My weekend:

Out of my five classes this semester, each class decided they wanted to have a major project due before Thanksgiving. Lucky for me, my wednesday class got cancelled, so therefore all five of these projects are due either Monday or Tuesday.

Project 1: Drawing Class

Photocopy a $5 bill, and work on "gridding" and duplicate the portrait of a president (about 1" by 2") onto a 18" by 24" piece of paper.

Completed Saturday night.

Project 2: Clay Studio

Finish glazing all the clay pieces you've already made by Tuesday. I had to glaze my massive pitcher thing, 8 cups, 7 bowls, and a few other small pieces.

Worked on that Thursday afternoon, Friday morning, and finally completed it Saturday afternoon.

Project 3: Crime and Punishment in European History

Using the website OldBaileyOnline.org research two months of British justice between 1670 and 1913 and compare the cases, verdicts, and punishments of those two months. also, explain how those two months can also explain the changing social trends of the times, the changing outlook towards crime and criminals, and how England fits in with the changing trends of Europe in criminology. Should be 6 pages long.

Completed Saturday Afternoon/evening/night

Project 4: Business Ethics

Write an argumentative essay on whether or not you agree with the Doctrine of Strict Liability in businesses. Make it a logical argument and make your paper controversial so that someone can easily disagree with it (what!? umm, ok I guess) Should be 5 pages long.

Completed Sunday night

Project 5: American Sports History

Read the book , "Darwin's Athletes" and explain the author's thesis and whether or not you agree with it. Should be 8 pages long.

Finished (and started) the book this morning (I skimmed)

Currently working on the paper. It's 11:22, and the paper is due by 1:00

Wish me luck. So yeah I completed all the assignments (almost) but that doesn't mean I did well on them.

They call it the Senior Plague

So flu-like symptoms are sweeping across the campus. It's not officially swine flu, or real flu, but anyone with "symptoms" are being sent home with pretty much no questions.

People around here are calling it the Senior Plague since, it seems, most of the people sent home are from the senior class. Officially, since the Dean of the College told me, last wednesday health services sent home 16 people, thursday 18. Those are the only "official" numbers I've heard. But I know that more kids were sent home before Wednesday, and even more have been sent home this weekend.

Apparently, Health Services has a 3 hour wait to been seen today. The student body is only 2,000 kids, so that a big deal.

At our last Red Key meeting we were trying to figure out where everyone was. It was like: Where's Foley? sick. Frechette? sick. Hooper? sick. Stinky? sick. Pokey? sick. Corcoran? sick. Hurley? sick. Hughes? sick. Meyer? sick. (There are only 26 of us).

Why is it that my senior years come with such problems? Senior Year of College: the Senior Plague. Senior Year of High School: The MC Genocide of 2005. 8th Grade: we typically only have 6 teachers, during that year we somehow went through 22.

Or the second time?

Apparently the pictures didn't work the first time

Another Clay Update

It's about a foot and a half tall and weighs about 25 pounds. It's huge

The Other Art Class

In my other art class, Drawing 1, we've been working on perspective and other stuff. Here's an example of what I've been doing

(It's my porch)

Project 3: Make 2 Jars

I first tried to make a sculpture of Atlas, and have the globe be the jar. But as you can see, Atlas wasn't strong enough to hold up the world, he fell. And then I make a jar with mountains on it, the lid is the sky.

Because Atlas was an epic fail, I had to make one more jar. This one is a cylinder with crumpled up loose-leaf paper as a texture. It's supposed to look like a sheet of loose-leaf, 3 hole punched and all. The knob for the lid is a pen and pencil

First month of Senior Year

Things are going well so far. 1 month in.

RAing sucks, per usual, but I guess I can fight through it

SBA stuff is almost in full force, placement for trips happens next Monday

Keys is good, we just got 11 new members, things are lookin good for the year

Class is actually going really well. I'm taking a class on the History of American Sports, a history class on Crime and Punishment in European History, Business Ethics, Drawing 1, and Clay Studio.

By far, Clay is my favorite class however it's RIDICULOUSLY time consuming. Here are two pictures of projects I've already done. And today I pretty much finished my third project which was to make 2 jars. I'll put up pictures later.

Update

I just moved back to school, living in the townhouses this year (with a porch off the back!). still in the process of unpacking because I really don't care about it. RA training starts at noon today, which I can't wait for. not.

That's all so far, hopefully things become more eventful

New Movie Project

So as you may know, Billy is in love with Morgan Freeman, (or maybe just his voice, i don't know)

Billy: If they make a movie about my life, do you know who would narrate it? MORGAN FREEMAN. (no surprise there)

So after a little brainstorming, we came up with a great new movie project, which is totally plausible and could actually happen.

The movie would be about a kid (based around Billy) who had a huge desire to have Morgan Freeman narrate his life. So he comes up with an idea. He would learn sign language, pretend to be deaf and Morgan Freeman, (somehow) would become his translator. Therefore, Morgan Freeman would narrate his life.

Obviously it would be a comedy, and towards the end the kid would be exposed as a fraud, but the movie would end with the two becoming friends again.

Weirdest Dream

So yeah, pretty much had some weird dream last night about Tommy and Sam's wedding, it was so weird that I have no choice but to share it.

It's the morning of the wedding and all the groomsmen get together ahead of time. We all get dressed in our suits, mind you they are Baby Blue and White Checkered Flannel Suits. Tommy was excited about the flannel.

We get to the church, IC not Saint Mary's, and it's absolutely packed. All the girls process in, not one by one, but the 4 of them (Jessica's not there) just walk in together as a group nonchalantly without flowers or anything. But instead of Tommy and Sam being on the alter, they sit with bridesmaids and groomsmen in the pews. The priest starts talking as someone walks around passing out the programs as well as ink pads and rubber stamps. It's time for the first reading, and 4 people all walk up to the alter to do the reading, they realize that not all of them could do it so only one of them goes up to the podium. I had no idea who any of these people were and then I realized that although it was only Tommy and Sam on the alter, there are about 4 or 5 wedding parties in the church.

During the first reading, Danny's cell phone goes off. Of course he answers it. It's a girl, apparently from Germany, so he gets up and walks out of the church to talk on the phone, like it's no big deal. The first reading goes on, and Billy and I look at each other "isn't Danny supposed to do the responsorial psalm?" He was. First reading ends and then five more people all walk up to do the responsorial psalm, none of them Danny because he's still out on the phone. Instead, Michael J Fox goes up there to do it. And he decides to sing it, and at least in this dream, Micheal J Fox absolutely sucks as a singer, his voice cracked the whole time and at one point you couldn't even hear him sing.

I was supposed to do the second reading and I was ready to walk up there and fight all the other people to get to the podium to do the reading. Instead, Obama walks in, like it's nothing. Goes and stands next to Tommy and waits for Tommy to recognize him. They greet each other and President Obama congratulates him. Then he walked up to the podium and starts talking about a new bill that's going to be talked about in the house of Representatives, which has no significance at all to the wedding, then he went on a rant about the newly elected female governor of Delaware and talked about her for a while.

Someone turned to me and said, "maybe we should have gone to St. Mary's." He left and I was getting ready to walk up to do the reading, but instead I woke up to Tommy's alarm clock and the dream was over. But yeah, it was pretty weird.

Update

I meant to update earlier, but that pretty much failed. So I will do it now.

Since the last update, I got a new phone which soon after arriving home was kidnapped. After a long ordeal, and random followings on twitter, I got my phone back. I've kept an eye on it since then.

Finished painting a house, which is the only work I've done since getting back from SD. But I might have found a job, I'll find out next saturday whether I got it or not.

For the fourth this year we went to the beach, it's been the first time in a long time that I stayed the whole weekend instead of just the day. It was awesome, everytime I'm there it's a family reunion, arguably the best fourth of july I've had.

Even the fifth of july was great. Minus frisbee-throwing a plate and making someone's face bleed. Also realized that sunburns on your feet are awful.

Well that's about it, I guess, I live an exciting and adventurous life and everything.

Holy Crap

Today Billy (blog) and I decided to go climb the Bunker Hill Monument because we've been doing nothing for the past few days. It would be something fun that would get us up and out of the house. We used to climb it all the time when we were little, so in my head i had the memories of running up the stairs, racing to the top of the monument. Not so much.

So we got there, after getting a wee bit lost (how hard is it to find a giant granite stick you would think). We started to climb and it wasn't bad. I got to step 100 and I said to myself, "this isn't bad at all, this'll be fine." Then, about step 150, my legs practically give out and turn to rubber. But I am not going to stop or give up, I'm going to finish this. So I keep on truckin up the stairs, pretty much dying (not really). We get to the top, Step 294, and get to see the great view. We got up all the steps in 8 minutes, relatively fast for walking standards. We get down the monument in 2.5 minutes, it didn't help that we were practically running and missing all the tiny steps on the way down (not safe). 

We headed back home and went and hung out with Sam (blog), and invented Ultimate Jenga. See both of their blogs.

Meh.

New Entry:

Got back from SoDak and have done nothing with my life.
Sam's land-lord is a whorebag. She hoards water.
Life is boring
Blah.

(see, bear, now you can read this blog, so shut up)

To Do List:
Get a job (maybe)
Draw blue prints for secret passage in Tom and Sam's new house
Install secret passage
Keep secret passage a secret from everyone
Give Billy a haircut
Laugh at Billy

-debleted

South Dakota blog:

wagacun.blogspot.com

What?

I really tried to put a video in this but it's not working right. But did you see Prince's interview on PBS with Tavis Smiley? 

1a. Really, you're name is Tavis Smiley? Were your parents big Sesame Street "Guy Smiley" fans. And do they have a thing again the letter "R" because it's spelled Travis. 

2. Prince is CRAZY. He says in the interview. 

"We're all indentured servants. When I found out there were eight presidents before George Washington, I wanted to smack somebody. I wanted to know why I was taught otherwise. Just tell me the whole story - I'll fill in the blanks. But don't tell me something that you think I'm supposed to know"

3. Well, we knew Prince was crazy. This just confirms it.

1b. No offense Tavis.

It's a trap ...

I got whiplash AGAIN. Seriously, it's like the second time in 3 weeks.

I got it from this:

You might say, "seriously, you got whiplash from that!? It's so fun and colorful, hence in no way dangerous" LIES. It's all a trap. Designed to hurt children (and 20 year old college students). Look out, it's always the ones you least suspect that are the most dangerous. I'm on to you rubix cubes.

Ninjas in South Africa

Since Sam yelled at me to post a new entry, here it is. 

This week is the last week of class for my junior year of college. As of right now, I have only 3 classes left. This morning, I had my last 1130 class, my South African Reading Seminar, so our Professor, Poppy Fry, (yes Poppy is her real first name -- it's awesome) decided to make it a fun class.

She made a bunch of South African foods for us to try. Umfani which was like spinach with salt and peanuts that was supposed to go with the Samps and Beans which was a thick corn and bean kind of thing, Chakalaka was vegetables seasoned with curry I think (I'm not sure, I didn't eat them) and Bobotani which is like a South African Meatloaf, but not that kind of MeatLoaf. It was all pretty good. And to go with all the food, she made Rooibos Tea which tasted like the tea from the Kowloon or other Chinese Food Restaurants, it was really good. I'm gonna try to look into where i can buy some.

We also got a brief lesson in the Xhosa Language. (That African clicking Language) It was really cool. She stressed that every letter is pronounced by itself, not like in english where you put together "th" and "ph" because in Xhosa, "Usipho" and "Usifo" are not pronounced the same. Because "Usipho" means gift and "Usifo" means disease. 

My favorite word in Xhosa is by far "Ninjani" which means "how are you" if you're addressing more than one person. It's my favorite word because "ninja" is sleathly hiding in the word. 

----------------------------------------------

Oh yeah, so something substantial did happen this past week. Thursday night, Third Eye Blind did a concert at Saint A's. I didn't go, I didn't feel like it. Instead I went to the Key Fire we had the night. After the concert everyone came down to the fire, we easily had over 300 people there it was awesome. The best part was that, at about 1 AM, guess who also showed up to the fire .... THIRD EYE BLIND. So yeah, the Keys are pretty much legendary now. It was awesome.

Whiplash

I think I have whiplash but I have no idea how or why. Very weird, but I still can't turn my neck

SoDak II

As of about 3:45 today. I officially have a job for at least part of the summer. I got hired to be an intern at Re-Member in South Dakota. Pumped.

"Ok, we're good"

I had my SBA Leader interview on Tuesday, I think it went pretty well. I find out after Easter what happens with that.

I had my Re-Member phone interview today. It lasted 5 minutes, there may have been 6 questions. And the guy ended it with, "Ok, so yeah I think we're good" Umm, ok. Bye

Who would win?

Yesterday I was watching TV with my roommates and a promo for this show on Spike TV came on called "Deadliest Warrior." I'm not completely sure what it's about, but I hope it has different warriors fight. Because I truly want to know, who would win in a fight: Samurai or Gladiator? Ninja or Viking? Spartan or Roman?

Week O' Crap

Well really, weeks o' crap. I am currently in the most anxiety filled span of time in my life. Aside from papers, reading, exams, and other school related issues, I have 4 stress-filled events.

1. RA Selection/Housing Lottery:

I am currently a Junior RA at my school, for senior year I applied to be an RA again (the money makes a HUGE difference). Stressful Aspect 1: Am I gonna get hired again? Did I do a good enough job this year? What is going on. Found out I got hired, OK but that leads to Stressful Aspect 2: Where am I going to be placed as an RA on campus? In the Freshman dorms? In the sophomore dorms? Please have me be placed in the senior dorms! Got placed in the senior dorms, which leads to Stressful Aspect 3: What part of senior housing will I be placed in? In the singles? The apartments? Hopefully the townhouses! I got Townhouses. (This is the condensed version, it was a lot more hectic)

2. Keys Elections

For the "honor" society that I'm in, time for elections came up. For Keys elections it has to be a unanimous decision among our 28 members. I wanted to be elected Vice President, but I heard people saying they wanted me as treasurer. When election time came (last night). We elected the President quickly, everyone wanted the same guy in charge. VP was different. It got narrowed down to me and another kid. The other 26 members debated who should be VP for 2 HOURS. It was wicked stressful, I was wicked anxious and nervous. After about 2 hours and 15 minutes of discussion, I was elected VP. Now I just have to prove to them they made the right decision.

OK so two of my stress-filled events have been completed, but I still have two more to go.

3. Spring Break Alternative Leader Interview/Selection

I went to South Dakota with SBA and for next year I applied to be a leader on one of the trips. Sent in my application, and last week I got an email congratulating me for passing phase 1. Phase 2 of the process is the interview. Mine is tomorrow night. Very stressed out and nervous about that, anxious too. I want to get selected, but you never know. Hopefully it all works out.

4. Re-Member intern interview

In South Dakota, we worked at a community center type thing, called Re-Member. When we got back from SBA myself and 2 girls applied to be interns there for 3 weeks in the summer. We sent in our applications about 2 weeks ago. Saturday I got an email asking when I wanted to set up my phone interview. It's set for Friday. So obviously this again, is a stress-filled, anxiety-filled situation. Hopefully that goes well too.

After all those are over, I have a break from school for Easter. Which is gonna be great, because time off is definitely needed at this point. After Easter Break, there are only 4 weeks left in the school year. Everything is flying by so fast .....

Long Walk To Freedom: The Musical Trilogy

So right now I am taking a course on the South African Politics of the 20th Century. For the course, we are reading two very scholarly books, tons of articles, and Nelson Mandela's autobiography: Long Walk To Freedom. 

One day in class, we (about 4 of us) decided we wanted to make the book into a movie. We then decided we wanted it to be a trilogy, and one third of the trilogy would be a musical. Hence, Long Walk To Freedom: The Musical Trilogy was born. So we started casting.

We decided that the young Nelson Mandela should be played by an up-and-coming actor, this movie would be his debut role. 

Young Adult Nelson Mandela - Will Smith

Middle Aged Nelson Mandela - Terrence Howard

Senior Nelson Mandela - Sidney Poitier

What about Morgan Freeman someone might ask. Don't worry, he is the narrator.

Who would then play Mandela's wives?

For some reason, Rihanna was chose to be his first wife. And Halle Berry was casted to be his second wife Winnie.

David Bopape, a strong member of the African National Congress (ANC) would be played by Djimon Hounsou (from Gladiator). Oliver Tambo of the ANC would be played by Don Cheadle. The token white-guy of the ANC would be none other than Tom Hanks. 

The leader of the militant wing of the ANC, the Umkhonto we Sizwe [Translation: Spear of the Nation] (AKA the MK) would be Mr. Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje).

Bono would be one of the white South Africans that housed Nelson Mandela while he was a fugitive.

Other notable cast members include:

Since South Africa has a large Indian population, we casted Freida Pinto, Kelly Kapoor and Sir Ben Kingsley (because he was great in Gandhi)

Will Smith's son (Jaden Smith) could play the role of one of Mandela's sons.

Forest Whitaker, Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, and Mekhi Phifer would also be casted in the movie: actual roles will be announced later, we're waiting on contract agreements.

And somebody decided that Beyonce and Shakira should both be in the movie, somehow.

But you may ask, how are planning on funding this movie? We already solved that problem. One word: OPRAH. We would cast Oprah in the movie as Oprah. We would add her into the story of Nelson Mandela's life by saying her and Mandela were pen-pals during his 27 year prison term. We figured by doing this, she'd pay for the whole movie. Plus, we could always throw in her yelling, "Apartheid is baaaaaaaaAAAAAAaaad!" 

It's a work in progress ... awesome progress

 

In 5 minutes and 1 second, I saved three lives

Gave blood today. But funny story...

So I do all the stupid questions, and the vitals (might I add, I was perfect) and finally got to give blood. I got to the station and the lady marked out where my vein was, three times, and after all the prep work, inserted the needle into my arm. Suddenly, NOTHING CAME OUT. She started yelling for her supervisor, "Laura! Laura! Laura!" who came over, took control of the situation, found my vein and inserted the needle properly.

Finished giving blood in 5:01, not a personal best but OK (4:21 is my best, giving blood is ALWAYS a race). So really today, I gave blood, and got stabbed by a Red Cross Nurse.

Here's a picture to explain:

(note: the yellow stuff is the iodine, I'm not diseased)

Additionally, when I said the supervisor came over and inserted the needle properly, she never in fact took the needle out of my arm. The whole time she was fishing around under my skin with a pointy metal stick. 

SoDak (abridged version with pictures)

On The Rez

(Bottger's B&B, I didn't actually use it, but girls on my trip said it was great. The door fell off, so you just sit there staring out into nature)

(Bob Bear Killer's House, up on the hill there's a trailer with 18 people living in it)

The Badlands

(It felt like we were in "The Land Before Time" or "The Ling King" or something, not South Dakota)

(this girl didn't know I took her picture, but it's OK because I showed it to her later and she thought it was cool)

Just a small glimpse of what the Rez was like. 

SoDAK

I leave for South Dakota at 6am tomorrow. I'm pumped.

Full blog of my week long trip to follow.

Tails, Tails, Tails, Tails, Hammer

So this morning I flipped a coin to decide whether or not to go to my 9:30 New England History class. Heads was go to class, Tails was skip it. It landed Tails, but I wasn't completely set on skipping. So I flipped the coin again. Tails, Tails, Tails, and yet again Tails. Was this a clear message to skip class? I'm sitting at my desk at 9:21, it takes about 10 minutes to walk to class and I am not at all ready yet. I decide to flip the coin again, Heads. OK, fine, I'll go to class. 

Get to class, just a little late but other people got there after me so I didn't care. The professor starts to talk about, I don't even remember. We broke up into small groups and did nothing. Talked about how stupid Connecticut is, white picket fences, and how Charles Dickens is stupid (for New England History purposes). Whatever, class ended eventually and I left. 

Went over to the ResLife Office to hang out until my 11:30 Ethics class. Talked to some of the RDs. Zack the RD asked me if I remembered seeing someone on Saturday night in the Lowers (apartments where I'm an RA) with a hammer. And if I knew who it was because they think the person who had the hammer did some other stuff on campus that night. They weren't allowed to tell me what, stupid confidentiality. 

I did remember seeing someone walking around with a hammer because I remember telling the other RAs in the Lowers that were outside with me the story of when a kid in high school tried to attack another kid with a hammer in the hallway. It was not successful since my former-Marine Lieutenant Vice Principle tackled the kid in the hallway and made him drop the hammer. 

But I could not remember who had the hammer in the Lowers. I could remember everything else, where it was, what time, what happened just before, all that. Everything except who and who he was with. I had an idea of a few kids in my head but I was in no way sure of anything. I eventually called another RA and asked her, and my idea was actually true. (I should have followed my instinct, but I didn't want to get the wrong kid in trouble.) 

The RDs were all excited about getting a name and they were going to call him into the office to ask him about Saturday so that if he didn't actually do anything, they could at least find out if it was one of his friends. I actually heard on RD say to the other, "we could do good-cop bad-cop."

Went to Ethics, where at the start of every class my teacher flips a coin to decide whether or not the have a quiz. I figured it was a good day for Tails because of my coin-flips this morning. But apparently I used all the tails up. It landed Heads and we had our 5th quiz in a row. 

For tomorrow I have a midterm in my South Africa Reading Seminar and two projects due in my Human Growth & Development class and I don't want to do any of it. So I'm sitting here avoiding doing my work.

Whatevs

new post.

there, my blog isn't empty.

more substantial post to come.