that case, I'll have to use an alternate story.

One fundamentally awkward aspect of the school bathrooms is the presence of those little communal tampon bins, particularly in the cases where the bins were removed from the door and instead sit between the stalls, displaying their bloody contents to the world.

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't really want the acquaintance in the next stall over seeing the evidence of my menstrual cycle as it seeps through the toilet paper I wrapped my tampon up in. It's a private, personal part of being a woman. And I'm proud of my vagina and all that jazz, but I still think the blood is gross, and I generally avoid announcing the current state of my bits to the world, this blog and Nyx aside.

However, today, as I was swapping my own feminine hygiene products, Becky (an extremely petite senior in my physics and government classes) dropped an applicator into the bin. My first thought was "How odd, I thought seniors were post-menstrual and didn't get their periods."