Mon.04.22.02 - It's been an interesting, and recently injurious, month since the last post.
The college deal is this: I misjudged a number of the characters I bitched about last time. I'm a flaming hypocrite sometimes, and though my life would be much easier if I'd gotten into MIT, I really do believe that everything happens for a reason and that everything works out in the end. It's one of those spiritual things.
Now then... I hardly remember what's been going on since last post. Lemme read it over and see what I need to talk about... hmmmm... okay, I think I've got it.
College again, first: rejected from MIT, waitlisted at Harvard, accepted to Duke and UNC. The college report of a real winner, no? So the plan now is to say yes to Duke (I've got nine days to do that... better get cracking) and then consider Harvard if they let me in. Morrison says I should go to Duke regardless, that he doesn't want me to go to Harvard, but I really liked it when I visited with Maggie over the summer. I desperately need to get out of this blasted state, though... I've already started to go soft after living away from home for six years... another three or four, and I may be southern yet! Uggghhh.
Consequently, the prize on which my eyes are focused is graduate school. My current educational track is pointing me toward graduate school, and it's pretty much been the plan all along. So hopefully I'll want to go to MIT, and MIT will want me to come to them, in another few years. Supposedly, my odds will be a little better at that point.
My odds should be markedly better, seeing as how Josh, Alex, and [I] beasted pretty much the rest of the world in the modeling competition - check out the official word from COMAP. Our team was one of four that got Outstanding Solution (which means I'll be published before my mom is), as well as being chosen for the INFORMS award. That means I get two certificates, $300 cash, and a couple subscriptions to a couple operations research journals (oh, rapture!). So that's pretty cool. Too bad my most important contribution was that I had the best computer of the three of us.
Now, the injurious part... the first injury was Casey. Casey's a stand-up guy; he and I are working together to generalize Euler's method techniques to n-space for the Numerical Analysis final project. I signed out to Hunt this most recent Saturday night to watch the 1987 live-action Masters of the Universe movie, and subsequently stayed up until 4:30 am getting walloped in Worms World Party. Anyhow, Casey my-sized a glass jar filled with trail mix about a week and a half ago. We'd my-sized other glass containers before, but this time (and you can see this on film; we've been recording most of them recently) he just kind of reeled to the side grabbing his face after he was done. Turns out a big shard of glass spun up and sliced a nifty gash across the corner of his jaw.
If you're wondering right now, "what is my-sizing?" I'll give you the same answer I tell everyone else: if you don't know what my-sizing is, you're probably better off that way.
So we patched Casey up pretty well, I got an excellent chance to display the wonders of Icthammol, the most amazing tar-based topical medication known to man, and Casey now has a fancy red triangle to define the corner of his face. Very sexy. I myself now have a red oval to define the corner of my chin. Also, very sexy, I'm sure. The story behind this crosses well over the big line of stupid, so bear with me. Casey, myself, and a couple other guys were doing a late-night standard fruit my-sizing. After we were done, I started walking back to Hill, when suddenly Mort and Casey attacked me from behind. I threatened them with the my-size (though I'd never do anything... Jitters can attest that getting my-sized hurts like the dickens), and Mort suddenly threw a big stick at me. It bounced on the ground, so I picked it up and tried to my-size it back at him (one-handed, which apparently only I have developed the skill to do). It didn't work, and so Casey came up and said he wanted to try. So I gave him the my-size, delivered the big stick, and got it promptly returned to my chin, spinning through the air, expanding in my field of view at an estimated 40 miles per hour. The thing smacked me in the chin and then bounced into my chest. We were soon to discover that, contrary to Casey's earlier observation, my chin was bleeding, and quite a lot. I myself made use of the Icthammol, and the scab is almost entirely off now. I'm going to have a scar and a hole in my beard. Woo!
Okay... fast forward to Masters of the Universe night. I go to sleep on Casey's couch at about 4:30. At about 9:00, the door to his room opens, I wake up, and standing there are Wahnefried and Jason. I had no idea what they were doing in Hunt, but Nick simply said, "paintball." "Paintball? Oh shit!" And I jumped off that couch, grabbed my stuff, and was following them down the hall still getting my pants on. Vig had planned out a hall trip to go paintballing, and I'd forgotten it was that Sunday. Apparently, a lot of other people did, too... well over half of the folks who signed up pussied out on us. We couldn't collect anyone else to join us from Hunt, so it ended up being 11 people on the mini-bus: Nick, Me, Haagen, Jason, Vig, Alex, Akhil, Neal, Emery, Mike, and Donna. Nick was the only person with much experience at all... he's a beast on the field but is a little oversized for most of the bunkers. Everyone was scared of me, instead. It really doesn't make sense; I've only played once before, and I wasn't terriffic then. In fact, I got famously shot in the right nut while retreating from three attackers. Everybody was scared, though; they thought I was going to tweak out on the field and just waste somebody. I seem to have quite an odd reputation with these folks, but one that I'm used to: it essentially boils down to me being a frightening psychopath. Mike's always been afraid of the image of me with a gun in my hands, so I played it up and hefted it around like I was ready to pick off the slightest disturbance to my austere, concentrated insanity. Wahnefried said he knew he could depend on me to come play: "A man of your word. Besides, you got four and a half hours of sleep last night, so you're ready to go!" Right on. As the discussion wandered around my apparently epic self-imposed sleep deprivation, Haagen commented, "Jadrian, why aren't you dead yet?" Scientists have been studying that very phenomenon for years.
So I shot people, and got shot more, and slid and sweated and tumbled and shouted and showered myself in nasty rainwater, and blew away a sizable chunk of cash. (That reminds me... I've got another story to tell in a second.) It was absolutely amazing. I really enjoyed playing it last year, and had so much fun this year... I like games where there's a false sense of danger (i.e. the enemy team's out to get you, not the very real danger of a mother of a welt if you get shot the wrong way). Under the assumption (foolish as it may be) that I will someday have an expendable income, I'd like to buy a paintball gun. On the list of priorities, I think that comes after a really souped-up PC, but just before a really souped-up Mac.
The injurious connection between chin and welt-covered body is my purported mutant healing factor. Wahnefried claims I heal really quickly... I think this is an indication that he's been experimenting on me in the night. Anyhow, the thing on my chin was a pretty hefty wound, but it is healing rather quickly. And supposedly I got some of the worst welts (especially from that point-blank shot by Vig... 8 inches away, straight into my chest), but they had almost disappeared by 7:00 Sunday night (we finished paintball around 2:30). Now people are saying I'm from another planet. A plausible scenario... it could explain some things besides just the healing issue.
The other story I wanted to mention: Thursday night, after realizing again that the graduation speeches were due Friday at 4:30, I mentioned the same to Dad, and he encouraged me to get inspired and write something that night. Instead of calming down, I mistakenly chose to "get inspired" by rocking out while Jeff, Casey, and a guy whose name I still don't know played Rage Against the Machine and some other stuff in the Ass Hall. Then I came inside, cleaned the room a little more for room inspections, and sat down to write. I was sitting there until 2 in the morning, if memory serves me, and I hadn't written a worthwhile word yet. The next day, I determined I'd use my double early out to write the essay... I was slightly delayed by a lunchtime encounter with Phil and Dr. Morrison, who distracted me with conversation and the attrition.org sign gallery. Morrison showed me the commencement speech he gave at the high school at which he taught before he came here, and I got a little bit of a kick-start. I started writing, and by 4:20 I'd pumped out a steaming heap of depressing drivel (depressing for the same reason it was steaming... it was shit). I went over to Watts, read it to myself out loud once, made some changes, and ran it downstairs at 4:30 on the mark. Now, the weather had been really, really, really (really) nasty outside... up in the mid-nineties, with beastly humidity. About a minute and a half before I turned in my paper, the sky exploded with thunder and dumping rain. Wahnefried had to buy flowers for Ashley (opening night of Fiddler on the Roof, dontcha know, and she played a creepy-ass dead lady), so after I passed in my essay at the eleventh hour, we went outside in shorts and t-shirts to walk through flash-flood conditions to the whole-foods store on Broad Street. I don't know why we went there instead of the flower shop on Broad that's much closer to school, but we paid dearly for it: the florist at the grocery store was a seriously rotten bitch. The rain had stopped by the time we got out of there, so we walked back drying off. Saturday, we went back in that same direction to go to Ben & Jerry's, then turned around and walked through the heat to go to Eckerd and Kroger. A nice guy who was watering his lawn hosed off our ice-creamy hands on the way there. So I got body wash, and Nick and I got a metric assload of juice, and then walked back pumping our muscles with heavy bags.
The issue here is that all these things (groceries, paintball, ice cream, lunch at Taco Bell after paintball) cost money. Luckily, mom will cover the groceries for the room, and I'm hoping she'll cover some of the other stuff. It boils down to the fact that, in the past four days, I've withdrawn ninety bucks from my account. That's just absurd.
I guess that's all for now.
