Continued Ruminations on Reunions

Yuma has his own energy startup. He runs it with full employee support, miraculously. He somehow managed to develop some astonishing social skills. At some point, he bought my battery concept, the one I'd held onto since high school, and incorporated it into his business plan. The money from that allows me to fund a reasonable lifestyle while still doing academic research. It allows him to be a billionaire, so everyone wins.

Gnatta runs a strip club where the primary attraction is Rachel (that suggestion was Ginny. The strip club was me, though) and the magically duplicating twins (two of Mario's clones). At one point, Sergio went to the strip club, and, seeing Rachel, elected to try to rescue her. He went back to talk to her and ran into Gnatta. The two get into a huge fight, claws out. Then, "Gnatta trips, falls over, and accidentally kisses Sergio, and they discover they've secretly loved each other all this time, and the fights were just denials, so they make up and come to the reunion holding hands, but, once there" (Ginny quote!), Scott declares his undying love for Sergio. Sergio struggles between the two, but then Scott snatches Sergio away, and the two run off into the moonlight and live happily ever after.

Julie is an astronaut, and she has just gotten back from the moon. She brings a moon rock to the reunion, and it has special properties, distorting electrical signals. When she comes near Dino, he short-circuits even more severely and collapses to the floor. Melissa, who has apparently been there the whole time, rushes over. "Oh, dear," she says. "This happens sometime. Ever since we extracted his circuit for multiplication purposes-"

We look at her blankly.

"For our children! They are small and lovely and will never grow up."

"Wait," said Cammie, who had wondered over, robo-baby in hand. "How old is this little fellow, then?"

"Well, 14. But you still look two, don't you honey." Melissa accepted the baby and pinched its cheeks. She then extracted a key from it, restarted Dino, and continued as if nothing at all had happened.

We move on, then, to Cammie, who has been working as an English teacher at our dear old Paperclip High School. She almost didn't come to the reunion, but decided, at the last minute, that since it was so close, she might as well. Anyways, she somehow (and no one is certain how) ended up marrying Lyle directly out of college. They had a couple of tight-pants-wearing children, and lived the perfect cookie cutter life. Then, one day, (again, completely inexplicably), Eccentrius decides to visit. Of course, being eccentric, he does this by showing up with a can of paint that changes colors in the sunlight, climbing over the perfect picket fence, and beginning to paint. Cammie, naturally, has no idea how to respond, but, after a good deal of running about, Lyle runs off with his secretary, who turns out to have chlamydia, and then Cammie and Eccentrius get together. They marry while hanging upside down by their legs from a tree. The minister sits upon a suspended tire. The newlyweds honeymoon in Swahili, where they visit Nyx and get some much-deserved sun.

While they are gone, Avon watches the kids. She manages to fit them in around her busy schedule at her private pediatrics practice. Her partner there is Lucas. Nobody expected him to go into medicine- to be honest, no one realized he was that good at school- but he hit college running, got into med school, and ended up, somehow, in pediatrics. When Avon wanted to start a private practice and started looking for doctors in the area, she found him, and the two established their own office. They worked together platonically for quite some time. After all, he was married to Cora Lee for quite some time, until he realized that she was just a bit mad. However, he neglected to tell Avon about the divorce for months, despite the constant flirting. Poor Avon was in agony, convinced she would hurt Cora Lee, certain she was being morally unsound. She finally caved when, while at Lucas's house (for a completely explicable, nonsexual reason), she saw the divorce papers sitting on his desk.

Anyways, I think that's enough of the future for the time being.

Something that Weirded Me Out Today

... was changing into my PJs while Eccentrius and Jeff were disseminating Paperclip High trivia on a video from High School Jeopardy's homepage. I realize that Eccetrius and Jeff could not actually see into my room through the Youtube video, but I still have this feeling that I accidentally let them see my underwear.

Speaking of which, the photos up there are ridiculous. Julie, you are easily the most amazing looking person I've seen up there. You make getting swabbed with makeup pads look glamourous rather than awkward. Also, the degree of intensity is such that I'm actually surprised that lasers didn't spontaneously shoot our of Team Paperclip's eyes.

And now, another mindbender:

Is an English sentence a house?

It's not. Because, obviously, a house is a tangible thingamahoozy, and a sentence is a grammatical concept. But, because that is a very short paper, we're going to take the metaphorical route.

Houses and sentences are driven by context. People do not just have homes, they live in villages, in beloved towns, and we often grow our own roots. We love the earth, and our homes would not be the same if transplanted to the other end of the earth. In Esperanza Rising, one of my all time favorite books when I was younger, a father and daughter bond over the love of their farmland. Their farmhouse would be useless if it stood in the arctic, or even in the coniferous forests of northern New England. Similarly, the previous sentence would make little sense if it were in the midst of a scientific paper or a Japanese novel. Location matters.

Then is the foundation. Concrete blocks in a big dirt hole, or a single capital letter. These are the beginnings. Then is the structure. Walls, pipes, and everything else between floor and roof. This is the part that requires the most effort. Today, it entails a seemingly endless stream of framers and carpenters and plumbers and electricians and excavators and engineers and masons and welders and many more. Note the mindboggling polysyntedon. A good while ago, in the 1800s, Thoreau completed just as many tasks in the construction of his own humble abode. He devoted a full page to the steps of his efforts. Sentences, too, have a lot of junk floating about their interiors. Subject and predicate can be expanded and warped to a multitude of grammatical organizations, just as houses have limitless modifications.

Then is punctuation, your period or your roof. There are question marks, simple roofs sloping in sharp angles before rounding into gutters at the edges. There are exclamation points, angled and steep in every way, bringing a sharp end to a sentence or a clean edge to a contemporary house. There are periods, rounded domes bringing a softer, more aesthetically simple closing to a sentence, a home, or, in the case of the period at the end of this sentence, an essay.

Explicit Conversations (PENIS!)

Gretchen, you may prefer not to read these.

I was sitting at a table in the library with Tybalt, Kathrya, Boris, and Bryant during my free today. Eccentrius came over, sat on the table, and began talking to Martin. I was listening a little to Tybalt and Kathrya, and Bryant was doing homework. Eccentrius leaned over to Boris and said, "hey, do you know Martin?

"Yeah, why?" responded Boris.

"Have you seen him?"

"I said I know him."

"No. Have you seen him."

Boris simply looked at him.

"Martin" said Eccentrius, in something between a stage whisper and his normal voice,

"has a big penis."

"What?"

"His dick is huge! Seriously."

"Why would you say something like that?"

"Because it's true!"

"Right, like you would know."

"Oh. I know."

"What, do you look at him in the locker room or something?"

"You don't?"

"Of course not!"

"Why not?"

"It's weird!"

At that point, I started cracking up and leaned over into Kathrya, interrupting her conversation with Tybalt. She joined my hysterical laughter for a moment before asking what was so funny.

"I'll tell you later," I wheezed.

A bit later, after Eccentrius had, much to Boris's relief, left, Kathrya said something about Mario and his man-crush on Irving and added that Tybalt had some support for that, leading him to launch into a story from his weekend:

So, on Saturday, we were all hanging out working on the challenge stuff, and Mario was on facebook, and, right before he x-ed out, Irving came over and wrote in his status is considering cock? but Mario didn't notice and closed the window anyways. Then the rest of us were cracking up, and he was like "What? What? What's funny?" and someone told him to check his facebook. He opened it up and, completely straight-faced, he read the message. He didn't react at all- he just clicked on it and replaced it with is sucking Irvings fat brown dick and closed the window. We were staring at him and said "Mario, you know people can see that, right?" and he was like, eh, whatever, they won't think it's me. Then, about ten minutes later, Irving gets a text from Melissa telling him he ought to look at Mario's status.

End of story.

A Payson Develops a Sense of Loss

The show is finally over. Guys and Dolls is kaput. All the free time on my hands may send me into shock. I played the guitar for the first time in two months today. Of course, I could only play for about two minutes, cause my calluses had disappeared and my fingers were tired and it just plain hurt. I also played piano for about an hour, but not Guys and Dolls stuff. Just Debussey sight-reading. It was glorious.

The final show went fabulously. The only snag was that one of the sax's light went out, but it was between numbers, and I passed him a bulb to replace it, because the bulbs are under the grand, but the fixture was too hot, so I just passed him an entirely new light set-up, and he managed to get the whole thing up and running by the time Havana started. Which is good, because the band teacher plays cowbells instead of her sax during that song, so he's doing double duty. He actually used to play maracas, but the band teacher took them away because she thought he was being overenthusiastic. This is coming from the woman who badly bangs the cowbells for the entire song while her facial expression resembles that of a child who has just discovered Christmas. Or Hanukka, if you want to roll that way.

When we got to the pit party, and it was just the two random saxes and Joanne and Cammie and I, we overcame the general awkwardness by dissolving into hysterics over the cowbells. When Ida showed up to the party at her house, she was incredibly confused by how much we were laughing.

We spent a good amount of time gossiping. (Why is Harry so grumpy? Nobody knows, but Morgan thinks his looks would be much improved if we attacked his hair with a weed-wacker. Why the hell is Emily still all over Spencer? He's out and proud, but they still hook up, even though she has a boyfriend. What fabulous flutist has a bit of a thing for a different fabulous flutist? The world may never know.) Anita and Richard tickled each other extensively. Cammie and I interrupted each other constantly. I begin to understand why Vicky thinks she talks a lot.

Also, there are photocopies of Eccentrius's face on the floor of the band room. I, for one, am simply thankful that he didn't go the traditional route and photocopy his ass. Or arse, as Joanne and her mum would say.

A final conversation with Harry:

Tea: I put your music with your bag.

Harry: Huh?

Tea: You left it in the pit.

Harry: Yeah

Tea: By the way good job on the second act

Harry: Yeah

Late Nights

I just got home, and I've barely even started my homework. So much for knocking out 5.1 during rehearsal.

That was, I think, the longest rehearsal of my life. Havana is my new worst enemy. And the entire thing just felt futile, since Harry and I are really only the backup pianos anyways. I won't even have to stay for the second act tomorrow.

Speaking of Harry, for some reason, he looks really, really cute in the light of those little music-reader thingies we use. I think it's because it highlights bone structure while rendering his greasy hair virtually invisible.

At least I've been getting on well with the clarinets behind me, Eccentrius and whats-his-name. Unfortunately, I probably won't get to sit with them again. Instead, the electric is front, center, right near the drum set, and not really good for conversation. Damn.