Eeenteresting

I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, but I absolutely love babysitting elementary-school aged children. There are few things as wonderful as being paid to watch TV or do my homework after they've gone to bed. And even before the kids crash, they generally make perfectly good conversation. Aside from that, making $90 on a Saturday night is totally worth missing a night out with friends.

I saw that nasty substitute teacher who I saw on a flight to Florida at the deli near my house. This was the second time I'd done so. Let me just say that I will never, ever be happy to see her. Never never never.

I'm trying to work out the order of dorms for my housing lottery form. I have a paper to read for internship that I really need to actually read. I have some free time on my hands and very little to fill it with.

I have a lot.

The actual Thiel Fellows got announced a few days ago.  I suspect that they were going to have 25, and I wasn't replaced, but perhaps not. 24 is a nice round number in its own way. I don't feel that I regret the decision I made---I wasn't ready, and I recognize that. Unlike some people (I kind of want to make a comment about Jeff here), I've been trying not to let all of this go to my head, though I'm uncertain as to whether I've succeeded. I suppose if I'd actually taken the Fellowship, and I'd spent recent days giving interviews and whatnot, I'd probably be even worse in the arrogance department than I am now.

I'm trying to figure out how many pegs college will knock me down. I know it'll be hard, but how hard? Hard enough that I should take regular-level multivariable calc? I've been looking at the psets, though, and they're manageable. I'm thinking I might not work during the days this summer. I won't make that much money in comparison to what I already have, and there are too many productive things I want to do.

I want to make those black box cost estimates I was told would be a good idea. I also want to use the online resources to teach myself the difference between this year's multivariable calculus and 18.02 (yeah, the school anonymity thing is totally not working out), because I'd like to try to ASE out. I think that, given the fact that I only have a month, those are sufficient goals. One is less structured, one is much more regimented, but I like it, and I like the idea of spending my days learning. And the fact that my parents are buying me a laptop saves me the equivalent sum of money to what I would have spent buying one.

So, on the whole, I think it's a good idea, and I think the productivity will mean more to me in the long run than the extra cash (my savings have been doing pretty well after this year, despite the rather large crash-related hit).

These are my plans. They may not be grand, but I think they'll be just as good.

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.

Purity Lost: Female Vampires in Dracula

A synopsis.

Victorian women were well behaved, unlike Vicky (Happy Birthday!) who wears pants. They also were very pure and chaste, eschewing sexual contact (Vicky merely eschews hugs). When "Dracula" was published, these scary things called feminists were beginning to emerge from the shadows. Actually, they weren't called feminists, just "new women," but the basic idea is the same. In "Dracula," all of these semi-feminists are monstrous, bloody vampires. They want to suck your blood.

For instance, Lucy Westerna. Before being vampirized, she's pure and blonde. Afterwards, she is voluptuous and wanton. Wanton, for all concerned, is not pronounced like the delicious segment of Asian cuisine. This is particularly directed at Jeff, who mispronounced it during English the other day. Also, when Lucy has been stabbed through the heart and killed, she is pure and sweet, not a bloody mess, which is nuts, because she should have turned into a relatively decomposed human body.

Also, the other vampire chicks are ridiculous sluts who make Harker into a mess, because, clearly, he can't retain control of his own sexuality because he is a thirteen year old boy, or something.

So vampires=sex=evil! According to Bram Stoker, anywho.

Love, Tea

Math Meet

Kathrya is going to murder me. Ginny and I told Tybalt about our evaluative walk analysis. This coupled with our interrogation of him about what guys say when they want to get their haircut leads me to believe that Tybalt now believes that I'm insane. (As a side note, Kathrya totally deserves this for getting my hopes up about Tybalts GPA, which is a 4.46, a full tenth higher than mine, and therefore very, very far away.)

Also, Jeff's little brother, hereafter referred to as Micro, who calls his brother Jeff a communist, is actually a neocon jerk. He said that I am overly talkative! Me! Overly talkative! That bastard! My response to this was to storm over to the other table, which I hadn't been sitting at because Ginny and I felt like awkward social outcasts, and tell Melissa that Micro was being mean. I then got my calculus homework and brought it over with me, and Bryant pretty much helped me with every single problem. He really is wonderful, unlike Micro, who is a tiny little meanie.

I'll give a bit more info on the meet tomorrow.

The Victim

Every English class has one. He (and the victim is typically male) doesn't pay any less attention than anybody else, but, invariably, when there is silence, he is pegged as someone who isn't paying attention and gets called on, and which point he stumbles out a response and goes back to trying to hid from the teacher.

Last year, the victim was Richard. We had four demo teachers, but the problem didn't truly become evident until the third one, who singled him out, calling on him repeatedly, trying to get him to talk. When the fourth one came, he eventually asked a question that no one knew the answer to, and he looked out at the class for someone to answer it. "How about you?" he asked, looking at Richard. The entire class burst into laughter. The poor teacher was very confused.

This year, the victim is Lyle (I don't know if this helps, but he's friends with Jeff and isn't related to Lisa (Lisa is a famous person, not a nickname) and was in all of my core classes in eighth grade). I'm fairly certain that Ms. Seltzia has called on him while he wasn't raising his hand once per class this year. To contrast, I have yet to be called on while I'm not raising my hand. Usually, he says "can you repeat the question?" before managing a half-hearted response. Today, she had put our next essay assignment up on the projector.

"... polire- that's Latin. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right. Does anyone here take Latin?"

"Lyle does!" somebody said.

"Lyle?"

"Huh? Yes."

"How would you pronounce this?"

He squinted at the board. "What?"

"P-o-l-i-r-e."

He looked confused. "That's Latin?"

The class laughed.

"Yes. But how would you-"

Ariadne couldn't contain herself any longer. "It's Polire! You're right!"

Lyle nodded. "Yeah..."

Honors List

Today, Gretchen came over, and we decided to combine our interests in gossip and academics to produce: The High Honors Predictions (Wood Knocking Enabled). This is also an opportunity for me to come up with lots of fun nicknames.

First, the top fifteen, also known as: Our Wonderful List, by Us.

1. Bryant, the somewhat smarter twin.

2. Tybalt, the other really smart twin.

3. Yuma, the Asian boy who likes to say "um." He is here because he is smart, and we like him.

4. Clara, who played Clara in the nutcracker and did very, very well on the math midterm and plays violin. We needed a girl on this list.

5. Julie. Because she is Julie.

6. Mario, because we like him more than

7. Livny. How we wish that he was stupider.

8. Brian. His first name is Avon's last name.

9. Jeff. Tierra is obsessed with him. However, he has taken a lot of journalism, which might pull down his GPA, but whatever.

10 and 11: Tea and Gretchen. Because we are awesome.

12. Avon or Natalie. They have the same first name, and we aren't really sure.

13. Sonny. The taller of the two workshop boys from Avon's elementary school.

14. Ariadne. Her dad gave a speech to our math class.

15. Nyx, because we love her. She's pretty good at school, too.

It'll be interesting to see if any of this rings true after another year and a half.

Also, I've been taking art classes at the art center in a nearby town. My teacher has a porno-stache, and it creeps me out a lot.