Turn On The Sun, Please

[Title concept from Pickles author/artist Brian Crane.]

Mrs. Leon complained today that I always leave before class officially starts, so I promised her I'll stay for third lunch next week (hopefully, but as previously mentioned, I'm not too good with promises). Maybe I will be there in time for sonnet readings. I don't know what else I could do with an extra half-hour of English class, especially since I'm probably not reading the same things (although my class is starting Brave New World, which Mrs. Leon's class has already read).

(Additionally, Clay told me he read nearly 150 pages of BNW in around two hours. Since it's, so far, taken me five days, more or less, I will probably need to dedicate a lot more time to reading. I'm past the first part—if there are any more, I don't know yet—of the everyone-is-talking-at-once pages right now.)

Other things of interest: I went over 10 pages of metabolism bio notes last night at around midnight (so also technically this morning), and have now come up with a really condensed, analogy-ladened version of metabolism, which I will add to the end of this, because I think I want to make more of these to prepare for the midterms (Mme Pottery mentioned midterms today, which set off a wave of panic).

Also, despite the cold, and the wind, and the general misery, there was frisbee today. There is another girl now, and she is pretty good at frisbee too (a great catcher, even in this wind). I ran around too (which almost never happens, mind you), but then my stomach started hurting, so I sat down and borrowed both Yuma's and Cameron's jackets (I wanted to borrow Tobey's too, since he wasn't wearing it at first, but by the time I'd gotten around to being too cold he was cold too and took the jacket) and tried to read more books (especially my LitEx book, which I have barely started).

Then a golden retriever came along and proceeded to sit on me despite my protests. Someone called out, "Be careful, he's a pervert," and with that the dog turned around and tackled me to the ground.

On that note, here is my version of metabolism:

• metabolism = energy vs. matter
• pathways: catapults tear down for boten anna to build up
• enzymes just float around for fun
• laws of thermodynamics: 
• energy is immortal; 
• entropy reproduces like bunnies
• ⌂G (free energy) = ♥
• likes to roll down hills and pull on wheelbarrows full of stuff
• must push it to make it go up hills
• said hill is a step-ladder hill
• In this analogy, "guy" is the substrate:
• guy wants to go over hill
• hill too high, guy too lazy, doesn't happen
• enzyme bulldozes hill, guy goes over
• enzyme only falls in love with one guy & his clones
• enzyme thus only bulldozes hills for guy & his clones
• when going over hill, enzyme and guy link hands
• their hands fit together like gloves
• at the top, enzyme pulls hard in excitement
• guy's arm falls off
• new products = guy + arm!
• then enzyme says, "eww, wtf?"
• enzyme ditches guy for clone #1209841
• other little-known facts of enzyme-drama:
• if guy is too hot/cold or brings H2SO4/HCl/HNO3, he gets slapped, enzyme says, "Get lost," and no hills are bulldozed
• cofactors/coenzymes: the bulldozer (the machine)
• inhibitors: the 3rd wheel
• either steals enzyme away (competitive)
• or kills enzyme and laughs maniacally (noncompetitive)
• allosteric site: door for 3rd wheel, except 3rd wheel is guy's arm
• arm can help or hurt
• too many arms will distract enzyme and result in no more bulldozed hills
• cooperativity: guy1 holds hands = guy2 can hold hands too
• many enzymes + many hills + many bulldozers = metabolic pathway (multi-enzyme complex)
• all these pathways come together to form . . . THE METABOLISM WORLD.
• dun dun dunnn...

This also effectively supports my argument that love/relationships can be a metaphor for anything.

School Again, What A Surprise

Proper titling rules dictate that I should not capitalize the "A," but I am ignoring that for aesthetic purposes only. Anyway, after a long three-day weekend (yay for Columbus Day), I am back into the school routine. Which, thankfully, means reduced time for annoying college things, but unfortunately, also means increased time for schoolwork.

Since my morning was rather uneventful (we watched this "how to turn a sphere inside out" video and a few Old Spice commercials during communication time, but that was mostly it), I will skip right to French, where our teacher, who I shall now call Mme Pottery, spent most of the class showing us this music video (in French, of course) whose main ideas are "Why do we have to go to school and do all this work?" and "Oh, leave it to Charlemagne, he's to blame." Then we listened to this music video by the same singer who performed at the 1967 or 1965 Eurovision contest, and it's a song about a doll who complains that since she's so pretty she should be able to have so much, but she can't have boys falling in love with her. Or that was what I got out of it, anyway.

Great use of over an hour's worth of time.

I spent a good part of econ figuring out the tax graphs and how to draw producer and consumer burdens. Now I have the concepts down, so the graphs are easier. Yay! Unfortunately, we have a test on Monday, which means I will actually have to look over the practice test (it's quite a heavy bundle), and I am not looking forward to that.

I also spent a good part of my free convincing Yuma that math team was more important than frisbee. I'm not sure how well that went. But I did get to print out all the stuff I needed to print out (except the Naviance sheet), and then tomorrow morning I will have to schedule various meetings, but I think all is going well (so far). Clay took my computer (which reminds me, I hope he logged me off), so I got my envelopes written out and reformatted my lab, and Yuma and I folded paper airplanes according to that tutorial he found online, and we spent ten minutes or so throwing paper airplanes in the hallway. Archie, who was at the corner table, stared at us weirdly. When Clay came out, I finally managed to throw a successful, airborne, non-circling-back plane. I was really proud of myself.

Then I got all of my earlies letter envelopes settled, including seeing Tea and Kathrya multiple times in the process. After that, we (although Kathrya was just in it for the walk and the Gretchen-glomping time) went to math team, where everyone was already there. To our horrendous dismay, there was only one of the round 5 and 6 practice problems each left. Oh no! So we each took one and will now have to settle for next time.

Argon came over a while later and asked Tea about RSI. It was a long, rather drawn-out conversation, by the end of which we found ourselves all sitting on tables. Ms. Sherbert looked over at us and asked, "Are you guys practicing?"

Haha. I tried one of the geometry questions, but because I was too lazy to square numbers in my head, I didn't go further.

After math team, I went to the library, where I saw Zephy and Reese. Zephy was doing her physics homework (oh, utexas, how I loathe you so), and Reese was figuring out other people's chicken-scratch handwriting, because he got a huge list of rejects from his email list for tech club or something. So I sat down and tried to figure out said handwriting with him, and I think we got a couple of the emails (Reese's way of testing to see if the emails were valid was to send out an email with the subject line "test" and nothing else). We didn't get Superman though.

Pity.