Radio Essay!

Nothing like the original fruits

Mike and Ikes are probably the best after-work snack to have ever existed. And when they're three for a dollar. . . .
Tonight I saw we also had some new lemonade-flavored ones, which were pretty good, but it's got me thinking how the spinoff, the sequel, never matches the original. Mountain Dew has discovered this around two million times now. Note to Pesi: people do not like blue, purple, or "pitch black" pop. (Typically they don't love yellow, either, but you got lucky).
What drives us to one-up ourselves, refusing to acknowledge our inability to outdo the first? Maybe it's capitalism. Money has always been the most effective enticement to get us to crawl out on that limb.
Not that Pepsi or Mike and Ike is going to get any more filthy-rich from the new products. They'll be discontinued, surely, before turning any significant profit, and while they're new, the promo prices will curb gains. So maybe it's boredom.
Alas, the second attempt is never better than the first, but it is cheaper.

The non-summer

It recently occurred to me that summer could be even worse than school. Aside from my much-anticipated country-hopping stint, I will have essentially no excuse to work less than thirty hours a week. This terrifies me because, knowing my managers, they will push until I finally snap and tell them absolutely no, at which point they will back off for perhaps a week and a half before starting to overschedule again. It's as if they assume I'll forget that I ever asked for less hours, and suddenly be okay with living at the store.
I told Paul I'm planning on setting up a sleeping bag, and maybe a pup tent, in the back room come June. He doesn't believe me, but I'm not necessarily kidding. It can be a good or bad thing that your managers like you.

Cherries

There are fifteen chocolate-covered cherries to a standard Queen Anne box, which are divided into three seperate containers, to "seal in freshness." I purchased one such box Sunday afternoon, and promptly ate my way through the first container and part of the second, for a total of eight cherries gone within two hours. Today, as I peeled open the third section, it occured to me, as it always does, that if I'd held off earlier, I could have done something important with my cherries. Fifteen cherries... if I'd eaten only one a day, they would bring me right up to when Paul comes back. I could track my progress by the empty cherry-spaces in the plastic. If I'd eaten only the first container the first day and then paced myself similarily after that, I'd have enough to get me throgh the end of the school year. Perhaps when I am old and retired with nothing else to look forward to, I will stockpile boxes and boxes of the delicious morsels and have one every night before bed, as a countdown to death.
That is, if I can ever learn to stop with just one.

Mr. Desperate

Being carless after school one day last week, I was forced to wait for good ol' Grandma to pick me up. It turned out she wasn't the only one trying to do so. As I walked out to the parking lot, I heard just the end of a conversation between two underclassmen.
"Man, do you know anyone who's single?"
"Nah, not really."
"Dang. You gotta help me man, okay?"
"Yeah, whatever."
The helper left, leaving me alone with Mr. Desperate. I avoided looking up, and edged toward the farthest end of the pavement. God, please don't let him talk to me. Please, God....
I sat down on a step and stared hard at the stack of photography projects in my hands. I sensed him coming closer. Ick. Please just go away. Don't talk to me. Where are you, Grandma?
He reached me and crouched down to examine the photo at the top of the pile.
"Let me guess: you're in ceramics, aren't you?"
Let me guess-- you're in special ed!
I bit my tongue to keep from saying, "How did you know? Yes, ceramics. That's why I'm carrying all these clay pots and vases. Don't you just love the glazing on this one?"
Instead, I gave a polite "Nope."
"Oh." He didn't waste time.
"Are you dating anybody?"
"Yes." One more reason to thank God for Paul tonight.
But even this didn't end it.
"Well, do you at least have a cell phone?"
"No," I said, in a tone I was sure would end the whole exchange right there. But this little factoid (or non-factoid, I guess) only seemed to score me uniqueness points.
"Wow, you're like the only girl I know who doesn't have a cell phone."
"Hm." I saw Grandma's car rounding the corner, and quickly stood up and gathered my things. Once in the car, I cracked up. Ceramics?! So I guess I officially have a scary guy story, although he was probably more stupid than scary.

Your tax dollars part II

Tonight, being a little bored, I decided to do something I've been told a dozen times not to do. I started grading my dad's third graders' tests. These happened to be math tests, and for math tests, I have to admit they were pretty interesting. Austin's is a case in point.
Excerpt:

15. Look at the Litter Sizes table. Figure out the mean (average) number of puppies. Use your calculator to help you.

Dog's Name__________________Number of Puppies
Fifi..........................................6
Spot........................................3
Duchess.................................5
Honey....................................5
Rover.....................................7
Daisy......................................4

The mean number of puppies is ________.

Austin wrote 55.

After observing that "8" was also a common respsonse, I asked Dad how he managed to get such a stupid class.
"Are you a bad teacher, or are they bad learners?"
He said it was a little bit of both.
"Will it be better next year?" I asked hopefully. "Probably not," he said.
"Isn't that a little disheartening?"
"Disheartening! Of course it's disheartening! It's terrible!"
"But there's nothing you can do about it?"
"They're third graders," he said.

Plants

After church we went to the garden center (again) where I found the most spectacular cactus the world has ever seen. Actually, I found about twenty of them, but I could only buy one (I don't get paid that much). The bottom part of it (the trunk, more or less) is the typical green cactus color. However, on top of that is this massive hot-pink prickly sphere, with a couple other spheres growing off it. It was way too amazing, and made the "flaming sun" pansy I'd picked out simply for the purpose of photographing it look pretty lame. I bought the pansy anyway (it's not the pansy's fault it can't be the coolest plant in the world) but I'm too enamored with the cactus to want to do anything with it. I feel kind of bad. Even though it would have suffered a little disappointment being put back because of its obvious inferiority, it probably would've been better off sitting on the shelf at Pioneer Garden. At least they knew what to do with it.

Kids

We took the preschoolers outside this morning, which actually turned out an unprecedentedly good choice. We had seven kids in class, Lily and Laci among them, meaning chaos was the basic order of the day. There was also a little blonde boy named Bryan, who had a penchant for getting hurt, when he wasn't sneaking off by himself to go look at the creek. I think he managed three injuries in fifty minutes. Five minutes into the second round of bawling, though, I couldn't help but wonder how much of it was just for show. The third time, though, the cause of the tears was legitimate enough. We'd just finished telling the two girls walking in front of him to stay away from the moving swing, and figured he had heard and would heed the warning. Of course he didn't. Bryan proceeded directly in front of the oscilling swing and its screaming riders. BOOM! He was knocked flat on his stomach. The cry, like the first two, was delayed, but by far the most dramatic. He absolutely wailed.

Your tax dollars at work

Nathaniel brought home a child last night as a simulation for his health class. It was this horrible little doll with perpetually open eyes that cried about every forty-five minutes (sometimes every fifteen, just to throw you off). Once it started whimpering, he had two minutes to get it to stop by deciding what it needed and providing the required service as quickly as possible. Luckily, the baby only "needed" four things: bottle, diaper change, burping, rocking. Nathaniel, being the surprisingly clever child he is, thought he'd cover all his bases at once. I came home from work to find the doll sitting contentedly in its car seat on an unfolded diaper, sucking away at a bottle ductaped to its face. One of the things the program tries to stress is the importance of keeping the baby's head from tipping back, especially when you lift it out of its seat (or try to force it on your older sister). Nate had come up with a remedy for this long before the baby even came home. Why waste time trying to hold it properly? If you just use a little more ductape to attach a pencil to the baby's neck to keep it straight, you can pick him up by the leg if you want! The system, though, broke down around two am when the doll started screaming simply to be held. Even ductape couldn't save him now. Or any of us, for that matter. (Considerate Nathaniel had declined to sleep downstairs or anywhere else farther from the rest of us, meaning no one got a full night of sleep).

Mother's Day

Mother's Day seems to be going well, by which I mean that there have been no tantrums yet over the absence of a pond. (Mom has looked into and decided against a pond more times than I can count. Always she has cited the expense as her major objection, but I have a feeling she was still hoping). It must be said, though, that at least this year we were prepared. I was, anyway. I had two lovely presents all ready to go this morning when Dad barged in and woke me up, begging for one of them. What? Give you one of my presents to give to her? You scoundrel! What kind of man has to buy presents off his children to give to his wife? I was understandably angry, especially considering I'd advised him the night before to go for flowers in the morning to forestall this exact event. But the flowers never materialized, and by eight o'clock Mom was getting anxious. He was desperate. (Although he'd already bought and given her a wheelbarrow and was going to pay for her plants when they finally got out to the gardening store, it was obvious she was expecting something from him the day of). I groggily gave him a temporary no, then went out to buy some flowers myself after church. Now having three gifts, I gave him the one I was least certain about (the wind chimes) and reminded him he owed me, big time. The worst part is, she really liked the gift I picked out for Dad to give her, maybe more than she liked the one from me. Since she had no idea why I was laughing, this made Dad look really good, as if the whole thing had been his doing. And since I will be reimbursed and he did thank me profusely afterwards, there's not a whole lot I can do about it. It would probably hurt her feelings a lot to know that Dad didn't have anything ready, too much to be worth telling her for at least a good three years.

Of being a bum

I have decided that my life's ambition for this month is to be a stay at home mom with no kids. How this will work out, I have yet to determine. It could get a little sticky, attempting to persuade people of the validity of this occupation. I mean, I think it could be pretty noble, but society generally frowns upon bums, particularly female ones who have been known to invent offspring when in a pinch. Surely I'm not the only one who can't wait for retirement to be lazy.

Myself, the iPod incompetant

Nate has finally left me and my iPod alone, which I can only assume means he's given up. Himself being an iPod expert, it seemed only natural that he would help me transition into this new world of iPod-ownership. Well, not an entirely new world. A few years ago I used the money from a photo/writing contest I'd won to buy the now-ancient, then-new "only a little thicker than a pack of gum!" iPod shuffle.
What? You don't know what I'm talking about? Oh well. Being able to think of nothing else I could want for my birthday this year, I requested an iPod nano, which I pretended to be a little surprised to receive. And it is lovely. Far thinner than a pack of gum (maybe the height equivalent of two sticks stacked), it holds one thousand times as many songs, has a beautiful 5 by 8 cm screen, and is pink to boot. And I have absolutely no idea what to do with it.
Put songs on it! Lucas said. Upload videos! Why, he'd even let me rip some of his MythBusters episodes! What an honor. But I declined, restating the imperativeness of my at least coming close to finishing this blog. Of course this didn't work, and gorgeous little Daisy (Hey, they asked me to name it!) is out about a hundredth of her memory due to the addition of a whopping 189 songs.
That was when I told Nate he absolutely had to go. Songs actually transfer pretty quickly, but they seem to slow everything else down the in process, and I'm already sleep-deprived. Thankfully, he left without too much of a fight, although I think he's disappointed in me. The iPod wasn't his idea or paid for with his money, but he appears personally offended that I haven't tried to upload our entire DVD collection or asked him to explain every nuance of the amazingness that is the nano.

I shall not want

Nothing better than a birthday when you can't think of anything to want. Absolutely. Nothing. I'm not sure exactly what this says about me, except that maybe I'm un poco consumeristic. If I want something, I buy it for myself, usually within three days of deciding I want it. I don't wait for birthdays or Christmas. Maybe the next paycheck, but usually not. It wasn't always like this. I can remember the feeling of wanting something for months and months, and having my page-long Christmas list pretty much finalized by October. Grandma would call to ask for ideas, and I'd go on and on until she just had to tell me goodbye and hang up. This year she was lucky to get one suggestion, and she had to endure five minutes of silence before I came up with anything. (And even then, I don't think a pony was the most helpful answer). It was like this at Christmas, too. I actually had to put off buying myself things so that other people could get them for me. There was a soundtrack I wanted, but I had to wait a month to get it, because I knew my little sister had it sitting in her closet.
And the things I do want keep getting more and more expensive, and increasingly unrealistic. The only thing I could really convince myself to want this year was a darkroom, which, all told, would cost around $700. This isn't so bad, but would take a bit of coordinating contributions from family members to pull off, and I was feeling lazy. I told them my second choice was an iPod nano, and with no other options, that's what they went with.
It could work out well that I've never loved surprises.

Of freedom

A couple days ago I did something I haven't done in forever: I got on my hands and knees and picked every dandelion I could see. I had twenty minutes before work-- too little time for any real studying or a nap, but just enough to head outside and lick up the sky and clouds. The sun was gorgeous, the grass perfectly dotted with yellow. Days like that make me feel invincible, as if I could handle anything (although the creaking of my swing and the soft wind assured me that nothing could ever go wrong again). But days like that are deceiving, and it seems like you can count on something unprecedentedly bad happening the next day, and the next. Gorgeous fragments of cloud and light are just temporary respites to encourage us betweentimes, and though I appreciate them, I can't help wishing they were more substantial.

Summer worries

Worse than sending my camera to a concert for two days with a very expirienced photographer, though, will be lugging it along with me to Peru this summer. Expensive cameras were about the only thing they told us not to bring, and they have perfectly good reasons to advise against it. I've never been "mugged" but I don't like the sound of it. Pickpocketing sounds childish and suggests something petty and relatively harmless, but this cannot be said for mugging. I have a feeling that I will find myself walking up to the first five suspicious people I see, extending the camera bag and pleading, "Take it, take it all, but please don't mug me!" This could be embarassing, especially if they quietly told me they didn't want my camera. Then I might be offended.
I'm thinking of taking out a month-long insurance policy on it, but this will still be little consolation in the event that I am mugged. I will only get a new camera at the end, and any pictures I'd taken on the trip will still be lost, just as if I'd never been stupid enough to bring the camera with me to Lima in the first place. I wonder if muggers are a cooperative sort of people. Surely they will negotiate, although I'm not very imposing. Maybe the first day of the trip I can rope one of the few guys going on the trip into negotiating for me. But that'd be like two insurance policies, and two weeks in Peru is two weeks without a paycheck.

Camera worries

Once again my lovely camera is being taken from me for an entire weekend, going to places far more exciting than I have ever been. And though the thief promises that it will return safe and sound and quite possibly with a T-shirt from one of the concerts stuffed into the bag, I am not entirely reassured. I can't even say how much I love my camera, and if it gets broken....
But it won't. More rational at this point is the fear that it won't come back at all. Last time she needed it, it was for an actual emergency. Rachel's camera was in the shop, and she had a concert to photograph that night. I reluctantly agreed to let her use mine-- as already stated, my uses for it that weekend were nowhere near as cool or important as hers. I've often thought that I don't deserve my Canon, which has about a zillion features I'll never know how to use. Usually these insecurities are quelled by a little capitalist pep-talk: "You worked for it, you bought it. It's a free country, and you can carry around an eight-hundred dollar camera and use only the automatic setting if you want." But this time they came back with a vengeance, especially as Rachel began to ask questions about how to use it. "What settings to you keep it on?" Settings? "Um, you know, whatever. Depends on what I'm doing. I'm not sure what I left them on last time, but of course you can change them if you want."
"How do you do that?" Gulp.
"Uh, this one here does aperture, I think. Really, just whatever you feel like doing. I'll throw the manual in there too."
She took the camera from me and examined it for a second before twisting the dials and changing numbers faster than I could think. "There. That should do it."
I wasn't sure what would do it, but we were a long way from automatic.

AP exams are coming up ridiculously soon, although that hardly means I'm studying. History will probably be the worst, and though I've done pretty well in the class all year, it would be stupid to expect a very good score. With only a week to go, I've decided to reread in its entirety the review book I've been using the past couple trimesters instead of the actual text. (Yes, that's right. I haven't read more than six chapters in the real textbook we've been assigned). This will of course be helpful, but I'm wondering whether any of it will actually stick. My mind doesn't work well with history, last year's class on world history being a case in point. I remember how to sing the Chinese dynasty song, I remember when we did a skit about Indira Gandhi. I don't remember what actually happened in any of the dynasties, or when Indira was around. I remember the name Chandragupta, but not how he was connected to the Gupta empire or even where the Gupta empire was supposed to be. It's embarrassing.
This time around will be even more embarrassing, because all of what I'm supposed to remember took place in my own country. At the moment I can't think of any examples of things I don't remember, probably because I've forgotten them entirely. Social trends are easy enough to hold on to, but dates get me completely lost. Anything before the Progressive movement is boring beyond reason.
Basically, it could be a bad week.

Two Questions Response

The Two Questions really do find everybody. This was probably one of the most relatable pieces we've read this year, because the two questions crop up all the time, in all aspects of life.
Again we saw how pictures can nicely supplement words. Barry's use of images to enrich the storyline and foreshadow the resolution was very cool. I also liked the recurring pictures, which gave a sort of theme to the essay and tied everything together.

Response to McCloud Comic

I was a little confused about the purpose of the comic, at first. I went into it assuming from the preceding discussion that it would be a persuasive piece, attempting to convince readers of the validity of comics as literature. I kept waiting for it to happen, but it never really did. Finally I realized it was meant to be an explanation of the art and not necessarily an argument. What I liked about it was that it showed the inadequacies of text alone. It's unlikely I could have understood half of the modes and jargon explained without the example pictures. Sometimes writing just doesn't cut it, and the essay was able to display this without making an argument at all.

I'm sitting here in Spanish, blinking at the clock. There's something wrong with it. I've been having clock hallucinations the past few days, when after an uncomfortable amount of watching, the second hand just seems to freeze, suspended somewhere between the four and the five. It must be summer.
I don't remember summer ever causing so many problems before. I can't sit still inside, and I hate working more than ever, because it usually means the evening is completely shot as far as sunlight or doing anything outdoors. I attempt to compromise on nights that I'm free, and do my homework outside. This works about half the time. The other half I get distracted or fall asleep, right there on the grass. And sometimes, if I'm really lucky, the twins will come out. There is nothing worse than the twins when you're trying to accomplish anything outside. They're nice boys, but three is a horrible age, and two--the age of their little brother--is worse. They run over the instant they see any one of their favorite neighbors exit the house, falling over themselves to get there first. When they finally get there, they compete to be the first one to construct a coherent sentence.
Twin one will start. "We--we--we--we--just got back from a--" Twin two interupts. "We--we--we--it was a birthday party."
Twin one: "Yeah. A--a bowling birthday... party."
Questions would at this time seem polite, but we've learned not to bother. The twins will continue talking without stopping as long as you let them.

Cell phones

My parents have officially broken down and gotten a cell phone for each person in the family. Camera phones, no less. Mine is red and shiny and fits into a back pocket perfectly. It is gorgeous, and although I'm not paying for it (I wouldn't have a phone at all if I did), I'm sure it costs a pretty decent amount each month. There was a discount involved for getting a family plan, and the previous contract had expired, but I still feel wasteful. My old one (the one that is now Dad's, ha ha) worked just fine.
My brother, however, feels no guilt whatsoever, and has probably accumulated at least fifty pictures already, of subjects ranging from the inside of his mouth to his "six pack" to the giant turd discovered in the bathroom at his school. There is, however, a downside.
Nate has apparently been assigned the abandoned phone number of a very attractive high school girl. He is text-messaged constantly from multiple boys who are getting a little annoyed with Cally's playing hard to get. This will make the third consecutive night I have been wakened by his phone beeping, but at least this time it was something important. At three am, Jason decided to ask Cally to prom! You know, it would be fun. That is, if she didn't already have a date, of course.
Poor Cally, who after switching her phone number, and assumably procuring a restraining order, is still pursued. Poor Jason, who will never know whether to look into that tux or not. You know, he never sees her anymore. And poor Nate, who is not allowed to send any replies.