Magically Mundane Mondays

Here is the start of another week, and the foreshadowing of a busy week to be. Or maybe it’s just because my free is in the mornings on Monday, so I am not actually getting any substantial work done, and the day just feels tremendously long.

There is a utexas due for Friday, and although at least we do not have 40 questions long utexases (what would the plural of utexas be?) anymore, they are getting harder (no more concepts MCs), so they also take quite some time. The lab for bio from last week is now due next week, because there is a part II (yay for growing algae!) upcoming tomorrow and Wednesday. I have 12 CDs worth of a novel to burn through (well, okay, I am not really burning anything because I have nothing to burn on CDs anyway), within the next month or so. Times like these I wish I had a portable CD-player (this has only happened once before, when I wanted a CD-player for the SAT IIs).

But those things are boring. I mean, I have to do them, yes, but that doesn’t make them any more interesting to listen to. So, onwards to the exciting things in life!

Math run-offs tomorrow! As I was telling Gretchen (and Sonny, although I am not sure how much he was paying attention and how much he just didn’t want to run up the stairs and away from us) this morning, I have been waiting for this day for almost a month. Really. Ever since we got our packets. I need to go over some of the coordinate geometry stuff still, but the regular geometry is good, and trig (this month anyway) is also pretty easy.

Also looking forward to seeing who’s going to (most likely) make the A-team roster (for most of the time). Bryant, definitely, and probably Tybalt too. Then there’s Mario (he says he’s going to take the run-offs during some time on his own, although he might presumably drop by—that is, if he goes to school, because I haven’t seen him in class in days). Dino and Tea and Gretchen and Yuma? Are there any more seniors now?

Non-seniors, there’s definitely Argon, although I am not sure about Joss. Micro, yes (he’s pretty much guaranteed for this round unless he flunks). Summer and Cheryl and Reno and the others? Well, we need at least one more person. Might as well be one of them.

Math team speculation is always fun. You know what this reminds me of? Fantasy sports. Maybe we can make a fantasy math team and bet on it?

Other exciting/fun things. Okay, this is in the past tense, but my dad hosted a semi-party yesterday (they called it “lunch,” as the little eight-year-old girl who came over said her mom told her, but as we—Onion and I—aptly remarked, “lunch” with company usually means a meal that spans until 7PM). My dad and some of the others started playing this weird card game that involves +10 points and “fishing for the suits,” whatever that means. So the three of us (Onion, little girl, and me) started playing some card game that I know how to play but have no idea what it’s called, while two other little girls sat/jumped on my bed. Then we went to play “Playing with Fire” on my laptop, then a few Orisinal games (they are the cutest ever), then slime tennis (which I won multiple times because Onion did not know how to serve), then Silversphere.

Then, when the little girls left, we started watching Youtube videos, most notably the Back Dorm Boys, Ultimate Showdown, Hamster Dance, and the Shamwoohoo. Onion then said that Taylor Swift’s music videos are weird (he is basing this off Love Story and the one where Swift plays the girl who’s got a million outfits in her closet and writes on a notepad her messages to her neighbor crush). All I can say is he has never been exposed to the world of weird music videos. Really.

So I showed/dissected-for him Rain’s Love Story for starters (guy in black suit wiggling his butt and having a girl vacuum all over him), then DBSK’s videos (Wrong Number—dipping phone in a glass of wine; O—semi-fantasy world where all five guys go, “Oooh, look at the birdies!” while everyone else vanishes; Triangle—bunch of fantasy fighters dancing and then some angel descends from the sky amongst a crowd in tin-foil hats), then Big Bang’s videos (Lies—girl kills boy-who-she-doesn’t-really-like with pineapple; Haru Haru—guy gets rejected by long-term girlfriend so he goes smashing things and tearing pillows apart).

We then decided we had enough of weird music videos (pity, I haven’t gotten to SHINee’s rainbow prism dance one yet), so we searched up Harry Potter versions of Tik Tok and ended with some quality OceanLab (you can’t beat OceanLab, really).

And when my Youtube minutes ran out on Chrome, we played Crazy Eights. It lasted well over an hour and when his parents finally ended the card game with my dad, we still had not finished. But it was too late (past midnight) so we never got to finish that game. Oh well. I was losing anyway.

Then this morning I thought I had missed the bus, because I woke up two minutes before the bus was supposed to come, but then I realized my clock is five minutes early, so I quickly got dressed and ran out the door, effectively waking up my parents (although I didn’t know that then).

For entertainment purposes, I suggest you go through all of the Youtube videos I’ve suggested (well, maybe not the weird MVs) unless you’ve seen them before. Especially the Back Dorm Boys. The one where they lip-synch to “We Will Rock You.” I’d link, but: a) it’s really hard to miss; and b) if I search it up I’ll get distracted and I won’t get anything done tonight.

Life Is Strange.

I probably had already concluded this some time prior to today, but I feel there needs to be a reassertion.

Life is strange. Bizarre. Weird. Odd. Completely wacko.

What has made me come to this conclusion (again)? Well, it all started . . .

(-cue person sitting in a wicker chair reminiscing about the past-)

Anyway, this Wednesday, sometime in its glorious sunny afternoon, my mom received a phone call from the Superintendent informing us of the extremely likely possibility of school the next day. The exact words were more along the lines of, yes, there is school tomorrow, but after last weekend, anything could happen.

I was psyched. I wanted to go to school really badly. Staying at home for a prolonged period of time was not my idea of fun.

However, it appears that my body had a different idea.

I spent an entire Thursday, home, sick, stomach hurting and drowsy (although that could be a side-effect of sleeping too much). It was miserable. I went to the doctor's on Friday, received some general information coupled with fancy words, but I was too out of it to comprehend. My mom took me to the pharmacist's to get my new medication, and then we went to Barnes and Noble's somewhere to just "wander around," as I had suggested.

When we came home, it was already late (3pm-ish), so I decided to ask around and see what I had missed.

Lacking phone numbers (not that I use my phone regularly anyway, besides the occasional call to my mom to pick me up), I went online. Bryant was, as I suspected, there, and so I asked him about chem and physics.

"We learned titration curves in chem," he said. "They're not that bad."

Well, for the past most likely every time I've asked him about anything schoolwork related, he has said, "It's not that bad." Not sure how much his words applied to me.

"What about physics?" I asked. "Was there a lab?"

"No, we learned about series and parallel combinations, and how you would go about solving them."

"How do you go about solving them?"

And thus he launched into a very long near-monologue about the complexities of solving circuits, interrupted occasionally by my odd, "Oh, it's like in that video we watched!" or the ever-so-common, "Okay." It got to the point where I decided, no, I wasn't ever going to memorize everything he said, so I went ahead and copied our conversation and pasted it elsewhere for future reference.

Then, Bryant said, "There's a couple questions about circuit breakers on UTexas."

Wait, what?

I hurriedly checked my Quest account, and, there they were, 45 brand new questions sitting there, waiting for me to unravel their evilness mysteriousness. With a nice message at the top reminding us that the network will be down over the weekend due to maintenance, so we should print out a hard copy to work on it instead.

Before I had a chance to start on those questions, Dora started a conversation with me.

"Hi Ginny! Why weren't you in class today?"

"I was sick," I said. "Did I miss anything?"

"Yeah, we handed in our papers today. Mrs. Tallchief thought you gave your paper to me. She was surprised you weren't there."

Oh. Oops. Right, research paper.

"Don't worry about it," Dora said. "Just send her an email. You should be fine."

Which I did later on, but I haven't received a reply yet, so I'm not sure how that's going. I also have several books I accidentally left in my English classroom, all of which are in danger of disappearing.

I saw Dino as well, so I figured I would ask him about calc. Except, of course, he disappeared right after I attempted to start a conversation. He and Owen both seem to do that a lot.

So I went back to UTexas, fiddled around with the questions, and arrived at a section where there was quite a number of bizarre diagrams that made no sense at all. Frustrated, I checked back to see if anyone else was online to provide useful class information, and I saw Dino again.

"Dino," I said. "You are very elusive. Anyway, what did you guys do in calc today?"

"Where were you?" Or, in Dino-speak, "where werw=e u?" (I find it amusing that he actually noticed his mistake, attempted to hit backspace, missed backspace, and decided to go on regardless.)

"Home," I said. "Sick."

To my surprise, Dino made a frowning face and said, "Feel better."

"Thanks," I said, grasping with this new, nice side of Dino as he reassured me that we didn't go over anything new in calc (yay, because I had thought Mrs. James would go crazy due to our unexpected "break") and told me to let him know if I needed help. Wow.

And this time, Tea, he did say something along the lines of goodbye before he left, so I think there's either still hope, or he's really picked up a "Easy Steps to Being Nicer" book somewhere in lieu of the "Compliments for Dummies" we suggested he get.

I went back to my physics problems, finished all of them except the ones with the weird diagrams, and spent the rest of night watching Youtube videos recommended by Gretchen and Stella (after I found my headphones), and deciding that vocal trance is really nice, and I feel kind of sad I had never explored this genre further before.

The next morning (well, this morning, really), I received an email from my physics teacher (too lazy to search up his nickname) telling us that he's sending over the diagrams for the eight-part question that I had trouble with yesterday. So the weird diagram problem wasn't just me!

On the not-so-bright side, UTexas is officially under maintenance right now, so I don't feel motivated enough to do any of the questions.