Runnin' from the Po-po

I apologize for the Ke$ha related joke. I shouldn't have done it. I really shouldn't have.

Anyways, this post is dedicated to my bepatched pants, shown above. The word "bepatched" is lifted here from Heart of Darkness, which I still don't really like all that much, even though I am now almost, almost done with it.

Let us also note that the butt of these pants looks vaguely droopy, as, in the picture, I'm not wearing them. This should be taken as proof that I am a fabulously curvy individual, despite the fact that said pants are a size 4 long, and therefore, well, not all that curvy. However, since the buying (I use the word 'buying' loosely, as they were technically free) of said pants, I've gone up a pant size to an absolutely luscious 6 long, and a bra size as well.

I realize that the fact that I am now a B cup is probably one of those things that I shouldn't share. But I am very, very proud of my body for putting its weight in the right place, so I felt the need to express my great happiness.

I am such a teenager.

End Dedication.

Now, we come to the true post, which is "How My Pants Found Their Patches", more or less.

During many of my evenings while at RSI, I played frisbee. (I use the word "evening" loosely, as this was typically between 11pm and 1 am). Ultimate Frisbee is a truly awesome activity, one which I enjoy greatly, despite the fact that I am altogether terrible at it.

Well, that's not quite true. I can throw and catch the damn thing, more or less. I just get winded easily, and I'm terrible at changing directions, so I tend to end up running into whoever I'm supposed to be guarding, which usually results in me getting hurt, because somehow I do that.

Example: that time I was guarding Stratton, a tall skinny fellow who is both taller and skinnier than me, and he stopped moving, and I kept moving, and his forehead hit me in the chin and I had this really annoying tender spot right where I'd started stroking when I was thinking (thank you, Dawson, for giving me your weird ticks), and it was rather uncomfortable.

On this particular evening, I was running late to frisbee. I don't quite recollect why; this could have been the night that I tried to explain tampons to Zsa and Grace, or I might have just been doing something less interesting, like talking on the phone to Rube. Regardless, I was late, so I went walking along the fence looking for a Way In, which I couldn't find.

I past Hyunmi (female, pronounced 'Hummy') and Maxwell walking the other way, and they told me the gate was locked, so I went to the far corner, where the dirt looked soft, and pulled myself up and over the fence, a feat which, while slightly annoying, was not altogether difficult, and I landed comfortably in the grass on the other side.

I jogged past Livny, Jasmine, Stratton, and others, who were playing soccer, and, presumably, enjoying themselves. I joined the frisbee game (I believe I was guarding Luke, who makes an effort despite his perpetual butterfingers). I played for all of two minutes before the soccer players began moving towards us at an alarmingly fast rate. Red lights flashed behind them.

"Should we run?" someone asked.

"No," responded Jasmine. "Just leave. Quickly."

The red lights were, naturally, a police car. Apparently we're not supposed to use the field when it's been locked up.

A small group of us reached the surrounding fence. Tem climbed over first. I swore in my head, but made an effort to scramble up. When my barefoot feet proved incapable, Dawson gave me a boost. I got on top. Looked down.

This time I swore out loud. The ground was very far away.

"I don't think I can get that far."

"I'll help," said Tem.

I looked at him, incredulous. "I highly doubt you'll be able to catch me."

"We'll do it like chicken. Have you played chicken?"

"Yes, okay, sure."

He stepped closer to the fence. I tried to get down, only to discover that I was stuck. I performed a very awkward (and trying, for someone with my minimal level of upper body strength) push-up maneuver, then sat myself Tem's shoulders.

"Okay," he said. "Now, get down."

"How?"

He paused, considering. He was, after all, over six feet tall, and I was, of course, quite clumsy. Dropping me backwards would be inadvisable, and his head was in the way of a forward leap.

"Okay," he said. "I lean forward, you hop off. Good?"

He started bending before I could respond. I dismounted, rather inelegantly, before falling into a still-more-inelegant heap on the ground. He helped me up.

During the time it'd taken me to unstick myself, Dawson had already vaulted over, and the three of us joined the rest of the group in walking back towards Simmons.

My pants felt...not quite warm enough. I checked my butt. All the fabric was still there, but there was a substantial tear on my left back pocket. If I remember correctly, I asked Kris or Jasmine (probably Jasmine, since she's female, but for some reason my memory says Kris) to check it, and he/she declared it "not that bad, and if you'd just stop fiddling with it no one would notice."

We made it back to the dorm, settled around in the lounge that usually contains the ginormous set of jenga blocks.

I sat on one of the couches, ripped pants and all. Livny extracted a deck or two of cards from his backpack. There was some debate about games--the Chinese kids (mostly Andy and Jared) wanted to play President, or Mao, or some other complicated game that they said would be too annoying to teach the rest of it. Livny, however, had the cards, so he won the battle.

He declared that we would be playing "Durak." He then spent about twenty minutes explaining it, then, whenever any of us had difficulty, which was virtually every time we played, he's say "no, really, it isn't that complicated," and his henchman, Stratton, would say "so simple we all get it, yeah?" or something along those lines.

We played for a while. The game, as it turns out, translates loosely to "Idiot." Jasmine may have been the idiot, but I don't really remember.

I was, though, one of the first to be declared "Not Idiot," which is something I'm rather proud of.

Astronauts

On this evening, an astronaut came to speak with us. This was almost as awesome as when D.E. Shaw gave us free t-shirts.

It was really neat, but she kind of kept going on and on and on, and then Teresa started asking her all of these questions about how you go to the bathroom in space, and Lady Astro gave really long answers, and I tried really really hard not to fall asleep, and this may have been the lecture where I sat next to Bing, and he would drift off (and by drift off, I mean his head would fall into his lap as he crumpled into sleep) and then I'd elbow him.

Anyways, that was that lecture. I feel like there's meant to be more detail than that, but, well, ehhhh.

Instead, I will use this post to discuss mentorship awesomeness.

Every so often, Bashir would actually show up in mentorship, as opposed to going to W20 and moaning about how he didn't have anything to do, or sleeping on the couch, or making his phone do this really annoying beeping thing which I disabled midway through my second mentorship week when he wasn't paying attention.

On one particular day, Bashir wanted to hear about New Jersey. I believe this was triggered by the time he spiked his hair up for the WTP dance and I said he shouldn't try to be DJ Ronnie D from Jersey Shore (I just googled the cast of characters to see which one had the spiky hair, I have never watched the show). I drew him a map of the East coast, then did a squiggly line and dropped California on the other side of the board, indicating all relevant portions of the U.S. When Bashir asked about everyone else, I drew Arizona and Colorado in, then dropped dots for Andy and Dawson indicating their respective Mid-Western states.

Bashir then took over and taught Didge and me a lesson on Lebanese history, geography and politics, which I promptly forgot almost all of, aside from that there is some major division between North and South Lebanon, and there are beaches on one side and mountains on the other, and whichever North/South side Bashir lives in thinks the fighting is stupid because it scares the tourists.

Didge said something about Australia, but I forget what. 'Twas quite fun.

On a different mentorship day, I was feeling rather stressed out. This is not that surprising, as my emotions tend to always be in either "really, really happy" or "completely and utterly freaked out," although I often manage to freak out and be happy at the same time, but that's completely irrelevant to this point.

I was in a state of panic over RSI-related work, college-related work, and Dawson-and-Rube-related issues (those boys have caused me way, way too much emotional stress). I also wasn't eating or sleeping properly, because I kept forgetting to and my mind was really busy, and Didge, who had spent the last week teaming up with Ash and refusing to leave lunch until I'd had cold-healing soup, was not pleased.

Our plan of action was for us to go get office supplies so that I could organize my research materials and feel better about that, and then come back to the Undergraduate Chateau and let me talk or sleep, depending on which would help more.

So, we took the art budget supplied by our mentor (twenty bucks) and walked ourselves down to the student union, which turned out to be mostly a really souped up Barne's and Noble's, including a random barbershop in the back.

I'm still not really sure what's up with that, but we went downstairs for school supplies and textbooks, passing on our way an absolutely ginormous bin of extremely fuzzy and fluffy pillows.

We each pulled out a large blue pillow (the blue ones are always the best), then spent twenty minutes walking around the store looking for file folders, which we eventually found in rainbow, and dry-erase markers, which were also rainbow.

We returned the pillows, and I made an impulse purchase of purple earbuds and a paperback copy of Tess of the D'ubervilles.

Then we went back to the Undergraduate Chateau, and I ranted for two hours, interrupted by him telling me really adorable stories about his girlfriend, and then I went back to the dorm and he went to W20 to work more.

Then we saw the astronaut.

I should probably put those in a more chronological order, but, meh.

Not happening.

Another Round of Particle Physics

A certain someone (i.e. Tea) is rather confused, but doing her best to keep up. As a result, you get to listen to (watch? read?) me go through my notes this week.

My header, outlined to make it bold, is SHP notes, as I had my new notebook, which was supposed to be electrical engineering notes but has already become something of an everything. On the top is a note to self: ask Rube about imaginary particles, which he was kind enough to explain during the break. Apparently, particles can borrow energy from nowhere, so long as they give it back quickly, and this energy sometimes generates new particles, but, in doing so, imaginary particles end up briefly carrying mass. Or something like that.

There is then a large drawing of a flower. Following that is "Unification" with a squiggly line under it, with unpredictable variables underneath it (and I mean "unpredictable variables." I don't know what the variables were). Oh, wait, I remember. It's saying that the standard model can't predict all variables.

Next we have "SYMMETRIES - explain everything." I must take the least informative notes ever. Ooh, now we move onto Field Thoery: must incorporate special relativity, quantum mechanics. At that point, my instructor hadn't yet explained what, precisely, field theory was, so I nodded along quite nicely. Fields are, as I later discovered, functions defined at all points in space time. They can be scaler, like temperature on the Earth, or a vector, like in magnetism. In quantum mechanics, this field oscillates sinusoidally, (like a mattress!), simulating particle interactions, as particles are the waves on a spring. It is at moments like these when I truly appreciate that Mr. Mubble taught us about waves on Thursday.

Then we went into Langrangians, which went completely over my head but had some relation to spring constants that was identified on the powerpoint by "(this is suggestive!)" at which I snorted at poked Allana to point out the ridiculousness of the exclamation point, at which point Rube tutted at my immaturity (this from the boy who attempted to argue with me last year that the penis game is not at all immature).

So, there are infinite waves, which work together like probability waves with particle motion. At places where the waves are added together due to constructive interference, particles propagate. Then there was some math stuff I didn't understand, and I learned that (cursive O) O(x^n) is "x of order n." Apparently whatever I just learned from that math can be applied to a crystal lattice, and the word phonon can be used to describe it.

Page 2! This has a series of notes on it between Allana and I. There was a short asian guy with bowl cut hair and glasses and an MIT shirt in front of us who, I swear to deities, looked exactly like Andy. Rube actually pointed to the guy and said "I be he's going to RSI with you." Anyways, I told Allana that if I guy who looked like that came up to her at Quiz Bowl nationals, he was my friend. She asked me his name, I said Andy, she said what?, so I spelled it on the corner of my page.

"I'll introduce myself as Shaniqwa," wrote Allana.

"I told him you were Allana."

"Names that Asians should not have: Andy and Shaniqwa!"

"Like Allana isn't Catholic" (this works better in reference to her actual name).

Beneath that, in Tea-code, is written "silly instrument," which, second to Wino, is our new favorite euphemism, and is from Canterbury Tales. My use of code to record it prompted both Rube and Allana to poke me repeatedly, trying to figure out what the hell I was writing.

Anyways, back to class....Langrangians, whatever they are, have symmetries called gauge symmetries, but pronounced gage symmetries, unless gauge is pronounced gage and I've been doing it wrong for all of these years. These symmetries apply to the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces, using an equation that includes circles with xs in them that make absolutely no sense. Anyways, the apparently predicts particle size, but this bit is rather boring so I shall skip it. There was something about minimums and partial derivatives (cyrillic d). Anyways, nothing forces a particular ground state, whatever a ground state is, hence it doesn't need to be an even function, so there can be SPONTANEOUS SYMMETRY BREAKING, which yes, is written in all caps in my notes and followed by wooooo!

I believe the wooooo is there because after Allana, Rube and I got back from stealing oreos from orgo and class resumed, the teacher said "and now, how that symmetry breaking occurs," Rube said "yay!" I said "whoooo" and the teacher laughed.

"So, mass comes from the Higgs field," but I still don't know what the 'so' is referencing. And a table! Look, logic. I shall copy this down into my notes so as to give myself the appearance of absorbing the information. Electromagnetism has one photon and is massless, neutral, has infinite range, and is calculated using QED. Weak nuclear has the plus and minus W and the Z, all three of which are imaginary, have gauge symmetry that has been hidden by the Higgs field, and are massive bosons with weak electric charges and zippy decay. Then there is the strong nuclear force, with its eight gluons, which are massless but self-interacting, colored, and calculable using QCD.

The next page starts with another fun euphemism, wino, as in a hypothetical symmetric pair to the plus or minus W. Now, a graph, with lines. "Theoretically, high energy scales will combine forces due to the effect on coupling constants as QED increases rapidly, strong decreases, and weak decreases slowly, finding a common value at ten to the sixteenth giga electron volts." Sure, yesterday's Tea, whatever you say.

Grand Unification Theory can be abbreviated as GUT, in case you were wondering.

Anyways, this one would be tested by searching for the decay of a proton, which would have a lifetime of 10^30 years, so if you watch enough, some should break down, creating observable Cherkov cones. But, after 1/5 a century of searching, we have nothing, so this particular GUT is likely useless, unless we have....

SUPERSYMMETRY (SUSY), which, yes, must be written like that. This would require an operator to switch between fermions and bosons, so there is an equal number of each. However, none of the knowns have pairs, so half our particles are missing. So, let's make up names for the particles that we haven't yet found.

Bosons become bosinos (photon becomes photino, etc.). Fermions become sfermions, including sparticles, squarks, and sleptons.

Allana then turned to me and said "You're such a slepton."

"Huh?"

"Whore."

"Well, you're a strange squark who can't get any."

She laughed. "So which is a better euphemism, wino or silly instrument?"

I said silly instrument at the exact moment that Rube said wino. Soon after that, I began playing tetris with myself on the side of the paper and shading in all the shapes, so there are no more notes, aside from Allan insisting that I am secretly called M.C. Tea, which is note true.

P-p-p-prom Planning

Pre-Prom at my place (woo, woo). There will be far too many people involved, by my count, but we shall have fun regardless.

My cousin sent me her bat mitzvah souvenir sweatpants. They are too small. I feel sorry for any of her fatter friends.

I can't do more than a one-liner, I'm sleepy. Work, work, work. Well, chat chat chat, mostly. Andy and Dino and Cammie and Kathrya and Gretchen. No wonder I don't get work done. Too busy with friends.

I like having friends.

Visiting Princeton: College Number Something Out of Far Too Many

As Ginny detailed here, we went to Princeton. Yay Princeton! I, of course, fell in love with yet another school. God knows how I'm going to manage to make any sort of decision when the time comes.

Avon slept over the night before, which mostly consisted of me trying to work secrets out of her and her responding with things like "well, this one time, I pretended I wasn't going anywhere so that he wouldn't have to drive me," and me being like "how are you so perfect?" in my head, but then I remember- Avon is Avon. We also spent a considerable amount of time on the computer. She had a conversation with Lysander in one window about banal items of interest, such as what they'd done that day. Andy and I, on the other hand, spent twenty minutes talking about the origins of the names of the various planets, with a few digressions.

Digression example:

Andy: Saturne in French, Saturnus is the Latin. Like "Marcus Aurelius" and such.

Tea: What, the French call him Marcu Aureliu? Oh, also, which came first, the names or the planets?

Andy: Probably the planets. The -us is Latin, I mean, like Marcus Aurelius, and the French call him Marc-Auréle.

Tea: Was he the Roman guy who killed Caesar?

Andy: err...I don't think so? Brutus?

Tea: Ahh, right. What was Aurelius again?

Andy: Marcus Aurelius was a stoic emperor, as in he was a Roman emperor and he practiced Stoicism. That's about all I know.

Tea: Everything from Western Humanities has blended together into a large blur of togas and "I WAS GOING A BUCK FIFTY ON THE AUTOBON"

Andy: ...uhhh

Tea: my western teacher was insane.

Andy: O_O

In the morning, Ginny showed up about ten minutes after my alarm went off. I believe I answered the door while brushing me teeth. Then I ate breakfast and then we left. Great story, no?

The big problem was that the GPS and google directions disagreed, so my mother dearest decided she wanted to just stay on I-95, but we somehow missed the turn, as all of the signs in New Jersey contradict each other, including signs telling you to make a u-turn at the next intersection, which is completely crazy, followed immediately by "RIGHT TURN AHEAD" for the same road. Very, very odd.

Anyways, Princeton was wonderful. I like that you don't have to apply to one school, and that the first two years of requirements for all science majors are identical, so you don't have to know going in what, precisely, you want to specialize in. And I like that, you know, it's PRINCETON, with all of the awesome academics and amazing undergraduate programs that comes with that. Oh, and the admissions office had extremely comfy chairs. That should be another factor in my school decisions: comfiness of chairs. They are, after all, an extremely important consideration.

Dear World

I am stressed out and exhausted.

Even though it is only nine o'clock.

Even though my calculus final is now over and done with.

Even though I have wonderful friends, and I'm not fighting with any of them.

I think it's residual stress from the calc panic, coupled with those silly menstrual cramps that mimic the lump-in-stomach feel of stress.

That's probably it.

After all, the whole confusion about Rube alone, and then more when Allana's opinions of him are added in, shouldn't be causing nearly this much stress.

I think some of it is residual emotional strain left over from the rememory paper.

Oh, and the constantly creeping sense of proma isn't helping, nor is the inescapable pull towards college admissions. Because I'm touring next week, and it really just never goes away.

How utterly depressing.

How pathetically whiny.

---------

On a happier front, my random woot shirts came. There is the weird ugly red one and the pretty brown swirly one. Andy found the links for me, based off of me saying that "one is brown with pretty blue swirls and the other is bright red and has a kramus on it." Yay for Andy.

Calc Test Tomorrow AAAAAHHHHH

Polar and parametric curves will be the death of me.

I'm freaking out, so, I'm sorry, but you're not going to get the transcription of a certain conversation today.

However, let it be stated that he said he wants to talk to "you" plural (referring to me, Ali and some number of people she told) tomorrow during gym class, which Kathrya will no doubt find interesting.

Also entertaining:

"That sounds kinda hilariously awkward and uncoordinated. So you fell three times in total today? Nice! Oh man, if a frisbee comes at my face I am definitely going to dodge the fuck away - someone in my physics class got hit in the eye with a frisbee and lost vision in that eye for at least a month. X_X But yeah, frisbees are delightful. You kinda sound like you’ll be fun to play frisbee with, to be honest, assuming you don’t hurt yourself (am I a bad person for thinking you sound fun to be around because you’re uncoordinated?)"

Direct quote from Andy, except I took out the shifty-eyes because the diamonds screw with HTML.

That was in response to me telling him about gym class today, in which "I tripped over my own feet and was lying on the turf, and then my friend went to pick me up and she couldn't so we both ended up lying on the ground and laughing hysterically. Then I tripped over one of my other friends later, and I slammed into somebody else and fell over again, and it was rather pathetic."

That one's quoting me, of course.

There Was No School Today

So I went shopping, and I bought this amazingly fuzzy sweatshirt, and these t-shirts. Then I went to the Y and swam, and I ran into Richard's mother, who apparently knows who I am, and it was rather awkward. Then I had a piano lesson, then I came home and read some more of American Gods and wrote back to Andy and ate dinner and read some more and used the computer and wrote a blog post.

Well, since that's rather boring, let's do another English event.

Feminine Irony is the title of this paper, and it exemplifies my ability to make all essays about feminism, religion, or both.

During the Elizabethan era, England had a female queen. However, this is ironic because, incongruously, women had no other power, and the queen kept her power frequently by repressing her own femininity. Isn't that fun?

For one thing, if Elizabeth got married, she couldn't be queen, which pretty much sucks. Also, I used the line about denying her femininity here, not in the first paragraph. Oops.

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet demonstrates that those gosh-darned Elizabethan females were weak, powerless, and repressed. Juliet doesn't get to choose her own husband. Then she offs herself. That is not fun. It is not fun at all. It is, really quite tragic. When I saw the show with Nyx, I cried for a good half hour afterwards, and then we went home and talked about how sexy the guy playing Romeo looked shirtless. He really did look good. Probably about as good as Norman, this guy from California who's going to RSI next year who's using a picture of his entire swim team in swimsuits as his profile picture, and they all look rather, uh, nice. What was I talking about again? Oh, yeah, Lord Capulet is a dickwad, right.

Oh, also, I need historical research in this paper. So, check it out, women were property of their husbands, and I'm going to back it up with laws and literature. Is that some great consonance or what? Anyways, I'm not going to bother with that sort of thing. I'm well above it.

Queen Elizabeth's situation was unique. Life sucked for everyone else.

I would talk about the sweatpants...

but they've been talked to death. Instead, I will share the bajillion compliments about the writing on my english paper, and we can all pretend that the compliments are about us and feel happy. Because, truly, I believe that simply reading nice words can improve our self-concept. Or, well, something to that effect.

-nice use of polysyndeton

-nice us of concrete details

-so much that's conceptually interesting here

-(He was 16 (maybe? less showy anyway))

-well-put

-unneeded?

-too clichéd?

-you might play with asyndeton here

-good sentence length variation

-was

-or just "couldn't sleep"

-I'm a little confused

-good use of great litotes.

-this is great

-(is this needed?)

-same question

-I love this repetition

-great

-beautiful description

-good

-good use of polysyndeton

-good

-good

-love the evanescence

-i love this

-great

-then

-great close

Me? Self-indulgent? Never (insert shifty eyes here)

Those (shifty eyes that unfortunately break my html block) are called shifty eyes. I learned them from Andy, whose name I can't figure out how to pronounce but I suppose I'll have to learn eventually.

And, to finish this off, I'm going to add another mindbender. The dwellings one is just never going to end, unfortunately. I'm sure you're *very* disappointed.

"We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what are relationship is to life and death, what is essential, and what,despite the arbitrariness of falling beams, will not burn." -Madeline L'Engle

I must say, great use of polysyndeton. Oh, yeah, it's saying we learn from art. Books help us discover who we are, what we fear, and just help us understand stuff, like, in general. Remind me to practice these intro things for the ACTs.

New Moon, by Midori Snyder, is an awesome book in which Jobber succeeds only by understanding herself. I would go into detain about the climax of the book, but I wouldn't want to spoil it, so I won't. The theme of the story is that the tools to save others already reside inside us; all that remains is to find them. This explains how we truly are and makes the art meaningful.

Stories also allow those of us still in the plane of the living to comprehend death. The Christian bible uses Jesus, the Greek myths se Hades' realm, and, weirdly, my saved version of the mindbender ends here, with the sentence "The better people are allowed to drift freely, floating like browned leaves, while the more nefarious are given painful punishments that will last an eternity."

How decidedly odd.

Facebook, English, and other Interesting Occurrences

Last week, Mario friended Genie on facebook. I told her that if he so much as said one word to her, she was to tell me immediately, and if it was anything creepy, I was going to threaten him, my unthreatening, kind-hearted demeanor be damned. Nobody messes with my sister.

Today, Krystal yelled across the English room to me.

"Tea, I didn't know you had a sister!"

"I do. I actually have two."

"Wow. I only found out yesterday."

"How odd."

"Yeah. You want to know how I found out?"

"How did you find out?"

"I stalked you on facebook!"

"What?"

"I was stalking you on facebook, and I was looking at your graffiti, and there she was."

"Oh, that's, um, nice, Krystal."

"I know."

Otherwise, in the realm of facebook, Mario is a creep, and Andy is totally awesome, even though it's starting to take me more than a half an hour to respond to his posts.