Adventures Down Under

Calm

2012-02-12T18:38:00.001-08:00

This weekend wasn't too eventful. Perhaps the pinnacle was going to the popular Pho place down the street.

Half of the group decided to travel up to Cairns for a two-thirds day on the reef for an absurdly high price. I think the cost of their trip was at least $200 more than my trip up pre-IQP and their cruise was leaving 3 hours later than mine giving them less time on the reef. But I'm sure they had fun. Actually I know they did. It's the freaking GBR.

The rest of us stayed in Melbourne and had a pretty quiet weekend. It was quite a nice change of pace for weekends. Friday night I made meatloaf and it turned out pretty good, but it reminds me that either I'm too nice, or my roommate is a huge mooch. Probably a little bit of both, though I lean towards the latter. So basically I made a meatloaf and we were splitting it three ways and two of us ate a little over half so it was looking like I would have a little leftover for a snack/half a meal. But the third person, my roommate, was napping when the food finished, so when he did get around to eating his share, he just took the remaining half… and ate all of it… That and he's been mooching everyone's food for all term long. Maybe it'll come up again. Who knows? I don't really like unnecessary confrontation or conflict, but if it gets to a point where it needs to be discussed, I will lay down the law.

So Friday night I just relaxed and watched Akira. In retrospect, that's really all I did this weekend. Sat on my ass and watched anime, played Skyrim, or read Cell. Real cool Dave, real cool. Well that's not entirely true. On Saturday I took a bunch of people on my plan to see Melbourne Museum and eat Pho. Oh man, DAT PHO. So good. So much closer to Vietnam. And it was normal pho sized for $9.50 which is a steal in Australia. Sadly, I again forgot to take a picture even though I went in with the intention of taking a picture of the pho before I ate it. I was just too excited to eat it.

Melbourne Museum was also pretty cool. It was a general science museum that was free with our student IDs, pretty awesome. They had exhibits on the forest, the brain, and dinosaurs and stuff. It ate up a good 2-3 hours of our afternoon for free so I'm not complaining.
The rest of the weekend was spent doing one of my three activities, all on my butt, but I watched the entire first season of Avatar: the Last Airbender. It's quite entertaining and given my current rate. I'll probably finish at least season 2, if not the entire series, before the end of the week. On a similar note, I've taken it upon myself to watch all the Pokémon movies before I leave. And Word spellchecked Pokemon into Pokémon, awesome. Again, real cool Dave. Reeeaaaalll cool. But that's what I get for going to a small tech school. I was fighting with my inner-nerd for 1.5 years and now this is what I've become. I'm happier, but I'm much nerdier. But so far I've watched 4 of the thirteen. All of these were taken from the above-mentioned roommate's external hard drive. He's a great person, just when it comes to food/finances he's a bit… problematic.

Yeah, pretty quiet weekend. It's also kind of scary to note that we're more than halfway done with our time here in Australia. It's gone by quickly, but slowly at the same time. I think I'm definitely looking forward to going home, but at the same time I don't really want to leave. But really I do kind of want to leave… This whole trip is definitely an experience that I will never forget, but I think if I sit down and reflect, I have learned and grown a good deal while here.
Melancholy note to end on, but whatevs.

P-P-PEACE

I don't know why I end each post with that, but I do.

Musings in Sydney

2012-02-06T21:09:00.000-08:00

Hello again folks. It's that time of the week again. The time where I remember that I have a blog and things to write about and document both for my own sake as well as, at least hopefully if you still read this, your entertainment.

The past week has been pretty eventful it seems, or perhaps not the past week, but the time since I've written the last post. The time between when I write seems to be forever, but it's really only a week. But I guess since I don't have my normal routine set here and I have no homework to do, time seems to pass by a lot slower. I'm no longer in the fast-paced world of being a student on a term schedule and having a million deadlines to meet, no longer in the US where everything is driven by productivity and profits. No longer, at least for now.

It's really a strange feeling being this un-busy. It almost makes me feel guilty, but then I go to the bathroom and see my IQP partner "inconspicuously" browsing facebook at the bottom of her monitor much like I do. But that's only during work. At (my temporary) home, I just really have nothing to do. I feel like there are a lot of things I WANT to do, but I don't really want to take the time to do them, I don't really know what I'm doing. It's like coming to Australia didn't really fix the issues within me. It's just put me in a new environment and changed the circumstances a little bit.

I also don't know why I started writing this when I did because I have a meeting at 11:30 which is pretty far away, but we have to do some prep work before our meeting. And it takes me forever to write these things because they are pretty long and even though I say I don't filter myself too much, I still do make some quick edits as I'm typing. Either way, it takes a pretty long time to write these posts which is good because it takes up time at work, AND I have a word document open and I'm typing so it looks like I'm doing work on the report or something. Overall, it's just a great way to pass time at work without being overly obvious and also I can upload it without wasting my precious 25mb/week I get at the apartment.

Well back to what I did this past week. We went to Sydney this weekend and it was pretty cool. By now you've probably already noticed my new profile picture, and at this moment some of my classmates are at work uploading pictures on facebook and tagging me. It seems that that's how they pass their workdays. They probably have faster internet too, and they can use their own computers… Enough complaining about my work setting, maybe. But actually it's probably not the internet here that's the problem. The real limiting factor is the processing capabilities of this "computer" I won't describe it again because I complain about these things every post.
So back to Sydney, we flew in Saturday morning because if we flew in Friday night we would've had to pay for another night in a hostel which is basically just $45 wasted for nothing. So Saturday morning/afternoon was spent just walking around the city, exploring and stuff. I took a few pictures, my classmates took way more. It was pretty fun just exploring the city and seeing all the iconic landmarks, and planking in front of them. That evening all but 3 of us had purchased bridge climb tickets which give you a 140m high 360 degree aerial view of the city. The only downside is that is costs $188 to get up there. Something I was unwilling to pay. You can't even take pictures up there and have to pay $30 more for just two pictures. Needless to say, I did not want to empty my bank account for 3 hours of amazingness. I'll take a longer tour and eat relatively well thank you very much.

Instead of paying for that I had a pretty quiet evening just chilling and talking with the two others who did not pay for the bridge. We walked a little more around the city, chatted a lot, chilled by the iconic view of the Opera house where I was enlisted by a couple to take their picture. Well that one I'll take a little tangent for. Basically we're sitting their talking and taking a few last pictures as the sun sets over the opera house. A couple comes up to me and has some extremely specific directions as to the picture they want taken. I apply the rule of thirds and take the picture she asked for. I show her and she's elated saying, "Oh, that's perfect! Thank you!" I smile in return with a, "No problem!" and as I'm about to sit back down another couple, younger this time and with a super nice camera, come up to me and say, "Sorry, but I reckon you're pretty good. Mind taking a picture of us?" So off I went again to apply the rule of thirds and take a nice picture because I don't take a lot of pictures, but when I do, they're freaking amazing. But not really. So I take a picture with the fancy camera, which makes taking pictures way more fun, and go to sit down again, but the older couple again realizes that in their first picture they had not asked me to capture the iconic angle of the opera house saying, "I'm realizing that we have the icon of icons here and we'd be silly not to capture it". So I take another picture and everyone goes on their way happy with the photos I produced.

Tangent done, back to Saturday night. Well actually there's not that much left. We basically headed back to the hostel, pooped from a day of exploring out in the sun, grabbed a bottle of something on the way back and relaxed and drank our drinks before calling it a night. Which reminds me of how weird is that when I go to a liquor store and buy a 6 pack of something for way too much I don't even get carded. It’s going to be a weird 3 months back home.
That brings us to Sunday. We booked our flight back for that evening so we had pretty much the entire day left for us. We woke up and checked out of our hostel and headed out to the wildlife sanctuary which is exactly what it sounds like. And of course by now you've probably already seen the 15 pictures that've been uploaded and tagged of me on facebook, and if you haven't yet, you probably just went or are going to check right after this. Basically it's a zoo, but there are animals, namely kangaroos, that you can pet and feed and all the profits go to saving and preserving the wildlife. Basically it was pretty amazing and we played with and fed the kangaroos for a long time and took a ton of pictures. There were also some koalas that we took pictures with, but those are still in fenced areas probably because they can/would probably destroy some annoying little kid if left in an unsupervised environment. Also while at this wildlife sanctuary we ran into one of my classmate's high school friends. It was mind blowing that they happened to both be in Sydney, Australia at the same wildlife park on the same day. That and apparently he had lost a TON of weight since high school.

After the park and copious amounts of pictures, the group decided that it would be worthwhile to check out the Hard Rock Café Sydney. So we departed on our quest to find the Hard Rock Café, which wasn't too hard. We ate lunch and it was super expensive. All my class mates bought mixed drinks along with their meals which doubled the price of their already expensive meals. I just ordered a pulled pork sandwich for $20 and enjoyed it. The serving sizes here were the largest I had seen while in Australia and they had Heinz ketchup. You might think Heinz ketchup is nothing out of the ordinary, but in Australia most of the ketchup here is not Heinz and they're all a good deal sweeter than the standard American tomato sauce, which is what they call ketchup. So a hefty, albeit expensive, meal was eaten and then we embarked out into the surrounding mall in search of souvenirs. By the end of the Sydney trip I picked up a magnet bottle opener that has the Opera House and the Bridge pictured on it and a couple of tea towels. The bottle opener was used the first day of purchase and the tea towels are in my bag of things that I don't use.

Cue airport scene without problems. At least I wish that's what happened. Instead we were delayed in boarding the plane by about 20 minutes, but then when we were all happily seated on the plane waiting to take off they told us that we had to wait for the engineers to come and see if the water in the cabin was anything bad even though they told us it was probably from condensation from the humid climate. So we sat there and I read Cell by Stephen King. In the end the engineer arrived and said it was fine and we took off, but not before having sat on the run-way for almost 2 hours. The entire flight from Sydney to Melbourne only takes about 65 minutes so we were sitting on the runway for longer than we were in the air…
We arrived back at our apartment with no problems, and we took Monday off for Superbowl Monday. I don't even want to go into the details of that game and it's the only sporting event I watched every year.

Sorry if the last few paragraphs seems rushed, but I started writing this at like 10 this morning and it's now 4 in the afternoon and we're leaving in about 5 minutes so it is indeed a little rushed. The term is half way over. Mind = Blown. At least IQP work is picking up and I have something to do at work now.

P-P-PEACE

Australia Day Weekend

2012-01-29T18:35:00.000-08:00

I don't know what's happened to my writing mojo, but I don't really find the urge to write like I did during the first couple weeks here.
Maybe I've gotten settled in for real and before writing was my way of dealing with the "homesickness" that I was feeling. I've definitely settled in some and gotten the swing of things down.

This weekend was a pretty relaxing and uneventful one. A lot of my class mates were out traveling. A few went to Brisbane, where it was flooding, and another group went to Tasmania. I just stayed in Melbourne and chilled. It was nice. We had Thursday and Friday off due to Australia Day which is surrounded by a little bit of controversy as some people call it Invasion day. It's the day that white settlers first landed in Australia and it's since, at least publicly, become a holiday to celebrate the diversity of Australia. To show for this there's a parade with tons of different organizations and clubs that all represent a different cultural group that takes place on the day. Of course we went to this because it's the touristy thing to do. And of course it was pretty boring/lame. I mean it's cool and all to see the stuff, but really it was just people dressed up in their traditional cultural garb walking around. Of the guys I talked to who went, everyone seemed to agree on this and as of course as WPI students, the highlight of the parade is when the Star Wars club walked by.

After the parade there's a bunch of other activities going on in the gardens on the outskirts of the city and we wandered down to see the woodchop. Yes, a woodchop. They have lumberjacks race to see who can cut through the log the fastest both with axes and chainsaws. It was actually pretty entertaining.

To most Australians, the holiday is just about kicking back, relaxing, throwing some food on the barbie and drinking some beers. To commemorate this there was a reddit meet up on Australia day in one of the nearby parks. I invited all of my classmates to go as well, but I was met with ridicule and how meeting people from the internet sounds like a good way 'to get free candy from a van and never see the United States again'. Mmmhmm, feel free to live in your WPI bubble while on the other side of the world and be too scared to meet locals. Yes I'm a bit angry, but whatever, not my problem. I'll go explore the city and meet locals and hear about the hidden gems, you can socialize internally with people from the States and be closed-minded.
So I went to the meet up and there was a good number of people there, about 15ish as a ball park. The event was BYO and of course being a cheap student, and given the fact that alcohol costs way too much here, I didn't BMO. I was just looking to meet some people. And that I did. It seemed that everyone there was pretty much a mix of a group of friends that regularly meet up about once a week via reddit. They all have their own friends outside so it seems, or maybe not since they're redditors, but they congregate and chill.

That evening one of the sponsors invited us over for post-dinner drinks and snacks. Naturally, free alcohol and college students go hand-in-hand so we all went over and had some drinks. Now his house is near Chapel Street which is supposed to be a ridiculously awesome place to be on a Friday night, so since we were already out there we decided to check it out. Unfortunately the place was pretty dead as a lot of people had work the next day so it was a failed excursion. Most people were flying out the next morning so it was extra sad because they stayed up late for the "legen-wait for it-dary", night for nothing.

That brings us to Friday, and I guess my motivation to write is gone, but once I start writing everything just kind of explodes out onto the paper. So back to Friday, I don't really remember what I did during the day… Oh right, I just kind of chilled at the library and played some Terraria and tried to get details for what was happening that evening because I got invited out for some drinks with the redditors I had met on Australia day. So afternoon was spent at the library, but I started to get hungry so I starting thinking of what to make for dinner because I had plenty of time and was in the mood for cooking. So I start thinking of what we have in our fridge/freezer which is dictated completely by the price of things since most meats are in the ball park range of $15-25/kg, which roughly translates to $8-12/lb which is RIDICULOUS. But at the Queen Victoria market there are ground beef bulk specials and it's $10 for 2 kg of ground beef, which is awesome. So we have a lot of ground beef in our freezer, and as usual potatoes are always cheap no matter where you go for whatever reason. Ground beef+ potatoes = shepherd's pie of course. So I look up some recipes and throw together a MEAAANNN shepherd's pie. I was so happy with how it came out and it was so delicious, it's definitely being made at least once a week if not more.

Friday evening comes upon us and I invite a couple of my classmates out to the bar. We go and meet up with them and just generally have a good time chatting with them and stuff, and they're all young professional who have money so they buy a couple round of drinks for us, again free alcohol is awesome. It was a relatively quiet Friday night, but still enjoyable nonetheless.
Saturday, uhhh, afternoon disappeared to I don't know what. Maybe grocery shopping and wandering? Not too sure, but the evening I went to the International Student Ministry they have at the church I went to on Sunday, met some more people and went out to dinner with them.

Sunday I went to church, went to the market, bought another 2kg of ground beef as I ate most of what was in our freezer over the course of about a week and a halfish. Pick up a few kangaroo steaks to cook and eat for dinner. Go to the beach and chill, the water was so warm, but it seemed like as soon as we got there the sun decided to hide behind the clouds. We came back I cooked the kangaroo steaks for dinner with a side of mashed potatoes, perfect medium doneness on the steaks. Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures until the last bite of the kangaroo so it's a rather messy, unflattering picture of my cooking finesse. Then the Australian Open final was on and it was a hell of a long game. Nearly six hours and each set was ridiculous. Nadal looked like he was going to get stomped on, but then every time he would stay in, fight and win the game. He was down 40-0 and he came back and won the game. It was RIDICULOUS and I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish watching the match.

Sorry for the cop-out in writing after Friday, I was hungry and took my lunch break and I discovered that pieces of my bread were moldy, I was about to bite into it and I notice that there are these black splotches on my bread. And I just bought that bread like 3 days ago. Ridiculous, I'm going to start storing my bread in the fridge. Oh and I guess I was going to explain that the lunch break destroying my writing mojo. Man, I never want to read over/edit these, following my thought processes must be so difficult.

Oh well.

P-P-PEACE

Full Week #1

2012-01-22T19:40:00.000-08:00

So it's about that time again at work where I don't have anything to do. Oh wait, that's all the time…

Well it's about time I updated my blog with what I've been doing. I know there are some fans of my blog out there dying to read about what I've been up to.

So the work week was the work week: me mindlessly trying to get through the day without looking too relaxed. It's quite hard to switch screens with the machine they've given me. There isn't enough processing power so sometimes the window of facebook lingers on the screen a little longer than I'd have preferred when someone is walking by. It's also funny to see that almost everyone else takes the time at work to upload their pictures.

But moving off the subject which I feel I've beaten to death and onto my weekend! So the Australian Open is in Town. There are banners and advertisements scattered across the city. And since I' m already across the world, why not go? So I bought a ticket that I had a classmate print out at his office. It was around $33 total which I guess isn't too bad because it is a grand slam event and you can pretty much stay there for the whole day. I woke up pretty late on Saturday due to the previous evening's festivities which I will go into detail later. I quickly ate some of my leftovers for breakfast and headed out to the open. I arrived there and got lost in the crowds trying to find where everyone else already was. Then I waited in line for about 30 minutes before I got into the courts and watched the 2nd half of Cirstea vs Errani. Of course while at the Open I took some pictures to prove that I was actually there because that's what this super expensive IQP is all about, right? Fly across the world just to take some pictures and say you were there and have done things! Who knows, something in the next few weeks might make me fall in love with Australia and move here. Apparently there are at least three WPI alumni who have moved here after their IQPs.

But moving right along. After the women's singles game there was Ferrer vs Chela. I don't know any of the names I'm typing and frankly, I'm surprised I even remember them at this point. But Ferrer is ranked 5 and Chela is ranked 27 so Ferrer pretty much dominated the match. It took him a while to get into the groove and he doubled faulted the entire first game, but after a few games he started owning the court. Oh and Errani won the previous game. So after Ferrer beat Chela I'd had about 4-5 hours of tennis, which is a large quantity for someone who doesn't really follow tennis and really just went to say he'd been there. So I left and just chilled the evening away, which is what happens a lot. Watch some TV, watch some anime, play some games, the usual.

Now Sunday I actually made it to church. Relatively large church with a cool name, Cross Culture. Think about that for a bit. There's the whole diversity part of it as the church is pretty diverse, lots of Asians, got some Caucasians too, and Indians, and it's in general pretty diverse, but mostly Asian. But then the name has another connotation, the culture of the Cross, what it means to be a Christian, to carry your cross daily. And there are way too many commas in that sentence because I like to use commas instead of periods because Word puts that ugly green underline in if you use periods instead of commas. Enough about the name of the church. So the service was pretty generic, albeit long. And I slightly disagree with the order of their actual service, but that's a completely unrelated topic and perhaps it's not my place to even be criticizing that aspect. I met some people there and pretty much spent my entire afternoon with them. It was quite interesting.

I didn't exactly feel the most welcome at the church except for this one oldish guy who pretty much showed me his little cultural snippet of Melbourne. His name is Nigel and he immigrated to Australia 25 years ago, but still has an extremely heavy Lebanese accent. Along with us were Jim and Neal, two young men of Asian descent. I don't remember which name goes with which person… but I can just arbitrarily assign them and it'll be okay. So Jim moved here 13 years ago from China and now works in a small law firm. His English is good, but he also still has a pretty heavy Asian accent. Neal finished his contract for work in Taiwan and decided to take a year off and work somewhere that wasn't Taiwan so he made his way to Australia and he's now on his 5th month here. Neal barely understands English and because of that keeps quiet most of the time. I'm sure the three of us could have easily carried on a conversation in Mandarin, but that would've been quite rude in the presence of Nigel who was pretty much the guy who brought us all together.

So I met Nigel because he happened to sit next to me during the service. Whether or not he chose to sit next to me because he noticed that I was new I have no idea, but I have the suspicion that he didn't know I was knew because when he asked for my name he said, "What was your name again?" implying that he thought we had met at a previous engagement and he had forgotten my name. It must be because all Asians look the same so he was confused. After he found out I was new, he half-followed me around after the service and invited me out to lunch at a Lebanese bakery. So we ate falafel and Lebanese pizza. It was really good and tasted and felt really authentic, and it must have been because this man has been living in Melbourne for half his life, he damn well must've found the best Lebanese bakery in town. That and it was pretty popular. Then after dinner he brought us to get some sweets: baklava. And oh my goodness was that baklava amazing cuz I mean, half his life. The four of us ended eating half a kilo of Baklava and the layers of pastry were so thin and crispy and the filling was sweet and the overall feel was just freaking delicious. I wish I had brought my camera with me to take pictures of the falafel and the baklava, but alas, I'm a camera noob so I didn't even think to bring my camera with me when I left the apartment.

And that was pretty much my Sunday. I had planned to go to the beach with some of my classmate as it was pretty hot, but I'm glad I spent some time with the local people here. I want to spend more time with locals and meet more of them. I mean, we're on the other side of the planet. I go to school with my classmates. Sure I don't really talk to them much at school, but I'm sure it'll happen more often now that we have time together here, well at least for some of them. We're in Melbourne, I want to meet new people, have them share Melbourne's secrets with me. There's some bars and places I found via r/Melbourne that I'm gonna try and bring some classmates with me to. I wouldn't mind going alone, but there's still that barrier of being a foreigner. Go to a reddit meet up on Australia Day and perhaps go to the bars they frequent. Speaking of which, I found this awesome bar here that I'm definitely going to visit and take pictures of before I leave. It's called the Mana Bar and it's as nerdy as it sounds. It's a gaming bar and they have TVs and consoles scattered around the bar and have the nerdiest cocktails you can imagine. There's the Princess Peach, Health Potion, and the Mana Potion to name a few. Biggest nerdgasm ever.

And I guess since we're on the topic of alcohol, I can go into the details of Friday night. What a smooth transition that was just ruined by this sentence. Well Friday night we pre-game because alcohol is SUPER expensive here. The cheapest thing you can buy here is a $2.50 bottle of wine. And that's pretty decent. I mean it's probably really crappy wine, but I don't know wine too well and it doesn't taste too bad. I know the red variant is pretty gross, but the white version isn't too bad. I even bought a $12 bottle of Pinot Grigio just to taste and to my untrained taste buds the $2.50 white tastes better initially. The $12 tastes like vinegar when you first drink it, and it does for the entire first cup which is absolutely horrid, but the next day I decided to try it again it tasted a hell of a lot better and was actually quite enjoyable. But then I took a couple days off from the "expensive" stuff and had another glass with dinner yesterday and the same vinegar flavor of the wine came back and it's just so unpleasant. I don't think I'll understand wine while I'm here, maybe later in life, unless someone can explain it to me, or I might actually just try and look it up later because there's still a good deal of time left in the workday.

Now where was I? So we were pre-gaming and we played a little bit of slap cup, then we started to get too loud and we were on the same floor as our advisor, so we decided to move the party upstairs away from the professor. When we got upstairs we started playing with a deck of cards. Various drinking games that I had never played before because I don't drink or party at school. Well after the pre-gaming was over I had consumed almost a full bottle of cheap wine and I don't know how wise it is of me to be posting this information on the internet for the world to see. It'll be the dark side of the Sun I guess. But yes, almost a full bottle of wine + 120 lbs of small Asian don't mix the greatest. But I'm very glad that I don't have Asian-flush nor do I ever plan on vomiting due to drinking stupidly. Even when drunk I'm surprised at how much control you have over yourself. Makes you wonder about all those people who use drunkenness as an excuse. Then again I've never been ridiculously drunk because I don't ever want to reach that point.

Pre-gaming done, we went to Eurotrash. It was a really small club and the music was not bad. The crowd wasn't the greatest though; a lot of dudes and the chicks there weren't too attractive. Man I sound like a douche when I'm writing about partying and clubbing. But after awhile we decided to leave and go back to the Lion, the second club we went to last weekend. It's a pretty decent club/bar and it's got no entry fee and is a block away from our apartments. At the Lion is where things went down. I got threatened by a small Vietnamese dude. He threatened "to smack [me], and [I didn't] want that to happen bro. I'll do it." So what had happened was that in a club it gets pretty crowded and you get pushed around a little bit and of course the natural reaction is to push back. And apparently this guy didn't like it. I didn't turn around or even acknowledge his existence but I could tell that the voice was coming from the down direction so I could only assume that he was even shorter than me. It's kind of funny thinking back on it and I'm sure if anything did end up happening, my WPI crew ( haha that's funny because there's someone who rows here…) would've had my back, but fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, it didn't end up that way.

Speaking of the rower here, he got a free drink from a gay guy. He beat me to my own game. There are details there of course, but you can ask me because I'm at 2100+ words already.

Tl;dr: Work->clubbing->Australian Open->church

P-P-PEACE

The First Week and its End

2012-01-15T16:23:00.000-08:00

So everyone arrived on site about a week ago and I guess it's time for an update. Especially since this is a word document and I'm typing and I'm at work. So it must be something pretty important looking in regards to my report. The words are just flying out as if I've just read a super relevant paper and now I'm trying to get all of the information down before I forget it all.

As you can probably tell, "work" is pretty uneventful so this will probably be a longer post if I have enough to write about because there's really nothing else I can do at this point. We're waiting for our sponsor to decide on what they want us to do and that was really apparent on Friday, which we informed after the fact that it's casual. But hey, maybe my new "casual" is the business casual dress, all grown up now. Speaking of which, I've been wanting to upgrade my wardrobe for awhile now, but clothes are too expensive. I did, however, take this opportunity of IQP and Christmas sales to pick up a few more "fashionable" clothes towards my future new wardrobe once I have the funds in a few years. It's not like I'm growing taller or fatter anytime soon either.

Well that's all unrelated to IQP at all and just random thoughts that stem from me starting to write about IQP. And to think I used to make fun of people who wrote like they talked. But then again, I think a blog is the time and place for something like that and not some academic paper. Even still I become more articulate and eloquent when I'm typing, it's like that extra half second I get to think before the words appear makes me awesome. But when am I never awesome? :D just kidding. Kind of. But not really.

I've gotten about half a page down and I've still written nothing about how IQP is going. I guess I'll start with the most recent and relevant topic regarding life here which is sharing an apartment with people who aren't really your friends and not brothers in Christ. It's a bit different to put things lightly. First of all the apartment is really small and maybe sometime I'll take pictures of it and upload them while I'm at the library. But the way the apartment is set up, it lends itself very much towards sharing food with your flat-mates, but as this weekend would have it, my dreams of simplicity and camaraderie would appear too lofty. I originally wanted to share all of the food in the apartment equally and split the receipts pretty much equally amongst the four of us. Very similar to how my apartment functions at school, again with me primarily doing most of the cooking which I'm totally okay with. But we seem to have hit a road block and we've now since converted to only sharing milk and eggs. I've paid the most for food so far because I like food so now I "own" a lot of the food we have around the apartment even though we've eaten most of it. I pretty much got a little shafted on the money side of things in regards to food, but it's not too much money and I'm not about to poke a sore spot over $5-10. Hopefully after last weekend it should be nothing but smooth sailing and blue skies ahead.

Now onto less touchy subjects and the fun stuff and of course my writing momentum gets kicked into a corner as we have the weekly office Monday morning coffee pow-wow. Then of course I have to look up how to make chili for our apartment dinner only to find out that it takes a damn long time and we don't have chili powder. I guess it'll be chili powderless chili. And I also guess we're eating really late too as it takes at least an hour if not 2 of simmering to develop the correct meld of flavors. Ah what a productive work day.

On a more exciting topic, this weekend we went out to a few different places. On Friday night we went to a couple clubs. Nothing really too exciting there, except one of my classmates trying to set me up with girls all night. Tapping on their shoulders and pushing me towards them. Really quite embarrassing to say the least, then add to that my extreme noobness in this type of environment. Yup, really awkward. Just imagine that happening for a few hours in loud clubs and him yelling over to me every couple minutes, "Dude just pick one out!" I'm totally a wuss and we'll see if that changes in the next few weeks I'm here. I may even discover that "clubbing" isn't really for me. I'm not too sure of it at this point. It's just really loud music on a crowded dance floor bobbing to the beat of the music. Music that is only mediocre. I mean it definitely fits the environment of a club and everything, but that doesn't mean that music isn't that great. Then again we only went to two clubs as we're reluctant to pay for any entry fees.

Saturday we went to the zoo and that was pretty cool. I took some pictures, but I forgot to charge my camera, so about 10 minutes in, it died. I was so upset but I did get some pictures of the kangaroos. Also the kangaroo exhibit is pretty much open air with a small fence that people can easily cross. There are emus and kangaroos kind of just chilling. Luckily while we were there one of the baby kangaroos walked out of the enclosed area and I got to pet it. Unfortunately there were so many people around so I didn't get to take an iconic profile picture. That kangaroo was pretty much an attention whore, but I can't blame it. It's a freaking kangaroo living in a zoo. There were also a bunch of other animals from around the zoo. Typical ones you'd find a t a zoo of this size. There were elephants, zebras, giraffes, all different types of monkeys, tigers, lions, seals, penguins and the list goes on and on. I did get to see a platypus though and those things are pretty damn ugly.

After the zoo, one of our sponsors here invited the whole group over for dinner and we sat around for awhile as they told us about themselves and then we ate and just kinda chilled because that's what you do at dinner parties. It was good, free food and company. Then Sunday morning I had planned to go visit a church down the street, but I'm kind of lame and couldn't exactly wake myself up in time that and one of my flat mates took the bathroom for about 15 minutes starting at 9:35 so I couldn't exactly wash-up in time for the 10 am service. All excuses I know, but I'll definitely go next week and maybe that'll be a better environment to meet people :D.

Then we went to the market and picked up groceries and the wonderful discussions took place, well not exactly then but the problem came up. We shelved it as people were going to the beach and so we went to the beach. The weather wasn't even all that great. It was warm when you laid down and got out of the wind, but with the wind blowing it was actually pretty cold. I basically spent the whole time digging a hole because that's what you do at beaches. You dig holes. It's much more exciting than just lying down and getting skin cancer. It's also hilarious because all my pale, white classmates are lathering on the sun screen and still getting burned and I don’t think I applied sunscreen until we were leaving and I didn't burn at all. There was also free ice cream being handed out and we totally abused it. I got two free ice cream bars and they were delicious.

And I guess that wraps up the weekend. It's Monday and we're back to the grind. Maybe we'll actually get some progress on our project this week. We should definitely be a little more proactive about our project because that is kind of why we're all the way down here in Australia.

On another note, with all the free time in the evenings I've been playing a lot of Terraria and Desktop Dungeons. I know I'm really cool, but everyone else seems to just be watching TV or other shows they have. Maybe I'll join in on some shows with people, but evenings here are going to be a large block of free time as we have no homework. This is what it must be like to have a job. *Gasp*

P-P-PEACE

First Day of Work

2012-01-11T20:49:00.000-08:00

Being in an office setting is definitely weird, especially for project work. It’s like we have the whole workday to work and research things for our project, but there isn’t really all that much to do yet as the main supervisor isn’t even in today. Also unfortunately, my laptop is unable to connect to their internet because it’s the government and all they have some type of server set up and I’m working on a remote desktop computer for the next 2 months. It’s running on XP and it’s pretty slow seeing as everything has to be remotely accessed. Oh well.

Another thing is that the work day is pretty damn long. There’s only so much I can do during the workday at least today being the first day. I’m also pretty damn bad, already ‘slacking’ on the first day and writing this. But really there’s nothing I can do. I’ve been reading all morning and I’m “settling in” so to speak.

Other random things that I’ve been thinking about: I still need to butt my way more securely into one of the groups of people. I’m fine chilling by myself and all but I think it’d be nice to foster new friendships and do things in a larger group. Completely unrelated, we need to learn how to shop better. For whatever reason we only decided to buy half a kilo of ground beef which was the cheapest thing at the market at $4 a kilo, but half a kilo is almost nothing. I used all of it in one cooking session and now we have no meat left in our apartment. A lot of starch and other things, but we probably need to pick up some cold cuts or something for sandwiches other than peanut butter and vegemite, which has quite an interesting flavor. I tried a little this morning but after tasting it I decided against covering the whole slice with it and just opted for the more familiar peanut butter.

Excuse the randomness of thoughts but that’s how my brain is functioning right now. But our supervisor totally looks like Natalie Portman. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it when I first saw her, but there was some familiarity about her and then it hit me. She looks very similar to Natalie Portman. So that’s that.

I can’t believe there are almost two whole hours before we leave, although it is nice that the sun sets really late so you don’t feel like you’ve spent the whole day at work. I’d imagine the feeling to be terrible when you get home from work and the sun’s set and it’s dark out. Man sounds like New England winter. Well perhaps it’s about time to get back to research and actually being productive for the last stretch of my first day here at work. We’ll see what ends up happening tonight. I have to actually try and be social and make friends. Who knew?

Checking In

2012-01-10T01:09:00.001-08:00

So now everyone has arrived on site in Australia. It’s all really exciting and fun, but I’ve already been in Melbourne for 10 days and I’m actually severely regretting coming early. I underestimated the cost of living here by a ton and now I’m down in the dumps and have to somehow manage to still have fun while being down basically 2 weeks financially than everyone else who just arrived on site yesterday.

Maybe I shouldn’t talk about financial issues to everyone, but meh. Well everyone has arrived and there are a lot of us. 15 people form a large group and I don’t know how the groups are going to break up into smaller circles. I can kind of see how it’s going to function, but it’s really far too early to see what social circles are going to form. Also I have no idea if any of the people here are aware that I have a blog and I don’t know how everyone would react to my thoughts that the rest of the world is seeing. I think it’d be interesting to know if anyone here in Australia reads these… I know some other people are writing stuff, but I’m also fairly certain that they aren’t publishing them on the World Wide Web for the world to see. I also probably need to butt my way into one of the groups because currently I’m sitting alone in the apartment and people are out doing things, library, maybe some at the beach? I don’t really know, but I’m already kind of tired of dealing with people for a bit. This is probably the first alone time I’ve had since flying out where people aren’t sleeping five feet away from me. Why are social workings so difficult? I also feel like I need to break up this large paragraph into smaller ones but I have no idea where to do it. But I guess since I just said that I might as well just

Start a new paragraph randomly. But then this is just a completely random thought so I’ll have to break again to keep the flow of ideas similar within the paragraph.

So I finally got some laundry powder, there was like a 2 kg box that was cheaper than everything else. The only downside is that I thought it would come with a cup measure in it, but I don’t think it does. Just a small set back because the apartment-hotel comes with cup measures so I can measure out the required amount of powder. I basically spent the morning alone while everyone else is still excited to be in Australia to take care of some various odds and ends. Went to the grocery store and picked up oil and salt for the kitchen, I sorely hope we make it to the market to pick up groceries because I sorely need to stop eating out every meal and walking through the grocery store, the amount of food you can buy at the store with the amount you pay at a restaurant is astounding. And there I go again about the finances.

I bought a prepaid phone for use here Down Under and it’s a “dumb” phone pretty similar to my phone in the states except that the buttons are much harder to press and the layout is different. It’s an experience trying to relearn how to use the phone. It’s particularly annoying because the delete button on my US phone is nothing on this phone and the actual delete key shares a button with the end call with up as delete and down as end call. I haven’t been texting too much but I’ve already accidentally deleted whole texts trying to delete a mistake. Also the change t9 option is the space button on my US phone, it’s all discombobulated.

Well we’re about to organize some type of group outing so I’ll leave this here and find a time to upload it cuz we only get freaking 25 mb/week here at the apartment. It’s ridiculous.

Cairns Extended Cut

2012-01-08T15:56:00.000-08:00

So my last post was definitely inadequate for the awesomeness that happened in Cairns. I just wasn’t quite feeling in the writing mood when I wrote the last post, and I had internet to distract me so I’ll go into a lot more detail in this one. I have the feeling this post will be a lot longer than the previous one so if that’s what you’re looking for, read on. If not, then don’t read it. I’ll never know who reads this and who doesn’t, unless you post a comment and those are always nice. Lets me know that people are enjoying and actually care about what I’m doing/how I am.

So our flight for Cairns was departing at 7 am so we had to wake up pretty damn early. I basically slept the whole way on the plane because that’s what I do on planes, fall asleep before or during take-off, and wake up when we land. It makes the whole flight seem a lot shorter because I’m asleep the whole time. Now I’m gonna complain a little bit here because I enjoy complaining and if you know me well enough, you know how often I complain just to complain. So this plane is perhaps the most uncomfortable plane I’ve ever been on. The seats were terribly shapes so you’re sitting in this super awkward position with your back pretty far back and your neck push forward pretty far, almost like they want to conform your spine to a nice C-shape. Now after the accident and apparently my years of poor posture, this seating arrangement is super uncomfortable and terrible for my back. Add to that the blasting A/C while everyone is wearing shorts so I’m cold AND uncomfortable. Well that’s what I was thinking when I was awake, which was probably like a total of 30 min of the 3 hour flight.

The flight lands and right as we get inside, it starts pouring rain, the raindrops are huge and the ground is soaked within seconds. But as we continue through the airport and claim our bag the rain has come to a complete stop before we have to leave the airport. As a side note, we initially hadn’t planned to check any bags, but between the two of us we needed to check one baggage to get our liquids like shampoo and sunscreen through the airport, silly security. We get a shuttle to our hostel and drop our stuff off as we’re not allowed to check-in until after 2pm. We do, however get to drop our bags off so we aren’t walking the city with our hands full. Unfortunately, when I dropped my bags off I forgot to take my camera with me further illustrating my inexperience with taking pictures though I am getting better. I do seem to take the most pictures of the random meals I eat though… Something about be and food. But I do think that’ll slowly come to a close because we’re moving into the Milano tomorrow and I get to stop paying out the ass for food to some degree. I know I wrote that in the last post, but eating out 2 meals a day adds up REALLY fast. Over just this week I’ve spent about $400 on food and other touristy things IN ADDITTION to the money I already paid before for accommodations and plane tickets. Pretty damn expensive vacation for one week… and there’s still more things to pay for… Well, I’m only in Australia once, that’s why I picked Melbourne as my 1^st choice.

I think at this point this post is already as long as my previous post and I’ve only covered the damn plane ride. Well, whatever, that’s what the extended version is for anyways. I get to tell you guys every tiny little detail of what I’m doing. Hell I might even include some pictures in this one. Then you people can really see my amazingly amateur picture taking skills.

So we walk the city, and everything is pretty much closed because it’s too early. We walk along the beach and boardwalk and kind of just observe the beauty of nature. The city itself isn’t really cityish. I mean it is, but there are trees sprawled in the middle of the roads and the backdrop is rolling mountains of green in the distance as pictured below.

Really pretty sweet. The beach itself is kind of nasty as it’s kind of marshy, but that makes for lots of cool animals. Different types of birds that can hunt in the shallow waters, crabs fighting for territory and dominance. Then there’s the Lagoon. Because the beach is so nasty, they filter the sea water and remove the brown-ness of the water and you get a nice crystal clear blue saltwater swimming pool along the ocean.

The real ocean is the deeper blue water in the background, that sand you see is what they have on the land to simulate a nicer beach to make up for the nasty one they actually have.

We walk around a little more and come across this building with a large glass dome on top of it. Intrigued we walk over and discover that it’s a zoo on to of a casino. In this casino there’s the most amazing little restaurant. The meals themselves are $12.00 at the most, and the portions are almost American-sized and pretty high quality.

Pictured above is tempura-battered Barrramundi, which is a local Australian fish. Fish and chips, oh and a beer. As you can see that beer is pretty damn small, it’s a “pot” of beer which I don’t think we have in the states, but then again I could be wrong because I have no knowledge of how alcohol works anywhere. I tried three different beers for the three meals I had here and the one above was Toohey’s Extra Dry and I actually really liked it. From what I’ve tried so far I seem to prefer “dry” beers though I have no idea what that means. I’ll look it up at some point but that beer was pretty delicious. So the meal total comes out to $15.50 which is RIDICULOUS here in Australia. A full-sized meal AND pot of beer for that little? MIND = BLOWN.

And I totally skipped the zoo on top of the casino because we were so hyped about this cheap, delicious restaurant. So yeah, it’s just a big dome with lots of trees around simulating the rainforest. The main attraction is the huge 4m salt water crocodile, most of which actually live in freshwater. But he’s actually pretty boring, just kinda sits there and does nothing. My favorites here were the Kookaburras. They actually have an albino Kookaburra named “Snowy” and they’ve got a nice little family of four of them. Apparently Kookaburras can’t be alone because they get all depressed and starve to death so they have to live together in a family. Also these birds eat meat and swallow chicks and mice whole. It’s really quite attractive.

So I didn’t get any pictures of the croc feeding because I didn’t actually have my camera with me when we were there for that… But I made up for it? No not really, the croc feeding was pretty awesome and I apologize for my noobness in picture taking. To make up for it, here’s a picture of a friendly bird perched on my shoulder.

Please excuse the shiny face. It’s pretty damn warm and humid in a rainforest and it’d been a long day. Also, the events of this dome are spread out among 3 visits as the tickets are for 5 days total, pretty sweet deal if you actually go back as many times as we did. Not really much else to do in Cairns anyways. Most people just kind of use it as a launch pad for the GBR and the rainforest.

Speaking of the GBR, that’s what we did the next day. Now here’s the thing. In Cairns there are three types of shops, food, souvenir, and booking agency. So walking around the city we ‘d seen a lot of different companies that take people out to the reef, but we hadn’t seen the one we booked it with. So we’re pretty anxious/wary for whatever reason that we might’ve been scammed as illogical as it is. We’re trying to reassure ourselves because it was on trip advisor and had a large number of reviews, but the doubts are still there in the back of our minds.

So we wake up bright and early for our pick-up scheduled for 7:15. There are two other groups of people outside waiting for their shuttles and as each van comes up and takes them away, I’m getting more anxious as to whether or not our shuttle will actually arrive. But alas it does arrive and we get shuttled away to the greatest experience of my life. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a water-proof camera. I was very close to buying a disposable one for $20 but I ended up saving my money and not doing it, which I’m kind of regretting at this point. All the photos I have are pretty boring as you can really only see different shades of blue. And I don’t know how my blog is going to like having pictures scattered all over it. I might have to host them all online which would be a pain in the ass so I won’t include a blue picture. (Yes indeed I had to upload all of them so an extra picture would've taken an eternity longer on library free wifi.)

So in my last post I pretty much just went into the most detail of the reef because it was amazing. I don’t really know what else to say but for the sake of not repeating myself and writing even more seeing as I’m at 1600 words and I still have Kuranda to write about, I’ll just refer you to below and reiterate again that the puffer fish was damn amazing. I also have underwater hockey to thank for my mastery of the snorkeling gear. Also the the GBR made me realize exactly how crappy the gear we have at school really is. I was able to freely swim around and not worry about learning how to use the snorkeling gear which made my time that much more enjoyable. I was also unfazed by diving below the surface to get a closer look or chase some fish around. I will never forget the time I had at the GBR and maybe someday I’ll come back and get certified to dive and dive the reef even though snorkeling it was amazing.

So after our day on the reef, we came back around 5:30 pm walked around the city a little more, showered the salt off our bodies and grabbed more food at the casino. We then came back and decided to kick it in the TV lounge. As we entered we were greeted by 2 ladies studying for their PADI’s, which is a dive certification course. They were from the UK and Denmark. We spent the rest of the evening just talking to them and chilling. The girl from the UK was actually an engineer and both of them were taking a year off and traveling. It seems pretty popular to do that in other countries, to just travel and backpack around for a year. So we had a nice evening of conversation about music and then they departed and we never knew their names. A lot of meetings like that seem to happen in hostels. It’s pretty cool yet kind of sad at the same time. You meet a lot of people and just talk about stuff, but then you leave and never get to see them again and you don’t ever share your names. It’s just kind of like, ‘Where you traveling from?’ and it goes from there. We’ve met a handful of people and received no names. Such is life, it’s not like you’ll ever see them again. You share the traveler’s bond and go on your way.

The next day we booked Skyrail and our shuttle arrived at a more reasonable hour of 9:00. It takes you basically from Cairns to Kuranda and it was nowhere near as amazing as the GBR but what can you expect? I mean it was still pretty awesome to be about 15-20 meters above the forest floor riding above the canopy and seeing the green spread as far as the eye can see and seeing the water falls. I tried my hand at some more “artsy” photos here.

Got that nice close-up of the ant on the plant with spikes all over it, the stem had even scarier looking spikes and a lot more as well. The trip up was a lot cooler than the actual town itself. Well then again we only had a few hours there and we didn’t really get to go to any of the cool things like the Butterfly Sanctuary. I really wanted to and I even wore red to help attract the butterflies, but it wouldn’t have been worth it to pay for a ticket for only about an hour of time in the place because we had to catch our return bus at 15:00 and the ride back takes about 45 minutes. Most of our time here was spent at a brain teaser stall in the market trying to figure out the puzzles.

Then we grabbed lunch and made our way back to Cairns.

Not the greatest picture, but it gives you a really good idea of what the Skyrail is.

We got back to Cairns pretty early, spent another hour or two in the casino dome zoo then went back to the boardwalk so I could get my pictures. Spent a good chunk of time just chilling on the boardwalk watching the tide come in and the animals do their thing. Really relaxing despite the nasty brown water and litter floating about.

Now we’re back in Melbourne and our holiday is winding down and the project is about to start. I hope you’ve enjoyed this enhanced version of my blog with pictures and everything. I definitely enjoy writing them but I choose to do so at non-ideal times. It’s about 1:00 AM here and I have to check out before 10 AM and I’m on the top bunk with a stranger from Quebec sleeping below me.

P-P-PEACE

The Next Few Days - Cairns, Great Barrier Reef, Skyrail

2012-01-06T22:05:00.001-08:00

I don’t really remember too much after I last wrote as we just spent the past 3 days up north in Cairns. It was amazing. It was such a stark contrast from the city life of Melbourne. Immediately upon stepping off the plane the air was a lot more humid and clean, and it rained hard for a short period of time. We arrived in the tropical north of Australia, Far North Queensland.

The landscape was just completely different. The central business district (CBD) is about a quarter of the size of Melbourne’s and there are trees EVERYWHERE, parrots flying around, and insects buzzing around too. We went into the dome zoo in the middle of the city on top of a casino. Saw some pretty awesome animals just flying around really close to you. Witnessed them feed a four meter long saltwater crocodile, “Goliath”. Just pretty sweet in general. Also, the ticket was valid for four days after you initially purchase it so whenever we had some free time we would go back and see the animals again, and it was different every single time.

Then of course the GBR (Great Barrier Reef) was AMAZING. HOLY CRAP. It was so awesome. It was like snorkeling/swimming in an aquarium. The fish are so close and you can just be floating around and you’ll find yourself in the middle of a school of fish. I also went on guided snorkel tours with the marine biologist on board and he would free dive 20m to the bottom and just pick up stuff for us to see. Basically we got to see a lot more things swimming around with him than if we were just blindly bumbling around the reef, even though that was amazing as well. I think I pretty much saw everything the reef had to offer, minus the friendly large fish Frank. I saw sharks, turtles, jellyfish, tons of shiny and colorful fish, starfish, sting ray, sea cucumber, and hands down the best part, a puffer fish.

Our marine biologist found and caught a puffer fish, made it puff and we passed it around. It was so cute, soft, and cuddly all puffed up. I’d always imagined them to be hard and pointy when puffed up but it’s the exact opposite.

I could write all day about all the amazing things I saw at the GBR but that’d be kinda boring for you guys. All said and done I will never forget the things I saw and experienced at the reef but I did get sun-burned moderately on my shoulder and calves. But that’s what I get for over-estimating my Asian skin.

The next day we took a ride on Skyrail, which is a 7.5 km lift over the canopy of the forest to Kuranda, the village in the rainforest. That was also pretty sweet, a stark contrast from seas of blue to seas of green which are both pretty different than seas of grey/buildings here in Melbourne. Now we’re back in Melbourne and everyone else is arriving on site in two days. And tomorrow I can finally stop spending ridiculous amounts of money on food as we get to move into our campus housing and I can buy groceries, which also cost a lot more but are still much cheaper than eating out every meal, and cook my own food.

GBR was amazing…

PEACE

Days Two, Three, and Four - Exploration

2012-01-02T21:13:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer - The following posts were written on a previous date. Day one was 29/12/11. I have just now gotten reliable access to internet as the library has been closed since the 25th. Also just in case you don't actually read all of this. This will not be a daily update once my project/work starts, probably closer to a weekly update.

- - -

Walking, walking, walking. Lots of it. It’s all we’ve been doing for the past few days. That or standing that is. A new city, lots of new places to explore and walk around. New Year’s was pretty cool too. Just hustling and bustling just like any of the other Melbournians. Going to all the different shows and performances they had on. Yeah. Don’t really know what to say, just lots of new experiences flooding in.

Also I’ve discovered that I absolutely suck at having a camera. It’s always in my pocket and I just kind of stare in awe at things thinking they’re cool and then I don’t take a picture. And then the pictures I do end up taking I don’t think are too stellar. Pretty boring in general, but I guess that’s cuz there’s no one in them except the occasional Gaffey as he stands there.

I really supposed it helps to write these on a daily basis so I kind of remember what I did that day, but I mean, who’s really going to read all of these? But then again I guess it can’t really hurt to write them for me. A way to reflect on my time here in Australia, remember and document all that’s going on. Let’s see… Arrival and I wrote about that… OH HOW COULD I FORGET. Yeah totally writing stream of consciousness here, deal with it.

Day 2 we went to the St. Kilda beach as our hostel had a free shuttle there in the morning. Unfortunately when we went to sign up for it there was only one seat left so we had to pay $7 for an all-day tram pass not too exorbitant considering all the other expenses Australia has to offer. Yeah, we walked all day for that and I got sun burnt. Not too badly as I did put on SOME sun block and caught the burning as we were chilling and then applied sunblock to prevent it from getting worse. But when we go to St. Kilda beach we totally found a trail and just followed it down the coastline taking in the beautiful scenery and whatnot. Ate lunch at some nice café type deal.

All the restaurants seem to be pretty classy. There are two types of places to eat, or that I will allow myself to eat at. There’s the “cheap” $8-12 place where there’s usually no service of any kind and you just walk up to the counter order your food and they either bring it to you after your order number or it’s handed to you. Then there’s the $14-22 place where it’s almost like a sit-down restaurant with waiters and everything, but from our experience so far bringing you the bill is something they don’t really do. Maybe it’s seen as rude as it’s almost like asking you to leave their restaurant? But Gaffey and I have totally finished a meal and had the waiter clear our dishes and sat there waiting for the bill and observing how other people pay. It’s definitely different here, a lot more relaxed and laid back. Not as busy as the east coast. For the most part a lot of businesses seem to actually shut down over the holidays of Christmas and New Year’s.

Also as a random side note, these will not be on a daily recap as soon as I started my project. I’ll be at work from ~8-5 so there won’t be a whole day’s worth of exploring to do. Maybe it’ll be a weekly thing once my project starts. Who knows? I sure as hell don’t. At the moment I’m just kinda kickin it in my room at the hostel, with no internet. Munching on some grilled chorizo and caramelized onion crisps and Tim Tams, relaxing, putting my feet up, and writing this diary/blog entry.

Well enough random thoughts. I guess this is what happens when I have no internet to keep my occupied.

Day 3, NYE

We slept in a bit to compensate for the last little bit of jet lag left and needing to stay up to welcome in the New Year. Spent the afternoon walking around the various gardens a short distance away from the city, along the Yarra River which runs along Melbourne and is why it’s a city in the first place, a large trading port. The big thing we were trying to get to was the Royal Botanical Gardens which has tons of different plants from all over the world. It’s really pretty amazing walking 20meters and being in a different country plant-wise.

Welcoming in 2012 was never a really big celebration in my past with my family. Asian families just aren’t really too big into holidays once the kids grow up. So spending it in a different country along with around 100,000 other people is pretty… err… different. A lot of hustle and bustle and more walking, which my legs and feet are in no way accustomed to by the way, but I’m manning up and my legs are strengthening. It’s kind of sad actually that I can’t walk all day. It kind of gets me thinking that if society were not as advanced as it is, I’d be screwed. Little to no athletic ability and can’t even spend the whole day walking without being in immense pain. I’d totally get eaten by a saber-tooth tiger in a heartbeat. But yeah, probably the first New Year’s Eve ever that I haven’t watched the ball drop, even if it is just on TV… Instead we had a pretty amazing fireworks display. There were spread out all along the river on different roof tops around the city and synced up so around 10 different roof tops were all shooting off the exact same array at the exact same time.

Day 4

We slept in again with regards to the fact that we’d been up til probably close to 2 or 3 the night before. Went to the Immigration Museum. It was actually fairly interesting seeing all the immigration history of Australia. See that they had their own anti-Asian period and all the tragedies of history. Definitely something I don’t see the rest of our group doing. That’s really the name of the game here. Find things to do as a pair that the rest of the group probably won’t do and if some people do end up going it’ll be likely that something else will be going on as well. Don’t exactly wanna shoot ourselves in the feet and do things now that we’ll likely do as a larger group. The more the merrier.

Then with much of the evening left we explored the city some more, walked some of the streets we hadn’t walked before on the first day and actually *gasp* went INSIDE some of the buildings!

I miss internet. Though we did grab a little free Wifi inside the McDonald’s we went to for dinner. I just emailed my parents and took care of some email business. Connect with the world. I also had a McOz sandwich. It was quite interesting, just a standard burger but with a large slice of beet. Apparently it’s back by popular demand so I thought I’d try it. Portioning here is much smaller as well. I can finish almost every meal I order and the medium value meal was the same size as a small American value meal. Oh and the daily value is 8700 kJ. Which I guess is pretty damn close to 2000 kcal. But I think the recommended amounts of fat and protein and everything else is a little lower because a double quarter pounder with cheese is over 100% daily value in a few categories while in the states it just hits 98% in the fat category.

As amazed as I am to say it. I kind of miss home/school a bit already. It’s just fleeting thoughts here and there, but when they were mentioning it during IQP Orientation I kinda just brushed it off cuz I normally don’t experience it, but I guess being here with just the two of us in a completely different environment is something I’m not used to. I’m sure once everyone else gets here and we move into the Milano I’ll be fine.

Cuz you know. You just gotta man up sometimes.

Day One - Arrival

2012-01-02T21:12:00.000-08:00

It’s been a long day. I made the silly mistake of staying up for as long as possible on the plane and watched a ton of movies. Just straight up back to back; finish one movie, before credits are over, switch on another movie. I watched Contagion, Kung Fu Panda 2, Cowboys and Aliens, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Change Up, and Red Riding Hood. Nothing was too spectacular except Kung Fu Panda 2. Do not watch Red Riding Hood.

So we, being me and Gaffey, arrived at the airport at around 9 AM Melbourne time. Waited in line to pass through customs and randomly saw Josie. After going through customs we figured out how to get to the apartment that WPI will be providing but we can’t live in yet. So that brings the time to about 11 AM. We walk around the city from the apartment and make our way over to the hostel where we will be staying to drop off our stuff so we can wander the city a little more freely. The time is now roughly 1:30. Okay, maybe my times are a little off… but then again we were walking pretty slowly taking in the many sights that a new country has to offer. Oh wait, along the way we also stopped to get cell phones. So I’m not losing random hours.

We try and find a place to eat lunch, lamenting the fact that most of the restaurants seem to be running an average entrée price of $18 AUD, which is basically the same in US give or take a few pennies. We settle on this cozy little café shop that is selling sandwiches for an average of $9-10, considerably less than $18, but still on the high end of things. But on average everything here seems to be costing about 150-200% more than in the states. A 450 mL bottle of coke with a discount of BOGO for $1 costs $2.35, but on the plus side, all the soda here is made with real sugar and not the stupid high fructose corn syrup garbage so it tastes considerably better.

And then we basically spent the rest of the day walking around exploring the city and just chillaxing. And our only source of free internet, the library, is closed from Christmas to the 2^nd of January, so it’s been a bit difficult to really plan anything to do. We have to rely on the old school method of brochures and word of mouth, completely prehistoric. . It’s really just kind of an inconvenience, but the next couple days until the library re-opens shouldn’t be too bad. We’re planning on going to St. Kilda Beach tomorrow, spend the day down there, scouting everything out. Then it’s New Year’s Eve so there’ll likely be some sort of club to go to, meet some people ;). But of course that’s in the evening so during the day we’ll go to some of the gardens around the city, maybe take a trip to some of the museums and see if there are some free or cheap/interesting ones. Really wished we had been able to get to go to Sydney, but I’m sure we’ll find things to do. Maybe meet some cool people. Hopefully.

On a completely unrelated note, I’m currently writing this post at around 20:30 on 29/12/2011, and it’s ridiculously bright outside. The brightness is as if it were 2 or 3 in the afternoon on the east coast. It’s completely messing with my head and probably psychologically extending the length of this day. I don’t even. I’m really pooped. I’ve been awake for way too long, probably close to twenty four hours and it’s really bright outside, and I don’t have internet. It’s expensive to have fun too. It also hasn’t really set in that I’m in freaking Australia. Man. The heck. Around 70 days in Australia. LET’S DO IT UP!

Six Days Away

2011-12-21T23:47:00.000-08:00

My flight leaves for Australia in 6 days. That's kind of mind-blowing. Sure my flight's been edited so I have like a 5 hour layover in LAX, but hey airports are kinda fun? Other than that this will be the first long flight I've been on for a long time. I'm no stranger to flying, but sitting on an airplane for 20 hours is going to be quite an ordeal.

And then I get to spend New Year's Eve in Melbourne. A different country, a completely different atmosphere. It's all very exciting. And there the drinking age is 18. Our local liason emailed all of us and told us to buy alcohol in the airport. Man this writing sucks compared to my stories, it's like an actual blog post. What is this?

Well Australia is going to be pretty sweet. Great Barrier Reef, kangaroos, ah man.

Hopefully these posts will stop sucking when I have actual events to write about instead of just writing about random crap that's semi-related.

PEACE

Edit: there's a lot of old crap on this blog. Feel free to read it. I probably won't. They're just the rantings of an adolescent boy. I guess they're pretty entertaining.

Scarred

2011-06-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

So it's been awhile. But I wrote a story for my humanities capstone and I've been meaning to post it for awhile and I'm at work waiting for the scanner to be free.

Disclaimer: it's long. ~20 pages

Edit: So I realized that having a 20 page story copy-pasted here was kind of disgustingly long so I copy pasted it into a google doc. The formatting is a bit ugly since there's no tabs at a new paragraph, but it's not bad.

Scarred

Hello

2011-03-22T08:33:00.000-07:00

There will be postings soon if anyone still reads this. Though I highly doubt it.

BYAAHH

Creative Paper for Class

2009-09-08T14:49:00.000-07:00

So yeah. This is a paper I wrote for class. It was basically a creative prompt on how I think the world will be in the year 3009. And I mean c'mon, creative writing = Dalziel story so how could I not write about Dalziel :D

Here's the 1st draft for your reading pleasure, if you can't tell from my paper this is a class about sustainability/energy/population growth/etc. big 'problems' of our time.

- - - -

Sunny with a Chance of Rain: The World in 3009

It was a bright, chilly morning in the year 3009. Dalziel awoke with a start to the annoying buzzing of his solar powered alarm clock. He rolled over in his 100% recyclable fleece sheets hoping that he could snatch a few more minutes of his precious beauty sleep. But alas, the sun kept on shining and as it rose higher into the sky and the rays became stronger, the buzzing got progressively louder and more obnoxious until Dalziel had no choice but to flip out of bed and turn off the annoying alarm.

After finally having gotten out of his bed Dalziel stood dazed and half-asleep in front of his alarm taking in the beauty of his surroundings. It had been three years since he moved into one of the new Super Efficient Cube Communities (SECC), but every morning he was still astonished at the sleek, pleasing, and most importantly energy producing living arrangements. Every movement that he generated was not gone to waste. The sheer fact that he jumped out of bed each morning was a source of powering his living space. The cube in which he was enveloped converted every small motion, from walking to dancing, into an energy source. How exactly the whole system worked was beyond his comprehension, but all he could do was just stare in wonder and thank the great minds that had composed such a system.

The SECC that Dalziel was a part of was one of the first that had sprung up in the United States. The Japanese were one of the first to start constructing these cubes of art and science. They melded the two so perfectly together and the final product was so appealing to the rest of the world that after Japan raised three communities, every country had at least started blueprints for a SECC, every country except the US that is. Even after eight hundred years, the United States were still bitter from their unceremonious fall as the world power. They were determined to reclaim their post as a country that essentially ran the world and tried for ten years to develop an even more efficient system than the Japanese. But finally after countless failed attempts and even a few fatal accidents, the US conceded their loss and started constructing a SECC using the Japanese model. Ever since news of SECCs surfaced Dalziel had stared in amazement and dreamt to one day live in on of those coveted cube spaces. As the rest of the world followed the example of the Japanese, Dalziel’s dream became more and more realistic until finally news of a SECC construction starting in his own city reached his ears.

Finally Dalziel got all of his morning chores done and headed out the door. As he took his first step outside of his cube he was hit in the face with a slightly pungent odor.

‘The backlashes of poor living from one thousand years ago,’ Dalziel thought to himself as he walked to the shuttle stop. Even after the government had started slowly cleaning the air with giant airships, the process was a slow one. Five hundred years later the air was only neutralized, no longer damaging to the ozone layer. But much of the ozone had been destroyed by the centuries of massive pollution and only in the year 2953 had a group of scientists finally devised a way to repair and replace the damaged and destroyed ozone layer. To Dalziel the future looked bright and optimistic. With so many minds working together and the world no longer in a deteriorating condition he was sure that the mistakes from a thousand of years ago could be fixed. The one thing that had yet to be dealt with was the acres of land that had been used to dump trash, the landfills.

Dalziel’s thoughts were abruptly interrupted as the crowd around him started moving into the shuttle that had arrived silently to carry them all off to work. The shuttle was completely electric powered and was almost perfect in efficiency. Running at 98% efficiency they were the only type of transportation around. Private transportation had been outlawed two hundred years ago and an elaborate system of automated shuttles had been put into place. There was no need to have drivers and if you needed to go somewhere from your house at a specific time all you had to do was call in ten minutes beforehand and there was sure to be a shuttle ready and waiting at the nearest stop.

Dalziel’s ride was short as the SECC he was living in was especially designed for the workers of the recyclable materials plant where he worked. What they did at this particular factory was they compiled a wide array of different materials that had been worn down, used or were a ‘waste’ product from some other line of production. Here they reprocessed all of the initially useless goods and remanufactured everything into something useful. They took old worn down cloth cushions and boiled and bleached everything back into thread that could be dyed and used again and melted scrap metals down back into usable sheets and wires just to name a few processes. Essentially Dalziel’s plant turned society’s trash and made it into a valued good. His job gave him a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment that was unparalleled. Seeing the fruits of his labor was something that would never grow old for him.

Time flew by as Dalziel worked methodically until finally it was time for lunch. Dalziel had made two very close friends, Bedelia and Quilliam, in his three years working at the plant. Oftentimes over lunch they would have deep philosophical discussions about whatever was on anybody’s mind. Their topics of discussion ranged from what they had for dinner last night to what they thought the meaning of life was. Today was a day like any other, they spent the first three minutes brainstorming ideas and wolfing down their food.

Bedelia was first to speak saying, ‘I was in the library the other day reading up on some history, and I would just like to say, screw the people who lived a thousand years ago. Thanks to them developing such a wasteful system of production and overly excessive lifestyle we have to deal with the way things are now. The air is terribly polluted and brown. The pictures of those blue skies and white clouds a thousand years ago were so pretty! Now all we have are these drab grayish black clouds embedded in a brown sky.’

‘Yeah! Screw those wasteful slobs!’ agreed Quilliam, ‘They produced things that would not decompose and also couldn’t be reprocessed! They threw all their trash in the “extra” land that they had with no thought of the future. All those hundreds of acres of land taken up by those ridiculous landfills just screwed me over! My wife and I wanted to have more than one child but they government paid $25,000 to get a vasectomy. When they make an offer so high it’s hard to deny it. And to think if those landfills weren’t around we could be producing enough food and energy to support at least two million more people if not more by the time our food production becomes even more efficient than it is today! Stupid industrial revolution screwing up the world so the population has to be controlled…’

‘C’mon now guys, they weren’t ALL bad. I mean at least they wizened up after a few hundred years of living and started reforming,’ Dalziel retorted.

‘Pffft. A few hundred years too late if you ask me!’ shouted an aggravated Quilliam.

‘I’m not too sure where I stand on this issue…’ said an optimistic Bedelia, ‘I mean it was so long ago that I really don’t think it matters what they did. The point is that we’re here now and the world is getting better. I mean there is almost no waste in all of our productions. All of our energy is “clean” compared to the industrial revolution. Even the pollution from a thousand years ago is starting to disappear thanks to all of our new technology! Just give it some time and I’m sure the damage from those few hundred years will be healed. We’ll have blue skies, white puffy clouds, and clean rain in no time!’

‘Yeah, c’mon Quilliam, there’s no use in being bitter about something you can’t change. Let’s just look forward to the future and try to do what we can. I mean we’re all working in this field so you must have some type of hope for the future. But let’s continue this discussion later because our lunch break is over,’ agreed Dalziel.

‘Fine…’ grumbled Quilliam in response.

‘Okay! See you guys later!’

Dalziel walked back over to his station mulling over all that had been discussed over his lunch. He certainly had thought about that topic quite a bit with all the technological advancements being driven by the issue of past pollution. Despite all the negative consequences of the past, the future was looking bright. He smiled as he imagined one day when he would be able to stand out in the rain dancing and look up to see the blue skies and white puffy clouds. For now he was content living his day to day life in the extremely energy efficient way that had become the norm. As all these thoughts were passing through his head an air purifier flew overhead stretching the smile even further across Dalziel’s face.

College Orientation

2009-09-03T17:10:00.000-07:00

To everyone who actually reads this blog, it's time for another story. The 1st one in quite a long time.

Dalziel opened his eyes and peered at his unfamiliar surroundings. The blanket covering him was not the same old typical blue drab blanket that had covered him for ten or so years. It was a crisp new multi-colored blanket. The starchy newness had not yet been worn out and the scratchy texture was slightly uncomfortable against his bare skin. Directly above him was the stucco ceiling with a strange smooth patch directly above his head.

He was about to sit up like he did every morning, smack his lips and wake up a little more, but the ceiling was much too low and he was not able to partake in his morning routine. Many of the small mannerisms he had picked up sleeping in the same place every night were no longer applicable. He was in a new place. He was starting new. He was immersed in a place where no body knew his name. He was at college.

Orientation was a very strange deal. A group of 943 high schoolers assembled from mostly New England used to a life of rigorous scheduling and structure were being introduced to one of the most unstructured and lax periods of their life... following a 'very strict' schedule.

The day started with breakfast bright and early at 0730 and running until 0830. Then there was a speech titled "Winning at Life". Unfortunately this was a misleading title as the whole speech was supposed to be about alcohol abuse education. Dalziel being the extremely obedient boy that he was, slept in past breakfast and the whole morning of substance abuse workshops, lectures, and speeches.

The first day of orientation Dalziel mindless and a bit fearfully followed the schedule laid out for him. Then after that day, he realized that nothing was really mandatory and he could pick and choose which events that he wanted to attend. Most of the morning activities were fairly useless, but the afternoon and evening activities were actually quite entertaining.

One particular evening, Dalziel found himself waiting outside the auditorium in a large group of freshmen. All he could hear was loud pulsating music coming from inside of the building, his first thought was, 'Oh great. Really? A dance with 31% females? Awesome...' At first he just internalized all of these thoughts, but then he realized that he was at college orientation. He would be spending the next four years of his life with these people, he might as well utilize his practiced extroversion and try to meet some people. Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, everyone around him all uttered their agreements once Dalziel worked up the courage to voice his opinion.

All the while the line was slowly inching its way slowly into the deep, dark chasm with the mysterious pulsating beat. Each person slowly but obediently shuffled in packed like sardines being led to the slaughter. Drifting closer to the unknown opening of the throbbing building, Dalziel felt a sense of anticipation growing inside of him, he slowly walked closer and closer until he was finally in the building.

Once inside Dalziel was greeted with yet another chokepoint, the stairs leading down to the gym floor. He made it down to the gym floor. There he was greeted with the loud cheers of the RAs, CAs, and his other classmates that had already made it down to the floor. They were standing in two lines with a space in between for everyone else to run through and give high fives and scream and yell their little lungs out. Needless to say, with 943 people the whole process took a ridiculously long time and by the time the whole class was done giving high fives, Dalziel's hand felt purely and utterly disgusting. But the activity was not over! Now they were instructed to hold hands with the people next to them and play what Dalziel retrospectively deemed, "Train Wreck". There really was no purpose of this activity as Dalziel saw it. It was just sprinting while holding hands, but of course with 943 people holding hands there's bound to be some safety issues. After sprinting for about 10 seconds the line would come to a stop but the people farther away from the stop would have no idea and it would just end up having the people in the front be smooshed up against the people in front of them exactly like a train wreck.

To make a long story short, because SOMEONE won't finish writing, college is nice. The room mates are pretty chill and we get along nicely. Still have yet to meet multitudes of different people, but hey, It's been just about a week of class now. Or some might say already 1 week of class... only 6 weeks left for the courses I'm taking. Alright finals in 6 weeks let's go!

P.S. A slight inconvenience of blue highlighted text. I apologize if it bothers you as much as it does me.

Shuffle Story #1

2009-03-30T19:45:00.000-07:00

Here is what happens when I put my playlist on random and I write a story to the lyrics of what I hear.

Dalziel found himself in the movie theater. He was unsure of how he got there, but it seemed to be a pretty interesting film. There was a protagonist, of course, and he was a striking man. His jaw line was well-defined, his flowing long, blond hair always blew perfectly in the wind, and his blazing blue eyes burned holes into the hearts of women everywhere. Sadly, he was enlisted into the army when he had finally found his true love.

As he lived his army life, it was pretty uneventful at first. Then, one dark and stormy night, his platoon was playing cards when they suddenly heard explosion outside and screaming. At this point, Dalziel was getting tired for some reason, and he fell asleep. Head resting on his right hand, body slightly tilted to the left but head slanted to the right. With a well-practiced positioning from years of sleeping in high school, Dalziel quickly dozed off.

“Can’t touch this.”

MC Hammer surrounded by hippie-colored flowers hopped into Dalziel’s vision. The strange man continued to float around in his vision until suddenly…

“STOP! Hammer time!” Hammers slowly rained down from the skies until one hit Dalziel in the face. He awoke with a start and saw that the movie was just about over. The protagonist had just come back home and was reunited with his true love. They were sitting in the shadow of the train kissing passionately. Suddenly, the credits cut and old school 8-bit Mario popped up. He was racing passionately to catch up to Bowser who had taken his precious Princess Peach. After much turtle stomping, Mario defeated the spiky-shelled maniac and broke out into song for Peach.

“Baby it’s fact, that our love is true. It’s as simple that. My love is true it’s a matter of fact!” But before he could finish his lovely song with clashing cymbals and a crescendo, Peach walked up to him and slapped him viciously across the cheek. Finally the credits came to a close, and the theater lights came back on. Dalziel picked his way through the popcorn bits and spilt soda and made his way to the door. As he made his way out, he suddenly found himself in the middle of a mosh pit. There was a rock band playing, jumping up and down, jerking to the beat of their own music. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw this girl she had bright green eyes and long blonde hair… Then suddenly, Dalziel looked at himself, in his cell phone’s portrait mode. He was not himself. He had long, flowing blond hair that seemed to blow perfectly out behind him in the wind and his blue eyes looked very striking in contrast to his sharp jaw line…

Yes, extremely random. But that’s the nature of my playlist. On shuffle.

Now I leave you with a song that may or may not have played while I was writing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N3BjVMWziE

Random

2009-01-15T17:45:00.000-08:00

I find myself with a new interest in werewolves for reason undisclosed...

Let Dreams Be Dreams

2008-12-29T14:24:00.000-08:00

So, interesting dream last night, and all these college essays are reminding me how much I enjoy creative writing…

I found myself in a mystical land. The grass is extremely pretty. There is a castle sitting on a cliff by the shoreline. Very happy place, Disney like. A tree near the castle has branches spread out like a hammock and in that hammock lays a statue. I walk towards the castle, of course I’m a disembodied mass as this dream occurs in the third person, unlike some books we know, and I see that this statue is made out of chocolate and is actually the mascot for Burger King.

“The King” lays in a seductive pose. Head propped up on one arm, other arm hanging loosely by his hip. His legs are open, the feet are touching, both knees are bent, but the leg on top is upright, forming a triangle-shape with his legs. Out of nowhere I am transported into the ocean abroad and I am on a ship. There is a couple, Bell(a) and the Beast. But of course the rose is no longer an issue so now the Beast has changed his name to Edward. They are deeply in love with each other and are sailing along to form a kingdom of their own. They see the castle and head for shore.

Right when they anchor in, The King poofs out of nowhere with his queen and three children and challenges Edward and Bell to a challenge, or rather just Bell, if he wins, he keeps Bell as his maid, if Bell wins, she can leave with Edward. But there’s a catch, the whole time Edward is restrained to the one cabin on the ship.

Yeah my dreams are a bit trippy, so I missed all the competitions and perhaps the most vivid part of my dream is Bell’s trek back to the ship. For some reason it is a beautiful day out as the end of all Disney movies are, but the dock to the ship is SUPER windy and it’s ridiculously hard to Bell to make her way. I’m pretty sure during this part, five hours of real life time passed, but who knows. But Bell is struggling her way to meet back with Edward, but Edward has no idea what’s going on, he’s just sitting in his little Captain’s lodge sullenly hoping that Bell(a) wins the competition. Of course Bell is screaming for Edward, but her voice is blown away with the wind.

Finally Bell(a) and Edward are reunited and they hug. The feeling of love permeated the atmosphere so much and my disembodied third person felt engaged. The hug so tight, so lasting, then…. “OHHHH, it’s been a hard day’s night, and I been workin’ like a doogg, it’s been a hard day’s night, I should be sleeping like a loggg.”

And I wake up, the feeling of love, now empty, but the song still playing in my head.

'When I'm home, feeling you holding me tight, TIGHT, YEAH'

- The Beatles

Yet Another College Creative Prompt

2008-12-28T17:24:00.001-08:00

Although it may appear to the contrary, we do know that people have a life beyond what they do to get into college. Tell us about an experience you have had outside of your formal classroom and extracurricular activities that was just plain fun and why.

I awoke from my car-ride slumber to see the bright blue sky looming overhead. The two-hour car ride to Ogunquit, Maine was finally over. The anticipation of the fun-filled day ahead of me manifested itself as I stepped out of the car, stretched my limbs and let out a gleeful shout. I grabbed my stuff out of the trunk as the other three other cars in our group pulled into the parking lot. I could see the joy in all of their eyes as they piled against the windows to look at the stunning blue sky and the crowded shoreline.

I smiled and waved at my friends as the minivans drove by, but then I kicked my flip-flops off, ripped my T-shirt off, and ran towards the beach, sprinting top speed, screaming the whole time. To my dismay, the notorious stories of the Ogunquit beach’s icy waters had slipped my mind, and as I took my first steps into the water, the shock hit me hard and I lost my breath and froze in place.

Unfortunately, in my excitement, I did not hear or see my friend Chris running directly behind me the whole way. As I splashed into the frigid water and stopped suddenly from shock, Chris was unable to stop himself in time and ran straight into me knocking me face-first into the freezing liquid beneath forcing out another scream. Chris behind me laughingly apologized and helped me to my feet and I walked as quickly as my frozen feet would carry me back to dry land. I quickly took out my towel and wiped the liquid nitrogen off my body and put my T-shirt back on as I attempted to warm up.

The whole group had watched my embarrassing, unintentional ice water dive from the parking lot. So as I walked back towards them to pick a meeting space on the beach, everyone was laughing at my clumsy antics. But I knew everyone was laughing in good fun and I could not help but laugh along with them as I told them what had happened. Of course my interpretation was sure to include my highly dramatized thought process and whatever else I felt made the story funnier.

Though my plunge into the water was painful, I felt that my sacrifice had been penguin-like. Just as penguins hit their companions into the ocean to test for potential danger, I was the scapegoat to see if the waters were safe. Since I had come back out alive, the waters were deemed predator-free. As people inched towards the water for the rest of the day, they did not make the same mistake I did, and they slowly waded their way deeper into the water.

As the day progressed, I spent more time sun-bathing on the beach with my friends as we dug holes and built sand castles. I was reluctant to head into the water as my first experience was slightly scarring, but the gigantic waves, the excruciating heat, and above all the urgings of my friends compelled me towards the scary sea. Nearing the water, my heart began racing as I thought of the hypothermic conditions. But as I started riding the waves with my friends, the various competitions we created on the spot blocked most nerve endings in my extremities. With my friends around it was almost impossible to remember my drastic first entry.

Although my to accidental water test was the most exciting event, the other memories I hold from that beach are not lost. Every moment I spent on that beach will always hold a special place in my memory because I went with my church youth group. We are a close-knit group, and everything we do together is always fun. Whether it be going to the beach or just mindlessly watching television, being around the people that I love trumps everything.

Tufts "Optional" Creative Essay

2008-12-03T15:55:00.000-08:00

Yes yes, LYF retreat post was promised. But I guess I lied.

So seeing as how I had to write a creative essay while applying to college. I'll post it here as well.

"Tufts develops leaders who will address the intellectual and social challenges of the new century. Since critical thinking, creativity, practicality and wisdom are four elements of successful leadership, the following topics offer you an opportunity to illustrate these various characteristics. We invite you to choose one and prepare an essay of 250-400 words. (And it really is optional!)"

Yeah mos def. Optional college essay, freaking liars. But I enjoy creative writing, so whatever.

"7. Use one of the following topics to create a short story:

a. The Spam Filter"

Filper’s eyes quickly opened as he peered into the vast openness in front of him. Nothing in sight. The day slowly dragged on and his eyes began to droop, but he still vigilantly stood his post. As the hour neared seven in the PM, he took a shot of his notorious coffee and coke mixture. The time had come, where his post as the spam filter would be put to the test. Seven was the hour of the highest traffic of spam. Filper was fashioned by the greatest spam filter programmer ever. He could filter ten thousand emails per second and read one million words per minute, but speed was not of the essence in his job. The quality of his filtration out weighed anything.

One spam e-mail into the sacred inbox could have devastating effects. That naïve e-mail user could possess a lazy finger and click on every incoming message without reading the subject, “FREE ROLEX WATCHES!!!$@#$^&!!SCAM!!!!” After opening the offending

e-mail, he would realize that it was not from his boss Joe, though it was from Joe123@spam.com, and see that it was spam. And of course everyone hates spam, the e-mail type at least, so he would marvel at the “stupidity” of those spammers who placed a link to stop the spam in clear sight. Unaware of the fact that the link was actually a switch to the endless torrents of relentless spam, he would click to “stop” future contact link. In doing so, he would open the flood gates of spam hell.

This hypothetical situation kept Filper on his toes whenever spam rush hour neared. In fact, Filper almost worked himself into a spam-lust as he imagined all the filtration he was to be doing. The satisfaction of directing those terrible e-mails into the deep, dark folder labeled “Junk Mail” could not be matched by any other activity. Being a spam filter is what Filper was born to do, it was his calling. He poured his attention to the fields ahead of him again and when the first sight of an enemy appeared, his filtering began, his test of endurance. As his skill was put to the test, his user logged on and this spurred Filper on even greater, his leader was watching him at his best. Then, as if in slow motion, his king clicked on the junk mail folder opened the first email and clicked the “unsubscribe” button…

Word Count: 403

Enjoy!

Up and Coming...

2008-10-15T15:56:00.000-07:00

A reflection of the happennings at LYF Retreat is on its way. Of course after Hamlet's sanity is discussed in three "well-thought-out" paragraphs...

The finished product

2008-09-22T14:00:00.001-07:00

Leave an e-mail. It will be sent... (unless I deem you "unworthy")

and by unworthy I mean until I check my blog again. I'm not some comment whore, contrary to what some beleive.

In the mean time, enjoy this music.

Here

Here too

Here be Three

More music will come as I check for comments.

VBS Long Essay Super Draft

2008-08-25T14:49:00.001-07:00

“I have to go to the bathroom Peter,” I said as I made the universal little kids’ bathroom signal.

“Okay hurry up! Come on!” replied Peter, the teacher assistant for my class as he led the way to the bathroom. After I unloaded my bladder I quickly hurried back to the main sanctuary where the worship was being held. I loved jumping, singing, and dancing around with the one hundred other kids who were also attending my church’s annual Vacation Bible School (VBS).

As I returned to the sanctuary the band was playing one of my favorite songs “Whose Side are You Leaning on?” and I let out of scream of glee and I mimicked the motions the worship leaders demonstrated. As the song played on, I noticed that one of my fellow campers was not as enthusiastic as I was and instead of dancing along with the rest of us, he was sitting bored on the floor staring blankly.

Determined to get him involved in the song, I naively walked up to him and start nudging him and unknowingly annoying him to no avail. When the song called for a leaning motion, I would put all of my weight onto him and lean. I thought that by making him part of the motions that I would get him involved but the next thing I knew, I was in a full fledged 3^rd grade headlock. I had not thought of the possibility of violence and being probably a full thirty-five pounds lighter than my adversary, I was in no way to escape easily. But with his arm nearby and my fast thinking brain, I opened my big mouth and bit down hard on the soft arm of my fellow camper…

Since that dreadful day of having the salty arm of my once-enemy inside of my mouth I have not failed to return to VBS almost every year. The camp has been with me for pretty much my whole life and has significantly shaped my personality. From seeing the cooler youth helpers and taking them as my role-models to being one of the cooler youth helpers who is a role-model, I have grown into the man I am today.

[Insert non-existent college essay-worthy personality traits and self-reflection here]

Now as I am entering the next stage of my life I will still never fail to return to volunteer every summer at my church’s VBS and hear the words that I myself one uttered. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

- - - -

Worth finishing?

Vocalistic Breakage Scholarliness

2008-08-18T17:54:00.000-07:00

Hello again my devoted readers. I am proudly bored of my summer vacation so here I am remembering that I can busily enjoy myself for a bit and provide all of you with perhaps 5-10 minutes of entertainment to help alleviate the dull days of summer. But be not discouraged I will provide some more outlets of temporary enjoyment at the end of this post.

“ROCK!” The sound echoed through the transparent plastic drum shield of which Dalziel was rocking out behind. The little children wearing different color coded matching T-shirts screamed along with the music. This cult-like T-shirt wearing was called Vacation Bible School, VBS and Dalziel was playing drums for their worship as well as being a TA for the 2^nd oldest kids of the camp.

Dalziel was to assist Eberhard in his teaching along with Mahalia. The days rolled on and Dalziel did not really expect to be too well-liked by the campers. He was never very good at working with little kids so he was not as active with the kids as Eberhard and Mahalia. Sure the kids would do the random things that they do such as renaming him Charlie (the Turtle) or Goat among other things, but Dalziel was just awkward when it came to interacting with kids. The kids seemed to love Eberhard especially and would always attack him and climb on him, they did this with Mahalia as well but not quite near as much as they did with Eberhard. For his personal bubble being kept in tact, Dalziel felt happy and sad at the same time. He was glad that he could have his moments of nap time when his help was not needed, but also sad that his campers did not really like him that much.

Then Wednesday arrived. The day of the water games, and by water games I mean randomly running around and owning people in the face with water. Dalziel knew before hand that Mahalia would be leaving at around 12:30 that day which was conveniently right when the game time was scheduled to end. With this in mind, during the day before water games, Dalziel was scheming along with Eberhard to push Mahalia and all the other girls into the pool and soak them. The water soakage was bound to be boys versus girls because at this age, the children were not really attracted to the opposite gender, but had more of a hate/slight attraction relationship with each other. So it was to be 4 male campers and 2 male staffers versus 12 female campers and 1 female staffer.

The time of execution neared and the kids filed semi-organized into the courtyard where the gallows were stationed. They sat down in a circle where they obediently listened to the games coordinator. He had planned 2 preliminary “moistings” before the real marinating was to begin. The kids were dribbled with water as the hot sun beat down on them overhead. Towards the end of the 2^nd game, the kids were on the verge of explosion when the games coordinator ran to the hose and sprayed all the kids down and started screaming. Madness ensued and the previous scheming was forgotten for a small period of time. Then as the Spartans were quelled for a bit, the plans re-emerged in their brains and the pushing and pulling towards the pool commenced.

After all the fun was to be had, Dalziel and Eberhard had each been dunked around 4 times, but Mahalia had been dunked a whopping 10-12 times. For all the madness that had occurred during the games, it was no where near the madness that was to happen during transition time.

As all the kids were wet, they needed to change out of their wet clothes. Seeing as girls will be girls, all 12 of them went into the bathroom and changed all at once. The guys, being guys, went into the bathroom, saw that the stall was broken and decided to change in the classroom together. The girls finished relatively quickly and all filed out of the bathroom fully dressed. The guys were taking forever inside the classroom and Eberhard was faithfully guarding the door as the 4 boys slowly changed. As the girls waited outside the classroom, they began to get restless. Then Eberhard made the mistake of putting his head in to check on the progress. The 12 girls saw that the door was ajar and all threw their bodies against the door pushing and screaming, “WE WANNA SEE!! AHAHAHAHAH!” Eberhard who knew the progress inside saw that one of the boys was stark naked under the table and held strongly against the mass of girls who were experiencing their new found hormones. This excitement they could not contain! 1^st going to the bathroom in groups and now boys! =O NO WAI! But alas, the bigger and stronger boys Eberhard and Dalziel protected their fellow males and held the ground with Eberhard holding the door only slightly ajar and Dalziel pulling 3-6 girls off the mass from the back.

This attempt of the obstruction of privacy was the most exciting and surprising part of VBS and for the rest of the week, Dalziel got a little bit closer to his campers and was dead tired. But that did not stop his midnight excursions into the wonderful land of Johto and Kanto…

That’s all for now, I may start making stuff up or posting up drafts of my college essay up here sooner or later. But some temporary respite from boredom is found here http://www.kongregate.com?referrer=littlestsun . Random flash games, do some achievements get some points, level up and all the while if you sign up with that link give me points too! =O yes this is what I have degraded to.

Gamers Un-ited

2008-07-22T19:06:00.000-07:00

Now that my gaming “career” is “over” I can reflect on what kind of twisted world I have just left. Or should I say, that Dalziel has just left =O

- - - -

“LOL I PWN YOU NOOB!” typed the despicable little nerdy boy with 5 inch thick glasses who spent all of his time inside in a dark room that was illuminated by the bright liquid crystals of his 24 inch LCD widescreen monitor.

“That’s it. How retarded are these kids who flame each other over the internet because they’re unhappy with their real lives. They spend all their time inside a dark room that is illuminated by the bright liquid crystals of a 24 inch LCD widescreen monitor” thought Dalziel as he threw his headset at his 24 inch LCD widescreen monitor. He had had enough of this enormous waste of his time.

Years Dalziel had spent in front of his bright 24 inch LCD widescreen, and all those years had gone to waste. He hated the more “hard core” aspects of the gaming world. When the leagues came and he and his friends attempted to make it big and to be the best, after it was all over, there were separated by the ridiculously numerous channels in vent and might as well have been worlds apart. Gaming was supposed to bring them together, not tear them apart. When the league play dissipated though, all was well, times were good, and friendships were strong. But right when the league came back, words were shot, times were bad, and friendships were being tested.

With all this in mind, Dalziel could not think of the reason why he kept coming back to the same villain who had ripped him apart and glued him back together again so many times. When Runescape lost is allure where did he turn? He turned to Gunz, Gunbound, Rakion, WoW, Rohan, Silk, Maple, TF2, Portal, Hellgate: London (biggest waste of money ever), DoTA, D2, and Rose just to name a few. Why? That was his only question. What sadistic nature embedded in Dalziel kept forcing him to keep his head under the water when all he really needed was the precious oxygen 2 inches up?

With the chain of words he had heard over and over again many times, “I pwn you noob!” it finally hit him. He had awoken to the crisp smell of the coffee that no one really drank. All those posers who thought they were being classy with their Starbucks cups in hand sipping their “coffee” never really drank coffee. Their drug of choice was sugar and cream, sugar and cream with a touch of coffee. The reason he had been holding his hand in the roaring fire had been to help him forget the problems of his life. Instead of using drugs and alcohol like the average teenager, Dalziel had gotten creative in his method of madness. Since he was a Christian, drugs and alcohols were a strict no-no, so instead of physically numbing his body with his mind, he took the path that left the body directly unharmed.

Though the body was left out of the direct line of fire, the mind in turn received of more focused beam of the numbing effects, this escape of the mind was so powerful that it drove the whole being into an addictive crazed state. Instead of wanting to always be out of the house and chilling with people in person, this beam of power was a magnet that always sucked Dalziel into the world of the internet. For the moments he was in front of his 24 inch widescreen LCD, Dalziel could forget all his problems and not deal with them. He could push them to the very outskirts of his brain where he would all but remember them.

But as the years rolled on by, Dalziel’s brain began to evolve. No longer would it succumb to the magnetic force of the 24 inch widescreen, it slowly developed a resistance to the drug. This resistance force tried to exert its dominance as the new alpha male many times before, but Dalziel was not strong enough. The addictive chemicals had seeped into his fat and when there were no more intakes, it would eat a bit of the chemical-laden fat and Dalziel would feel the cravings and relapse.

These stoppings and relapsings had been occurring on and off, and with them as the resistant strain of Dalziel brain grew stronger, bouts of depression would accompany these cycles making them even deadlier. Then another variable was thrown into the mix and things became even more dangerous. This variable was highly unexpected but very potent; few know the dangers of this unseen renegade variable. To this day, Dalziel is still unsure about this lonesome explosive variable, but he has moved on with his life and gone through the intense rehab known as his will power.

Dalziel’s one true source of power in his life stems from within his own body. The only problem with this power source is that it is fails easily, with any pressure or perhaps a new but similar renegade variable, it collapses into a little ball and assumes the fetal position until it finds its lemons and stares the foe down into a little corner where it then consumes the offending’s soul.

- - - -

“Sometimes solutions aren't so simple.
Sometimes goodbye's the only way.

And the [S]un will set for you,
The [S]un will set for you.”

Revelation hits like a little girl

2008-07-19T19:02:00.000-07:00

I have officially quit gaming hard core style. Games are no longer fun to me and I have just realized that games were actually my escape from the world. In an extreme illustration, games were my drugs. I would “use” because I could not deal with all my pent up emotions and would just game into numbness. Now I guess I’ve grown resistant to this strain of gaming known as EVERYTHING I HAVE EVER PLAYED which is basically everything known to man.

Now that I have finally quit the games/drugs, I hope that I will be a more open to share my emotions/talk to people. To all my gamer friends, which is like all my friends from school, even though I doubt any of them read this, this may sound like the end, but if you look closely at the word choice in the beginning, I said hardcore style. This does not mean I am completely closed against gaming because I’m pretty sure it’s going to be pretty hard for me to relapse like an alcoholic unless some amazing game comes out (COUGHD3COUGH) in the next 3 years. But even then, I will never go back to where I was before.

And also now that I have so much more free time on my hands, I will need to find a new hobby. What I am thinking of right now are basically, guitar, working out and getting ridiculously jacked Chuck Norris style on a total gym pro, reading a lot of random good books, writing more short stories for your reading pleasure, and chilling more with people in real life which doesn’t really work so well during the school year. Another option which I guess has always been there but never kind of neglected to the extreme is Frisbee. I’ve been on the team ever since freshmen year and yet, I still suck. Well I guess I don’t suck compared to the really bad people on the team, but seeing how I’ve been playing for 3 years now, the level of my skill is ridiculously low. So I guess I could become the all around awesome kid who no longer games his pain and emotions away into numbness but instead tackles his emotions and feelings head on in the face like a wave. Whatever waves life may throw at me, I promise that I will no longer ride the wave and give into the numbness of just riding it calmly back. I will run with my head held high and stance strong and dive into the ocean of the world and defeat it. I will prevail.

With all that said, I will probably need some of your help in keeping me on my feet. Sometimes I may be feeling quite tired from the extreme cold of the waters of life so I may need a friend to huddle together with for warmth and energy to get back out there and keep on fighting. Therefore, you should start talking to me again on AIM or whatever you have previously tried to contact me with oh so many years ago. I realized that since I was always gaming without an away message, I would receive many a chance to talk and share about my life, but I would be too enveloped in the allure of a stupid game to notice. To many if not all of you, I apologize for my gaming having shunned you away from ever getting to know me better and I ask you now, please, please do talk to me. I really do want to get to know you better. You can also remind me to not game.

Speaking of all these waves… the beach today was pretty fun. Running chest first and slamming into those huge waves at Ogunquit could not be topped. Yes the water was freaking cold at 59 degrees, but I manned up and took the hit and did not pull a Ryan Fung. =P Sitting in the car seeing people dance and wave at the ridiculously baked women in the trunk was also quite amusing if not the high light of sitting in the car. I also shared some quality time with my techno raver buddy sharing headphones. To all of you lame kids who did not go, you all missed out on my ridiculously chiseled bod. So since next year is my last LYF beach trip you don’t want to miss out! If you don’t go next year I’ll have to start charging for looks/feels. Just ask Chris Huang, kid was all over me strangely enough.

Hello World...

2008-07-12T18:31:00.000-07:00

Just dropping in to say that I am still here but am waiting for myself to become less lazy and actually kick my butt into gear and write a story. Kinda just bumming around for now. Letting summer take its droll effects on me as I sit here and absorb the laziness of summer that will soon be replaced by the burning, fuming scent of a college common application essay being written and rewritten.

With all that said. Hello world.

"But I could not recall
A more perfect fall
Cause when I looked up into your eyes
It didn't hurt at all."

Pyro Meet Sheer Stupidity/Peer Pressure

2008-06-23T19:16:00.000-07:00

Dalziel found himself celebrating his birthday with his friends at his house. He was very last minute in his planning and found himself calling people up at the last minute and asking them if they could come. It was the Saturday of the 1^st full week of summer, Dalziel spent most of his time going around to people’s houses and chilling, but when alone for the small snippets of the day, would simmer in his own thoughts and become saddened by the massive void of free time that seemed to pervade throughout his whole summer.

He had tried to get a job long ago in March, but the silly company took forever to respond and Dalziel went through many actions in attempts to raise the company’s awareness of his availability. When June swung around, Dalziel found himself desperate and also applied to Staples. Still simmering, Dalziel needed to find a way to un-isolate himself and surround himself with the company of others.

Thus, this last-minute “birthday party” was thrown together. It all seemed to be going well, a decent number of people showed up, they arrived and chilled in the basement for a while. Playing Wii for a bit, but then after awhile, the allure of the Wii started to wear off and the party moved upstairs and outdoors; out into the driveway of Dalziel and his street style un-used basketball hoop.

Dalziel never was really interested in basketball, but he still enjoyed watching his friends play and screaming at the amazing and not so amazing moves pulled off by his friends. But then after another small window of time, basketball started to get boring as well so as Dalziel walked around his garage in an attempt to find something to do, his eyes passed over the Poland Springs Bottle filled with pure ethanol; a highly flammable substance. So Dalziel went inside to find some matches or a lighter. After futilely rummaging through the drawers in his cabinets, Dalziel remembered that his dad had kept some sort of “special” matches from a high class restaurant in the china cabinet. Dalziel grabbed the matches and the alcohol, and walked back out onto the driveway where his friends where still playing basketball. He moved down the driveway a bit from where they were playing, poured some alcohol on the driveway, and threw a match on it. The ethanol immediately burst into a deep red/orange color. The strange color of the flame mesmerized Dalziel as he stared wonderingly into the depth of the fire.

As the ethanol started to burn out, Dalziel quickly poured some more out into the pile and then realized that he was messing up his driveway. So he ran inside and got a cup of water and doused the ground on which he had been burning. After the dousing, Dalziel realized he was burning the special matches like no tomorrow, so inside the house he went in search of a candle to minimize the usage of the matches. He emerged once again with a lit candle in hand and headed to the back of the house where not as many people could see their exploits of the pyro nature.

As they explored the wonders of the ethanol and the mesmerizing nature of fire, Northrop came outside to spectate the happenings of the afternoon with fire.

“Yo Dalziel, why don’t you try putting some alcohol on your hand and lighting it on fire. It doesn’t hurt,” suggested Northrop.

“I’ve seen it done before, but you try it first!” As Dalziel was saying this, Northrop had already grabbed the bottle of ethanol and opened it.

“No thanks, you try, it won’t hurt!” said Northrop as he doused Dalziel’s hand with a dollop of ethanol. The battle of what to do inside Dalziel’s head was short lived but multifaceted. Light his hand and fire and see some awesome pyro activities as well as some awesome “street cred” or light his hand on fire and burn terribly. The lure of the awesomeness of this hand on fire won in the end and Dalziel slowly inched his hand closer to the burning candle. As his hand hovered one foot over the candle, Dalziel let the pool of alcohol loose and pointed his hand down toward the flame. As soon as the 1^st drop of alcohol reached its ignition temperature the flame raced towards Dalziel’s hand instantaneously and one foot above the candle, Dalziel’s hand was ripped back due to reflex and then shaken violently. The sound of fire whipping and burning in violent wind was echoing inside of Dalziel’s head as he tried to desperately shake out the alcohol fire on his hand. The whole time, Dalziel’s friends were sitting their observing the stupidity of Dalziel as he had tried to simulate the fantasy world and casted a fireball.

From merely observing Dalziel’s fireball remain on his hand, Dalziel’s friends could tell that Dalziel was no mage. Mages did not burn their hands when trying to cast fireball. So Dalziel finished screaming as the last of the alcohol was burned up and quickly sprinted inside to run his hand under cold water… Never again would Dalziel experiment with fire on his body, the pain of the burn flowed powerfully through the whole left hand of Dalziel. This unbearable pain was reminder enough for Dalziel that fire was the ultimate enemy of biological beings…

So my hand was burnt quite severely and one would expect that it would still be extremely painful as there was fire on my hand, but miraculously, I feel no pain whatsoever in my hand. I thank God that he has healed me and also thank my parents for being involved in the healing ministries and praying powerfully in the spirit to ease my pain. Any questions feel free to vent/IM/call. Amen.

Bored #1

2008-06-08T16:29:00.001-07:00

Yes, so, I’m kind of bored right now. So I’ll write a random story. And here begins the randomness.

Dalziel was running out of time. The clock was ticking away and as its illustrious hand reached the not so illustrious 0 mark of the timer, something big was bound to happen. Tick Tock went the clock. Ticking and tocking, the clock spent its days hanging on the wall, peering over the room as an overseer peers over his slaves. Only the clock did not have a whip in hand, he was satisfied just pointing at numbers all the days of his life; or rather the length that his heart lasted him. Once in a while, after his heart gave out, Mr. Clock would sit like dead meat on a hook, but alas, Dalziel would notice the stench of Mr. Clock’s rotting corpse and perform open-heart surgery in a matter of seconds and resuscitate Mr. Clock from his dark days of death.

For this, Mr. Clock felt an extreme attachment to Dalziel. All this love that Dalziel showed him by looking at him lovingly and saving his life when needed was just so rainbow styling to Mr. Clock and for that he was sure that Dalziel was the man of his dreams. But of course before Mr. Clock could spend his days together with Dalziel, he had to undergo a sex change because he was sure that Dalziel was not gay. Mr. Clock spent many hours of his days pondering how to achieve this seemingly impossible task; he would have to undergo such a rare operation all without using his hands. His hands were bound to their circular path as Mr. Clock suffered from extreme obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). If Mr. Clock stopped moving his three hands around for even one second, he would lapse into a deep sickness from which he could never recover even with the magical life-saving hands of Dalziel.

Then one day, as Mr. Clock was sleeping, he felt the pull of something strange. He was being lifted off the hook that bound him to his mundane place on the wall. This force was very strange to Mr. Clock; a bit frightening and exciting at the same time. Then when this strange power finally ripped Mr. Clock off the wall he neared the source of this magnetic force and saw that it was a super massive black hole. Hands still pointing and moving, Mr. Clock thought this was the end. He would never see Dalziel again, and about that he was correct…

Dalziel’s sleeping time ran out. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and rolled onto the floor where Ladridia lovingly licked his face to Dalziel’s complaints.

“Ahhh… stop Ladridia!” exclaimed Dalziel in disgust. He rewashed his recently washed face with water instead of dog saliva and as he brushed his teeth, thought of the strange dream he had. There had been lots of clocks and some strange personification of these clocks. He thought nothing more of his extremely abstract dream, but unbeknownst to Dalziel, his dream would have much importance in the days to come. By thinking about the dream while awake and kicking, Dalziel had unknowingly fulfilled the prophecy of the magical land of the clocks. Dalziel’s day continued without event and the thought of his dream never entered his head for days. He lived life as he normally would, extremely routinely. Wake up, go to school, sleep in class, wake up for snippets, copy frantically what was on the board, go back to sleep, eat lunch, go home, game with friends on vent, do homework, eat dinner, talk to people on AIM/surf internet, go to sleep, and repeat.

Then suddenly, while Dalziel was sleeping, he felt a strange presence in his room. He thought he was dreaming so thought nothing of this new aura in his room, he continued sleeping and enjoyed the softness and warmth of his pillows. He rolled over and shifted to find a better position, but as he did so, he kicked the hand of this new person in his room. As his foot connected with this strange hard substance, Dalziel realized that this was no dream…

He was suddenly wide awake and he grabbed the nearest object that could serve as a weapon. His natural-born survival instincts were kicking in as Dalziel clenched his metal flashlight tightly. He slowly stumbled out of his bed and headed toward where he had heard the intruder scamper... As he neared the pile of potentially dirty laundry, his heart started beating harder and harder, “ba-dump, ba-DUMP, BA-DUMP… THUMP!” Dalziel’s heart leapt straight out of his chest and lay still-beating in the middle of the pile of the now bloody laundry. Dalziel fell over lifeless onto the pile but in so doing, he landed perfectly so that his still-beating heart was shoved back into his chest and he awoke again with a huge gasp of air that filled his lungs so much that his lungs burst and he died yet again… Dalziel’s lifeless body lay rotting on the floor but then the clock climbed out of the corner and returned that favor that he had received so many times. He performed surgery on Dalziel and resuscitated him to life, after that simple action, Mr. Clock picked Dalziel back up and placed him back into his bed. Mr. Clock summoned forth his super massive black hole again and with one last teary-eyed look back at Dalziel, jumped back into the whole and left Dalziel to live his life.

Dalziel awoke the next morning and felt an odd pain in his chest but coughed a few times and thought nothing of it. The pain subsided and Dalziel walked into the bathroom past a small, mangled battery on the floor with a note attached. “You saved my life so many times so I thought I would return the favor…” Dalziel thought nothing of the note and tossed the battery along with the note into the trash can and proceeded to brush his teeth…

The Morning of Unfortunate Events

2008-05-28T14:03:00.001-07:00

I apologize for the long delay in this new episode in my blog, but alas, the gaming skin is hard to shed, especially when you hang out with a bunch of other gamers. But I have cut back I’d say a good 50% on my gaming time compared to my olden days, so I’d say I’m making decent progress. Though whether or not I want to quit completely or just leave it where it is at this lower margin, we’ll see. And seeing as how my polling scarce polling last night was not sufficient, and I’m writing a new blog now, I’ll put my poll right here.

What makes my stories interesting? I know I have a unique writing style that makes it interesting to read, but topic-wise, what is the most appealing topic? Stories of my past “romantic” flings (though there are basically no more of those as the gas mask has expelled all the numerous possibilities given my extremely, ridiculously, handsome physique =P)? Or stories of just random funny days? If both are interesting, then I guess the only remedy is if I live a more exciting life…

But enough with the future, we’ll move back into the present and commence with my story…

Yet again we meet Dalziel being his sleepy adolescent self, rolling out of bed to the petulant sound of his 10 minute auto-snooze cell phone. This 10 minute auto-snooze feature would prove itself to be a terrible “feature”. The previous night had been a particularly eventful night as Dalziel’s whole family was together for the first time in a long time as both of his brother’s had returned home from college, but alas, this unity could not last. Northrop was headed off to Korea the next morning at 5 A.M. to spend time with his girl friend =O. So although Dalziel was not directly speaking to either of his brothers, he felt the need to stay up as a means to acknowledge the fact that he would not be seeing his brother again for another month. Or he was just using that as an excuse to stay up late…

So that very morning, Dalziel’s parents were leaving early also to send off Northrop to the airport so they would not be home when Dalziel awoke to relentless sounding of his 10 minute auto-snooze super feature cell phone.

*insert “Energize.mid”* “oh crap 53! Dang it! I’m gonna miss my bus” Those were the 1^st thoughts running through Dalziel’s mind on that one fateful morning. He sprung out of bed like a fully-loaded air soft spring, ran to the bathroom while taking off his PJs, washed his face and combed his crazy morning hair, all done while taking off his PJs to save time, ran back into his room, shoved his still sounding 10 minute auto-snooze feature phone into pocket of his back pack, got dressed, grabbed his iPod off its docking bay, and ran out the door sprinting full speed [under the beaming rays of the sun after a flying piece of plastic] (limited inside joke).

So Dalziel reached the bus stop and the normals were not there, but luckily, Dalziel lived on a large hill and the bus would have to come back down the hill in order to get to school and thus, Dalziel often boarded the bus while it was descending the hill. Dalziel took this morning to be just another morning where he would be doing just that, boarding the bus while it was heading towards the school down the hill, but as Dalziel inserted the headphones into his welcoming ears, Bus 23 pull up the hill…

“The hell? I ride bus 14? What’s bus 23 doing here?” pondered Dalziel as the bus turned into his neighborhood. “OH HOLY CRAP! INTO THE NEIGHBORHOOD MEANS ELEMENTARY SCHOOL KIDS! WHICH MEANS IT’S…” Dalziel whipped his left arm out of his back pack straps, swung his frayed, green L.L. Bean backpack around his body opened the pocket where the 10 minute auto-snooze feature phone lay awaiting it’s demise…

7:55

“No freaking way… one hour late…” Dalziel sprinted full speed back to his house, punched in the garage code to open the door back up, ran upstairs with Ladridia hot on his heels barking her furry little head off, grabbed his wallet with his license in it, and jump down the last 8 steps of the stairs, grabbed the keys out of their basket by the door, and jumped into the car. He deftly whipped out his cell phone while starting the engine and dialed his dad’s office so he would know that he was driving to school. No answer so Dalziel left a simple message as he backed out of his drive way going 20. Dalziel floored the acceleration for the 3^rd time in his short driving career and reached the school in half the time than usual, the one set back was that the junior’s parking lot relatively near the school was completely full so Dalziel drove up the hill only to see that that parking lot was also full. The last option was the K-Mart about half a mile away from the school.

Dalziel pulled into the parking lot and could not find a spot on the small lot closest to the school so he went down the hill and parked in the back corner of the dreaded “lower K-Mart”. The place where the lowest of the low’s of those who drove to school parked. By this time, Dalziel had calmed down considerably and he slowly waltzed the half mile to school and walked to his locker where he disposed of his belongings and walked to the front office to get his tardy slip, this one fateful day would be on Dalziel’s record forever. This was the only tardy/absence Dalziel had received thus far into his junior year at high school… to make matters even worse, the late slip lady informed Dalziel that if he did not want a truancy from his class, he would have to bring in a note, but to this day, 7 days later, Dalziel has still not handed in a note but he has also not received a truancy note. Dalziel hopes that this matter will clear itself out, but he highly doubts it…

Now remember, leave a comment, answer the questions in the poll that was horribly placed at the beginning of this wonderful story. Thank you.

One last thing before I go. AFTER, I repeat AFTER you fulfill the poll, read this. It may be a bit “racy” for those younger readers, but I do say, it is the best thing I had read in a long time.

Riddle #1

2008-05-19T17:32:00.001-07:00

New type of writing in testing, I will write stories from the perspective of some random noun and you, the readers will have to guess what it is! 1^st person to guess correctly will receive something from me. As of now, that something will be a hug? Maybe a quarter? Or maybe… you won’t get anything but the satisfaction of winning… you’ll have to wait and see! Answers can be accepted either via AIM or Comments. That way I have a way of telling from the timestamps I receive.

The small clatter and thump of Rogelio’s head onto the glass surface of the curved precipice awoke himself and his numerous companions. Last they knew they were sleeping soundly in the dark pouch of their cave, but this new environment didn’t look too bad. It was well lit and the floor was extremely smooth. Then before they knew it, Rogelio and his companions were being drowned alive! There was a strange whitish substance that came pouring out of a huge gaping hole that appeared out of nowhere! The waterfall of this white liquid seemed to be eating his companions alive as with each contact, there was a loud CRACKLE/POP. Rogelio tried to run away, but he could not. He and his friends were packed in like sardines in a can. He had no choice but to accept his grisly fate to be consumed and melted by the strange liquid.

He closed his non-existent eyes and gritted his non-existent teeth as he braced himself for the gigantic wave of the substance. To his surprise, the cracks he felt ripping through his body did not kill him, all they did was scare the living daylights out of him as he could not control the gases escaping his body. It was as if he had eaten a LOT of beans and kept releasing explosive farts the ripped through the air and created a small gun-shot explosion.

So Rogelio just sat back and tried to imagine that he was swimming in the ocean and tried to tune out the explosive CRACKS coming from his and his friends’ bodies. But then suddenly a strange silvery UFO attached to a stick hovered into his vision and started descending rapidly. He tried to franticly swim away from the offending object as it dipped under the surface of his new ocean and began lifting his friends up and away.

Rogelio successfully evaded the first couple of dips, but on the 6^th dip… his luck ran out. He was abducted along with 20 of his friends and they all went cracking and screaming into the gigantic cave that the UFO was taking all of his friends. The mouth of the cave was lined with squarish stalactites and stalagmites that were lined up perfectly, but inside the cave, it was symmetrically and evenly smoothed over with tiny bumps lining the floor.

Rogelio thought he was safe, but soon the opening of the cave began to close out the daylight and he could no longer see his surroundings. To make matters even worse, the floor started moving and pushing him towards the now moving stalactites and stalagmites! They were so perfectly aligned that there was virtually no room between them as the cave started moving around. Rogelio’s fate was sealed, he was crushed by the vicious stalactite/stalagmite combo and pushed down the waterfall in the back of the cave where he would sit and rot until the fishes came to eat him bloated corpse…

What is Rogelio?

What Can I Say? The oddities revolt!

2008-05-14T17:54:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I’m sorry to say, but the previous idea submission was not flowing with me. I’m terribly sorry to say that I cannot bring myself to write off of something else. As of now I think the only things I can have fun and be involved while writing about is something I think up myself. =\ No hard feelings.

So more fiction to come, or maybe it isn’t fiction… decide that for yourself, this story I’m sure could go either way.

THWACK! “THE HELL ARE YOU DOING SLEEPING IN MY CLASS?” Dalziel awoke with a start and also a size 13 shoe-shaped mark on his face.

“SINE, COSINE, TANGENT!” shouted he with the shoe protruding out of his forehead.

“Oh, very good, you WERE paying attention. Now we can get on with class, but seriously? What would you do if I started sleeping during class, here let’s try now… … … … … … … … … … Not very productive huh?” Dalziel’s math teacher was going insane, he had always told stories of beating the crap out of “day dreamers”, but he never suspected that the left shoe of justice would rain down on his unsuspecting body, let alone his beautiful face. He was sure that the mark left from the shoe would be felt and seen for the next few days. What would he say to his mom? He couldn’t tell her what actually happened because Mr. Noeth would get fired and no one would want that. Noeth was the most epic teacher in the history of his school. Getting him fired would not look good and there would probably be more shoes of smaller sizes flying in his direction if he reported this horrific incident.

Dalziel attentively took notes for the rest of the period, but he was well aware of the many wide-eyed stares he was getting, or rather, the shoe-shaped mark on his face was getting. After class ended, Dalziel packed up his belongings and walked out the door caressing his now-scarred face.

“Dude, how’d that feel?” asked Gamaliel

“Meh, not too bad, just a bit sore, I guess I’m kind of in shock right now. He always tells stories, but I never thought he’d follow through with those insane plans. I mean honestly, why didn’t he just get me a cup of coffee or something. A freaking shoe to the face? Who does that?”

“Mr. Noeth does that, obviously. Pffft. And you’re in Honors trig and you can’t make that simple deductive reasoning? Downs much?”

“… no you…” was Dalziel’s curt reply as he split into another hall ready to attend Spanish Class. Heading into Spanish class his teacher quickly noticed the strange demarcation that covered the majority of Dalziel’s once handsome face.

“Qué pasó Dalziel?”

“Nada, nada, solo mi incapaz de andar.” So in his five minute walk to Spanish class, Dalziel had devised an ingenious plan to deal with the now-bluish mark on his face. He would claim that he was walking around outside to cut through the traffic of the over-crowded halls, not paying attention to where he was walking, and he fell over and unfortunately there was someone running to catch a football and he stepped on Dalziel’s face, hard. At this point, Dalziel was falling asleep again, probably from the slight concussion he felt coming on with the violent shoe to the face experience.

THWACK! “DALZIEL, ESTÁS DORMIENDO EN MI CLASE? NADA DE ESO!” Dalziel couldn’t take it anymore; he had had enough this with his ridiculous teachers. Two shoes to the face in one day were enough to drive him over the edge. He reached into backpack for this “special” friend whom he brought to him everyday just for days like this… slowly he pulled out his iPod, plugged in, and zoned out. After achieving the Zen he needed to fall asleep, he awoke with a start to the “Energize.midi” of his cellphone…

“The hell kind of dream was that?” thought Dalziel until he felt an odd aching pain that seemed to cover his whole adolescent, acne-scarred face that was the complete opposite of the one in his dreams… but only to some extent…

Trailer / Spoiler

2008-05-10T20:26:00.000-07:00

Alright, so I promised something on Saturday, but since I forgot I had Iron Sharpens Iron today, I actually had less time than I thought to do random stuff on Saturday. So this will be a small window into the story that will be coming up, say the 1^st paragraph or so. Iron Sharpens Iron was pretty cool though, bunch of guys just coming together in Christ, cool to witness, good workshops, the usual conferencey type feeling. We’ll see if I put any of it to use.

Disclaimer: fiction follows this line.

Dalziel was excited that someone new was coming this visit his neighborhood. He lived in the neighborhood with not many people around save his two brothers and his best friend. Everyone else was a very elderly and did not ever leave the house as if the light of day would scar their skin forever. At this point in time, Dalziel’s mother was feeling contrary to how she normally felt. Instead of pulling Dalziel away from girls, she was feeling a need to quickly get Dalziel and his brothers married and out of the house. Despite this fact, Dalziel’s father was feeling similar to the typical Mrs. Dalziel.

The coming of this new guest was so big that even the people from the nearby neighborhoods were gathering together in Dalziel’s small section of the world and were getting ready with all their best clothing. They were planning on having the biggest block party Dalziel’s neighborhood would probably ever see. Everyone was excited especially since it seemed as though in Dalziel’s neighborhood and the surrounding ones, there were only guys. In other words, this guest visitor would be bringing in outside people that would change the “sausage fest” atmosphere that constantly surrounded Dalziel.

Apologies

2008-05-07T18:33:00.000-07:00

Dear readers,

I am sorry to inform you, that my posts will probably be not as frequent as I had hoped, or at least not as frequent until school winds down, I recover from my sickness, and/or Frisbee games/practices stop being so intensely awesome. On a lighter note, I have had my first idea submission via AIM, so I do have something I can write about. I am pretty sure that the populace that reads my blog will find the topic very “juicy”, but due to reader discretion, I cannot reveal the idea. I hope this will not keep you up late at night, but if it does, you can always try and find out who submitted the idea and ask them, or you can just wait until I start writing it, probably Saturday. But until next post, I bid you… good eats! …errr… good night!

Love,

Dave Sun

Randomness

2008-05-05T18:44:00.000-07:00

Today is the day, where I am flat out of ideas, and therefore I will just start writing random crap in a story format, whether it be true or not, you can decide that for yourself. But remember if you EVER, I come up with an idea that may POSSIBLY be interesting in ANYWAY, please do comment and tell me. Or talk to me on AIM/vent if that’s how you swing.

Dalziel awoke yet again to the sound of his cool cell phone alarm that actually isn’t very cool. He rolled out of bed onto Ladridia who was whining to be let out into the back yard so she could pee out all those warm yellow liquids inside of her bladder and then be fed after. But of course Dalziel being as sleepy as he was and needing to complete his morning chores, Ladridia’s whining was ignored as the warm yellow liquids inside Dalziel’s own body yearned to be released into the wonderful world of the septic tank just as Ladridia’s own liquids yearned to mix in with the bacteria living and re-spawning in the dirt.

So the warm yellow liquids got their wish, and the bacteria lining Dalziel’s tongue and teeth got what they deserved. After a night of eating away and causing bad breath inside the warm, moist environment of Dalziel’s mouth, they needed to be stabbed to death by the one hundred or so sharp plastic bristles of Dalziel’s tooth brush which were coated with the poison of Sodium Fluoride. After all the living organisms inside Dalziel’s bacteria infested body that needed to be dealt with were dealt with, he ran down the stairs and then, and only then, did the last organism make its cry. His stomach was amazingly empty, but since he was only half-awake, its cry was not yet strong enough to fully awaken the hunger factor to its full potential. Dalziel knew this fact well, so well that as he grabbed his one piece of buttered toast, he also grabbed a hand full of snacks which he would consume/inhale during 2^nd period.

So Dalziel’s school day happened with no occurrence, but after the school day was over, he had Frisbee practice.

This was one thing that Dalziel looked forward to. Even though he was on the B team, he was the glory player of the B team. He was known as the agile “Tiger-Ninja Man” to his coach, but to his fellow team mates he was “Sun-Sun” and “Chickadee-China”. But really, he was not often called “Chickadee-China”, this only resonated its voluptuous sound waves when this one certain Bertram “Broface” was feeling playful.

He was the “Tiger-Ninja Man” to his coach because during games he would often sprint down towards the flying disc, leap gracefully into the air and pounce on the disc slamming it into the floor where it belonged when thrown by an opposing team. Dalziel did this often enough, but only because he was on the B team, he was sure that in the higher leveled play of which Dalziel would some day reach, the disc would not be so kind as to float so slowly through the air for Dalziel to swat.

So Dalziel finished Frisbee practice uneventfully, but tired as usual. Life goes on Obla Di Obla Da.

Extremely short post in comparison to the others, but I ran out of ideas and couldn’t think of any good made-up stories worth my time and I also got home at like 7 today, but enjoy what’s there.

First Dance

2008-05-02T15:47:00.000-07:00

I thought of one good last memoir type writing, and then I think I’ll writing pure fiction from here on out. But not to worry, I’ll still write memoir type entries whenever anything exciting happens in my life. Oh but wait… that means I won’t be writing anymore memoir type entries… =( We’ll see how my life goes. Play it day by day here Dalz….Dave…

For this story, we delve back into Dalziel younger days. No longer is he in high school pumping out the calculus and AP chem, but he is now back in junior high, living out his naïve little life to his hearts content.

It was almost summertime and Dalziel had no plans out what he was going to do with his long free time. So his mother talked to all the other Asian mothers, and tried to find some good camps for Dalziel to attend. Her search was well rewarded when this popular camp was referred by the other Asian mothers, New England Chinese Summer Youth Camp, which is now to be referred to as simply, camp.

So upon hearing this deliciously long name, Dalziel was filled with dread, “Chinese camp? What do you do? Sit in a classroom and learn Chinese all day? Hell no. I’m not going to any Chinese camp.” But after he conferred with the children of the mothers his mother had talked to, his fears were completely dispelled as they all seemed to enjoy it very much and this year would be their 3^rd year attending.

So Dalziel gladly decided that he would attend this so-called Chinese camp. When he arrived he met up with his group, all kids around his age, and he was surprised to meet his friend Jagjit. From this point on Dalziel spent his time hanging out with his group and Jagjit. He attended the classes which they had been assigned, having fun in every single one of them. And to his surprise, they were speaking very little Mandarin if any at all. This was the single greatest camp experience Dalziel had ever had!

Not only was Dalziel surrounded by other fellow Asians, but he was also surrounded by fellow female Asians as well! Now that his mom was not around to keep the “anthrax” away, Dalziel could mingle and flirt to his hearts content. His 7^th grade hormone were running wild and he quickly became close friends with every member of his camp group, everyone, not just the men, he became friend with all the females as well.

Dalziel felt as if he had finally experienced the joys of being with girls, but he was not yet ready for the thrills he was yet to experience. On the last night of the week long camp, Dalziel found himself for the 1^st time, sitting in Jagjit’s room, applying wax liberally into his hair attempting to mold his hair into the perfect shape. He was preparing himself for the end of the week dance! No matter how nervous Dalziel was, he was excited to attend such a glamorous event as he had spent all week bonding with his fellow group members, but now he could chill with some of them in a “club” environment.

The dance was everything and Dalziel had expected and more, blaring music, flashing lights, and pretty girls. The night continued on, and Dalziel kept to his circle of guys rhythmically bending their knees and bobbing their heads to the music. But lo and behold, a slow song was bound to appear on the scene, and as it did, a low sounding groan echoed across the room as the populace of the dance floor cleared off to the sides to make room for the minimal couples.

Dalziel was unfazed by the slow song as he expected that no one would ask him to dance, but being as inexperienced as he was, he did not know how extremely, extremely, ridiculously good looking he was, and he was unaware of how all the ladies went crazy over his hot bod and cute face.

Being who he was, Dalziel stood nonchalantly staring into the abyss and was extremely surprised when he saw a girl he did not know walk up to him and say, “Hi, I’m Marissa, I think you’re cute. Wanna dance?”

Dalziel, scared out of his mind, but too hormonally driven to deny such and opportunity, slipped out a quiet, “Sure…” As the song commenced, Dalziel did not know what to do, but as he was following this Marissa girl out into the dance floor, he glanced around and saw what the other meager dancers on the dance floor were doing and got an idea of what he was supposed to do. He awkwardly grabbed onto Marissa’s waist and held his arms at a 120 degree angle and slowly swayed back and forth to the music. One thing Dalziel did not catch from his quick observation was where the dancers’ eyes were placed. He had no idea where he was supposed to look, he thought that if had actually knew who this Marissa girl was, he would be looking at her, but since he did not know her, he would glance around at the other dancing couples, glance at Marissa, who also seemed to be in the same dilemma as Dalziel, and then quickly glance away at another dancing couple.

After what seemed like an endless swaying back and forth, the song finally came to an end and Marissa said, “Was that your first dance?”

“Yeah…?”

“Wow! You’re pretty good at dancing!”

“Thanks.”

“Okay bye, cutie!”

“Bye…” Dalziel slowly shifted back into his normal crowd and the night continued on and Dalziel danced with a few more girls before the night was over. At the end of the night, Dalziel feet were killing him from four straight hours of standing, occasional dances, and knee bends. He was content with his life at the moment as he had finally had his 1^st dance, not to mention the other four or five he had participated in. Dalziel would never forget this dance nor would he forget the wonderful times he had had at NECYSC. He was determined that he would return the next year, and that he did.

Year after year, Dalziel tried to attend this camp again, but finally after three years of attending, Dalziel’s mother finally realized why he loved this camp so much: he was free to interact with all the girls he wished because she was not there to keep him under her enormous gas mask and away from the girls who emitted the deadly toxins.

To this day, Dalziel has still not returned back to the wonderland of NECYSC, but he has grown up and his mom has finally realized that her gas mask no longer applies to Dalziel as he has outgrown it and she no longer keeps him away from girls. For that Dalziel is glad.

Eventfulnessless

2008-05-01T18:57:00.000-07:00

Guys, I was serious about my running out of ideas. If you wish to see a post up everyday, as I know many of you do and I thank you for your continued interest in my writing, SUBMIT IDEAS SO I HAVE STUFF TO WRITE ABOUT!

So, before I continue with my LAST idea, I must insert this disclaimer to ease the minds of my readers…

Disclaimer: The following day did not actually happen, but it is a compilation of many snippets of days to make one big exciting day.

Now that business is taken care of, I can commence the writing!

Dalziel slowly climbed out of bed as his cell-phone alarm clock relentlessly played its “Energize” song over and over again in endless loops. He slowly turned the alarm off, headed off to the bathroom where he brushed his teeth, a habit which he had just only started a few months earlier as mentioned in the previous post. So, yes, Dalziel was actually brushing his teeth, now to skip other random boring details, he got on the bus after a small sprint as he rounded the corner to see his bus just pulling up.

So Dalziel entered school that morning, tired as always, but he was confident in his sneakiness that he would be able to sleep through his 1^st two boring and unimportant classes. During history, gladly they were watching a movie, but Dalziel’s seat placement was horrible to find a good position to sleep in. He was in the 2^nd row right in front of the teacher’s desk so he could not find the right angle in which he could position himself to hide from the teacher and sleep peacefully. Eventually, he slowly edged his desk over at a slight angle so he could place his head onto his desk and still be perfectly behind the student in the 1^st row. Dalziel was pleased with his ninja-ness and quickly fell asleep to the low droning of the boring black and white history movie.

As time passed on and Dalziel continued sleeping, he was unaware that the teacher had noticed that his hair had disappeared from his vision. Obviously since Dalziel was sleeping, he could not hear the teacher slowly walk up and sit on the side of the classroom from where he could survey the whole class. And since Dalziel sat in the 1^st column of chairs right in front of the teacher’s desk, he was in plain sight of the teacher who sat there quietly observing Dalziel’s back rise and fall rhythmically as he was fast asleep.

Then all of a sudden as if Dalziel had just been hit with a quick-attack from Pikachu, he snapped upright and rubbed the sleep away from his eyes. Then he noticed a presence behind him that was shaking, he turned around and saw his teacher sitting on the side of the room from where he could see everything and from where he had obviously seen Dalziel sleeping his class away. His teacher was stifling a chuckle, a stifled chuckle that scared the living crap out of Dalziel, he was sure his old crafty (<=someone notice the slight allusion) teacher had something horrible in store for him, but tried to hide his fear.

Then to his horror, his teacher walked back to the VCR and paused the video. With this break in class, Dalziel was sure that his teacher would do something horrid, but nothing happened except the ringing of the bell. Dalziel was saved, but as he left the room he glanced at his teacher who was chuckling to himself and looking at Dalziel with a slight glare in his eyes. Dalziel quickly walked out of his horrid history classroom and headed over to his statistics class which he thoroughly enjoyed.

His statistics teacher was a hilarious, bald man. And to accentuate his bald head, Dalziel was sure that his teacher waxed it carefully every morning. As Dalziel took his seat next to Alcaeus, his teacher walked in carrying his normal “Wisconsin” mug full of coffee, it seemed like every other day, but Dalziel was in for a surprise; a surprise much more shocking than that of his history teacher sneaking up on his sleeping body…

Okay I lied; there was no amazing surprise in Dalziel’s statistics class, but seriously. This is what happens when I run out of ideas guys. It’s boring for you to read, and slightly frustrating for me to write, but I will try to continue to in the life of Dalziel with basically no plot for your entertainment.

So the day went on, Dalziel went to Chem class, went through with the lab with the normal random discussions. Gamaliel whipped out his infamous “Ssswhhsshhhssss”s at every turn, and laughed hysterically at every single one no matter how extremely unfitting they were. For example, Tallara said, “What’s wrong with this salt?” (no she really didn’t , but I know you get it), and Gamaliel responds with a hearty, “SSSWHHSSHHHSSS! AHAHAHAHAHA LOLOLOLOLOLOL!oneone!!11!eleven!!1!!”. At this point, the rest of the lab bench just sat there watching Gamaliel laugh his silly little head off at what he thought was his own ingenuity, but really the lab bench was in awe at how hard Gamaliel tried to pull off “sswhhshhss’s” at every turn even when they don’t work.

Now we skip math class because there is no way for me to articulate the hilarious chaos that happens in Noethre’s class.

So onto Spanish. No matter how funny Sr. Davalengle was, when he got to actual class, he was boring to no end, so Dalziel often slept in his class as well. Dalziel had gone through Spanish class sleeping in plain sight many times before without incident and Sr. Davalengle seemed not to care and always seemed to only call on Dalziel while he was conscious. But this day was different, inside Sr. Davalengle’s hilarious little mind, he had developed the perfect plan to surprise Dalziel and crack a joke at the same time!

As the class went over the exercise together, Dalziel slowly drifted off, but Sr. Davalengle waited until he was sure Dalziel was fast asleep, just like Snorlax without a pokéflute on hand. Now when he was sure Dalziel was out like a light, he said, “Dalziel! Número tres, por favor!” (Dalziel! Number 3 please!), but since Dalziel was sleeping, this sound did not register in his brain. Again, Sr. Dalziel reiterated his choice in a respondent to the question, “Dalziel! Number three!” but yet again, Dalziel’s sleeping brain did not hear the sound waves emitted by his teacher. Finally on the third time, Dalziel’s brain registered the sound and sent the message quickly to his eyes to open and respond to the inquiry. He awoke and sleepily said, “Sorry. Lo ciento. Qué número?” To this Sr. Davalengle burst into dance singing, “Ohh, it’s that time of the day, where students sleep in class!” the class erupted in laughter and life went on.

Sorry for the disappointing post guys, but I’m flat out of ideas as of now. So I leave you with a link to techno music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCV1fv-Ef_w

The Day of Unfortunate Events.

2008-04-30T17:51:00.001-07:00

So, guys. My idea pool is running a little low, I have enough ideas left in my head to last maybe 2-4 more days, not including today, but 2-4 days is not very long. So start posting random ideas in comments and you will see if they are used or not, you will not find out if your idea was used or not until I actually write a story and you see it posted. So if you ever think of an ingenious idea that you think that I can make interesting, please feel free to post it. The worst idea is the one you don’t suggest, so anything that comes to mind.

Now that that little announcement is over, we can continue on with the next adventure in Dalziel’s exciting, drama-filled life. Last we had left him with the lingering taste of some poopy silver nitrate in his mouth, but that had been covered up and dissolved into the large amounts of random snacks Dalziel was eating and swallowed where it would then be digested and turned into REAL poop. The taste was so unique, that Dalziel is sure that he will not forget the taste anytime soon, not until he becomes a senile old man who yells and little kids for no apparent reason.

Now, onto the story…

It was just a normal Sunday morning. Dalziel was waking up to the more melodious beeping of his new-found alarm clock with many different functions. He had moved into his brother Northrop’s room after Northrop had moved away to college. Well he hadn’t really moved into Northrop’s room by choice. When his older brother had come back home for Thanksgiving break he was bringing home some special people, and by special people I mean special to him ;D. So Mama Dalziel decided that since Northrop’s old room was only one wall away from the master bedroom that these special guests would not feel comfortable sleeping a wall away from the owners of the house. The simple solution to this problem was to move Dalziel out of his current room and into Northrop’s old room.

Dalziel was not totally against moving into what had used to be his room many, many years before. In fact, Dalziel had Northrop had switched rooms numerous times. Thus Dalziel never had to decorate his room with his own posters and other funky additions that make a room personal. Northrop, being the lazy person he was, would never take down anything from the walls of his old room, and Dalziel just inherited the decorations with no complaints.

So back to that Sunday morning: Dalziel was awakening to his new and improved alarm clock that also doubled as his cell phone and watch. He groggily shuffled into the bathroom and waited his turn to empty the liquids the night had left in his bladder. After leaving his morning’s waste its place, he shuffled back into his/Northrop’s room and decided what he was to wear that morning to Sunday service. Half-awake he picked out his nice pink striped shirt and khaki pants. Dalziel always liked looking nice on Sunday mornings, he was brought up dressing up on Sundays and there was nothing wrong with looking your best when going off to meet the one you love.

An analogy to help illustrate this belief: if one were to say, meet a special someone of the opposite sex (or the same if that’s how you swing), one would like to look his or her best. One would not want to in anyway repel this special someone by wearing pre-ripped jeans because that special someone would probably be repulsed by the fact that someone paid $100 for something that he or she had bought for $1 and worn down into the “fashionable” look after years of use. If one really wants to wear old-looking pants, you are welcome to bring any pair of new jeans to me and I will wear them for you for a few years, and I will return them to you in their full $100 glory.

So Dalziel got all dressed up for Sunday, brushed his teeth and completed all the normal morning routines that people should do. But in fact, this brushing teeth thing in the morning had only entered Dalziel’s life about a year before this dread-ridden Sunday morning. Dalziel had used to believe that brushing teeth in the morning was just something the toothpaste companies had invented to get people to use more toothpaste and this would in turn, make people buy more toothpaste as they consumed more toothpaste in a daily basis. But his views had changed after this topic of his not brushing his teeth had been insulted by someone who he held in a special light. This got Dalziel thinking more about his personal hygiene and then he realized that the tooth paste companies were not just money-hungry people looking to gyp people out of their money. Every morning when he awoke, he would feel that disgusting feeling in his mouth as if someone had just took a crap in his mouth. Unlike the silver nitrate experience of his life, his mouth actually did not taste of poop, but it felt as if someone had; there was the same textural feeling. And then ever since that fateful day, Dalziel started brushing his teeth every morning and he had one person to thank.

After the normal prep, Dalziel sat waiting in the kitchen for Northrop to finish up as he could not drive yet. As Northrop came slowly traipsing down the stairs, Ladridia went ballistic as she normally does; running around in circles, barking her little head off, but all this chaos was easily solved with a simple stomp on the floor and a menacing, “Ladridiaaa?”. So all was quiet and peaceful as Northrop and Dalziel got into the car for the normal twenty minute drive to church.

But this was no normal morning anymore... With Northrop driving, the normal twenty minutes was cut by a quarter into fifteen minutes. And also since Northrop did not feel “normal” parking in the back of the church where the English service was held, all this unnatural occurrences just because Northrop was home… All these out of the ordinary things should have tipped off Dalziel that something else out of the ordinary was bound to happen, and that’s just what he got.

Dalziel was stepping out of the car, he reached for his bible with his right hand, stepped out of the car right leg first, and then as soon as his left leg cleared the car, he began to close the door with his right hand with the bible in it. As he was doing so, his left hand was lagging behind the rest of his body and as the door came back to meet its counterpart of the car’s frame, it was so desperate to be reunited with its partner that it dragged everything in its way back to the car with it. Unfortunately for Dalziel, the pointer-finger of his left hand was in the path of the lust-driven car door and was dragged into the dark crevasses that surround the cracks of a door.

At first Dalziel thought he could just quickly slip his finger out from the crack, but unbeknownst to him, but knownst to car, his finger was jammed snugly in place with the door fully closed.

“AH! HELP! AH!”

“What!? What’d you do?”

Opening the door and quickly clutching his left finger, “CRAP! Ah… I… Just slammed my friggin’ finger in the door.”

“HAHAHA… are you serious?” looking at Dalziel’s mangled finger, “HOLY CRAP KID! YOU DID! AHAHAHA! ARE YOU OKAY?!”

“Yeah I think, it just kind of hurts…… a lot…” the blood started pooling on top of Dalziel’s finger and the two brothers rushed towards the church building for some immediate first-aid kid attention.

“Good mor - ooh that looks like it hurts, go to the office for some bandaids,” were the first words out of the morning’s welcoming usher. The two brothers then continued into the office where Dalziel quickly grabbed a tissue and held it snug over his profusely bleeding finger. Northrop was busy looking for the first aid kid and a bandaid large enough to hold all of Dalziel’s precious fruit punch with cornstarch solution inside his body.

At this point Dalziel was feeling slightly light-headed from the shock and perhaps from the blood he had lost, even though he had only lost probably a few ounces by then. He promptly sat down as Northrop continued riffling through random cabinets in search of the magical heavy netherweave bandage that would restore 3400 HP to Dalziel’s battle-ridden body. (No not really, but you get the idea.)

Finally one of the administrators of the church came around and with his experience in Chinese safety tactics, found the first aid kit in no time and Dalziel was able to properly bandage his wound and apply an excessive amount of anti-biotic. Thus, this fateful day was one that will not soon be forgotten in Dalziel’s life. To this day, his left pointer-fingernail is still not the same. Yes, it has grown back, but its normal shape and thickness has been altered with, perhaps this small deformity will be with Dalziel for the rest of his life to remind him of the hilarious yet embarrassing plights of his younger days…

Chemistry...(what type of chemistry? ;D)

2008-04-29T19:34:00.001-07:00

Yeah, so now that Dalziel’s adventure in Jr. High land are over, we can move forward a few years and meet up with him in High School. Namely his AP Chemistry class where is completing a lab practical… Actually… due to a complaint of a die-hard fan, I am now changing all names to something that flows better with the stories, seeing as all of the names I have been using are basically randomly random names, I will try to stick with either something I make up, or just a random other name…

Ok, never mind… I just spent like 5 minutes trying to think of a different name for our main character and could not think of on that is palatable by my standards, back to my random weird sounding names that are not palatable to some certain “white boys” and by “white boys” I mean Tommy Yan… yeah, that’s right, a real name just appeared on my blog! =O

So Dalziel found himself half-sleeping, half-awake in chemistry class as he often does. Not only was it chemistry class though, by far he enjoyed his chemistry class the most, but Dalziel could not find the strength in his body, namely his eyelids, to stay awake, he would survive through class as a zombie. He would never be fully awake unless something was especially exciting, but he would never be fully asleep, except for in elective classes that do not really matter.

So there was this one incident in which Dalziel found himself being wide awake. Often times under similar circumstances he would find himself wide awake and relatively active: Lab time. Dalziel thoroughly enjoyed lab very much. Not only was his lab bench an interesting bunch to talk to, but he enjoyed the actual chemistry labs despite their academic focus. He enjoyed mixing chemicals and obtaining many different products and especially those awesome colors that are oftentimes a result of a well-done lab experiment. Dalziel was typically quite normal in his chemistry labs, following the rules closely, but still leaving enough room for him to have fun. Not wasting his effort in achieving the perfect 5.0000000mL measurement as he knew from his experiences at his dad’s office that such a precise measurement would have little to no effect on his experiment.

But this one day, Dalziel found himself in a very odd situation… instead of loosely following the rules and safety conditions of the lab procedures; he was going completely against them. He was putting these potentially dangerous chemicals… INSIDE HIS MOUTH! But of course the estrogen-infested part of his lab bench was in protest of his highly unorthodox ways, but that did not stop him; Dalziel was feeling adventurous!

So the reason Dalziel was being completely unorthodox in his actions was because of the ridiculously complex vagueness of this particular experiment. The students were given a list of 15 potential chemicals they could receive. Of these 15 they would receive 10 and would have to properly label. Some of these candidates were NaCl – table salt, C₆H₁₂0₆– glucose (sugar), and H₂O – water. These three candidates were obviously easily distinguished by taste which is why Dalziel found some unidentified liquids and solids near his mouth.

His first taste-test had been a very effective test. He had observed the different solids they had gotten, picked out one that looked like NaCl and cautiously poured out a few crystals onto his lab book. Then out of the blue, he quickly swooped down, like an owl to its prey, and sucked up the minute crystals as if he were a vacuum cleaner. To his half-expecting tongue, the taste of salt reached his tongue, shot up to his brain and registered on his tongue and from his life’s experience he immediately registered the taste as NaCl, common table salt. Thus, the lab group had identified its first salt within a matter of seconds with no chemicals involved other than the offending NaCl and the saliva which coated Dalziel’s tongue.

The next obvious tasting candidate was either water or glucose, as all of the solids had no resemblance to glucose, so either his lab group did not have glucose in their selection of 10, or it was in solution. Dalziel and his lab partner, Gamaliel, decided to take their chances and try to find either water or glucose by taste, but the complimentary lab group, which consists of those certain people who shall remain unnamed because I do not want to find more names, objected to these “stupid” boys risking their precious tongues in search of the wily water and glucose. So Dalziel and Gamaliel decided to sit back and relax for a little while as the girls conducted their highly precise, meticulous chemistry experiments.

Then something unexpected happened; one of the girls, Tallara, was fed up with the orthodox ways of living her chemistry lab life! She finally motioned for Dalziel and Gamaliel to work their taste-bud magic and find out what the chemicals were with a simple “Can you just… you know *motion towards mouth*…”

“Hells yes!” was the hearty reply. So now, the boys had to come to a decision, there were 5 liquids left, and the girls were having trouble with two of them, who would get which test tube. Whose tongue would potentially be scarred for life? Gamaliel took his chances 1^st, with a small dab of his pinky into the test tube; he acquired the liquid ready for taste-testing. He quickly stuck his tongue out and dabbed his tongue with the slightly moist finger.

“That is not water!” exclaimed Gamaliel as he darted towards the sink for water and a paper towel. Now came Dalziel’s turn to take a shot and become the pawn in the lab group’s quest in search of the devious water and sugar… He uncorked the test tube which he had chosen, placed his finger over the top and inverted the test tube so he could obtain some liquid. He then slowly stuck out his tongue and slowly moved his finger closer to his tongue. As the liquid reached the vicinity of his nose and he could not smell anything, Dalziel was slightly reassured that he had chosen wisely and would not be scarred for life. But little did he know that the chemical on his finger would NOT taste like water, and WOULD leave a dark brown mark where it came in contact with his skin.

“Ugh! Definitely not water!” Dalziel briskly walked over to the sink and paper towels just as Gamaliel had before him. He rinsed his mouth out over and over, but the offending taste would not be cleansed! It was as if someone had taken a crap inside of his mouth and had spent the time to wipe the feces all over the inside of this mouth so it would take a long time to clean out. Dalziel dejectedly walked to his lab bench, moist paper towel applied to his tongue in an attempt to mask the taste of poop in his mouth. Despite his attempts to overpower the taste, he could not do so without food on his hands. And seeing as how he had forgotten his lunch money at home, he could not purchase any vittles to clear the taste.

Dalziel tried to continue on with lab and hoped that the taste would slowly dissipate from his mouth, but 5 minutes later, he could taste the silver nitrate as if he had just put it on his tongue. So he looked around at the rest of his lab group and asked, “Anyone have food so I can get rid of this terrible, TERRIBLE, taste?”

And it’s late now, so Dalziel got a fiber bar from his lab group and he completed the lab without placing anything else near his mouth. Oh and by the way, he was luckier than Gamaliel who tastes HCl- Hydrochloric acid.

Adventures of the Puberties... part 2!

2008-04-28T18:47:00.001-07:00

So last we left Dalziel with Amadea sitting alone on the bus… well not really, but we’ll just say he did…

Now the weekend progressed without occurrence. Dalziel gladly attended his conference, and was having such a good time that he had forgotten about the whole stressful, wonderful ordeal that had occurred on the bus. All was going along fine in Dalziel’s world until the conference came to an end, and Dalziel had to return to school.

He was suddenly slapped in the face with the realization of what would happen in school. There would be the awkward silences that he knew he could not alleviate with his minimal social skills. Those silences would be the ones that ripped him apart; he knew that just because he had not had the courage to deftly return the peck that these silences would happen. If he had just been faster by 5 minutes in making his decision rather than dilly-dallying his time away, if he had listened to his “BFF”, Alcaeus, who was sitting next to him (happy?) he would not have to deal with this dent in their old friendship. But of course all of this was just the musings of Dalziel within his own head. Would Amadea really feel different after the simple, unfeeling peck she had given away? Or did she put a lot of meaning into that motion? Dalziel had no way of finding out until he actually saw Amadea again in school.

That Tuesday, he returned to school expecting the worst, but he did not either extreme. He was not completely erased from Amadea’s life; she acknowledged his presence as he sat down next to her during 2^nd period history, but the normal flare behind her voice had lost its sparkle. So he was in the dog house as Tim from “Home Improvement” had called it. All he needed was to get out of the dog house and back into the real house and all would be fine again. Then and only then could Dalziel find someway to repay the wonderful gift he had received from the woman of his dreams.

Dalziel tried to act no differently from than before any tension had appeared between himself and Amadea. At first, Amadea was reluctant to talk to Dalziel as she had before, but Dalziel was determined to get himself out of the dog house and kept at it and finally after 10 longs school days, his relationship with Amadea was restored to where it had been before. They laughed together, completed class work using the same book, and joked around. Dalziel had successfully moved back into the old house.

8^th grade continued on normally, tests, homework, chilling, and then the end of the year reared its shiny, golden yellow head over hill and the hype of summer began enveloping the school and included in the hype, the 8^th grade semi-formal dance…

Dalziel knew that his would be the best of the best opportunities for him to redeem himself, but he had recently been noticing this other boy, Mogens, had been hanging around Amadea a lot. He knew that this other male was around to pick up some candidates for the semi, but Dalziel had to beat him to the chase and ask Amadea before Mogens did. Being as inexperienced as he was, Dalziel decided that he could not smoothly ask Amadea to the semi so he asked Parsifal for some help.

Parsifal was glad to help Dalziel and they developed a plan: Amadea’s locker was close to Parsifal’s and thus at the end of the day, Dalziel would calmly walk over to Parsifal’s locker as if he was going over to talk to Parsifal, but then randomly Parsifal would leave to get something and Dalziel would be alone with Amadea and there he would pop the question. It seemed like a perfectly good plan in Dalziel’s head, but whether or not he could follow through with his plan was the real question.

That night Dalziel spent the whole night tossing and turning with butterflies in his stomach. He felt as if he stomach would fly out of his stomach and onto the green carpeted floor next to him and then his dog Ladridia would come in and eat it being the silly, disgusting dog she was. But alas, his stomach stayed where it should be under his diaphragm. When Dalziel finally did get to sleep he dreamt about how the whole plan would unfold itself. He dreamt about rejections, happy acceptances, and everything in between, but the last one he dreamt about before he awoke was a horrible rejection…

Dalziel awoke to the ridiculously annoying, piercing beep of his cheap eight dollar alarm clock. He was shaking and could not remember why, until he remembered his terrible, terrible dream…

Dalziel walked into school and barely noticed what was happening around him, all he could think about was what he was going to do that afternoon. Finally that afternoon came and the plan worked out perfectly and Dalziel found himself alone in the hallways with Amadea.

“So you going to the semi?”

“No?” she replied with eyes shifting around the room followed by a nervous giggle.

“well, you wanna go with me?”

Sad look appears on her face. “Sorry, but I can’t”

Dalziel, down-fallen walked away and Parsifal came bursting out of wherever he was and asked, “How’d it go!?”

“I got rejected…” was Dalziel’s sad reply. Dalziel slowly walked to his bus shaking off the rejection where he met Ianthe, Amadea’s good friend.

“Yeah… just got rejected by Amadea…”

“Oh… how come I didn’t know about this? Well you know it’s not her fault right?”

“What?! What do you mean not her fault…?”

“Well, her parents won’t let her date other races…”

“Are you freaking kidding?!?”

“No…”

“Well… there goes a load off my chest…”

Dalziel continued walking and burst out in laughter of all the stress that had gone through his life in this short moment of time. He thought that he was the only one whose parents controlled him like a puppet when it came to interaction with the other sex. Other people just seemed to interact freely however they pleased, they did not have the same leash as he did. At least, Dalziel now knew that other people like him, no matter what race, had their leashes well hidden out of sight. Dalziel experienced something in life that his mother would never know about, and he had grown up and become more of a man than he was before. This experience would not become forgotten by Dalziel. It had shaped him and opened his eyes to the stark realities of this silly, silly world. Dalziel was a new man…

Adventures of the Puberties!

2008-04-27T17:19:00.000-07:00

So I think this next story is very well worth the time. It’s about me in 8^th grade, and my raging adolescent hormones…

Dalziel was excited to go to Six Flags. It was the end of his 8^th grade year and the band was going on their annual field trip to Six Flags. Not only would he be going on an awesome field trip, but the bus ride there was bound to be spent with his good friends, including his “special” friend. Her name was Amadea. She had sat next to Dalziel for pretty much the whole year in both Science and History. Dalziel had always been attracted to her and when he was assigned to sit next to her, he was at first scared as he could basically not interact with girls very well.

This scary, but true fact that Dalziel could not find himself interacting with girls was due to one factor. His mother had always hated Dalziel interacting with the opposite sex and whenever she could she would keep Dalziel away from those long-haired homo-sapiens. To his mother, the estrogen they emitted seemed to be identical to anthrax when within 10 feet of Dalziel. No matter how hard Dalziel tried, with his 8^th grade mind he could not overcome the 14 years of his mother’s conditioning.

Thus, on the 1^st day of assigned seating, when Amadea 1^st happily plopped herself down next to Dalziel he was unable to utter the 1^st word. All he could do was utter a simple, “hi…” in return to her hearty hello. As the year progressed, Dalziel slowly was able to talk to Amadea more and more. He would often crack jokes to her and just talk about random things. Another thing they had in common was that they were both in the band and hung out with basically the same crowd.

So it was the end of the year and the Band Six Flags trip was coming up. Dalziel was pumped to spend the 2 hour bus ride in the back of the bus chilling with his friends, and of course Amadea. So the first 30 minutes of the bus ride were spent just talking about random things and joking around, but then finally as the mood became chiller and the hormones kept on raging, Dalziel and the gang started playing truth or dare.

Of course since they were on a crowded school bus and sitting in the back, dares were rampant as truths were deemed “lame”. So the normal dares came around 1^st, “Haha lick the window, eat this random lint, etc.” then the hormones prevailed again and then the more interactive dares appeared: “go kiss ___ on the cheek, etc.”. Then Dalziel could not believe his ears, Parsifal dared Amadea to kiss him on the cheek! His mind was racing, “would she do it? What would he have to do in return? How would their friendship change after?”. Little did he know that Amadea was also similarly scared to complete the action, then finally after Parsifal’s constant nagging/cheering, she finally went through the action and as she did, Dalziel’s chest was thumping faster and faster and he felt as if it would just pop out onto the floor and continue pumping blood at 70 mL per second.

Then before he knew it, the whole ordeal was over, and Amadea was sitting back in her seat and Dalziel was sitting there with a stupid grin on his beaming face. Dalziel finally came to his senses and quickly sat back into a normal position and acted “cool”, as if nothing had happened. Then he finally realized that it was his turn to answer the daunting truth or dare question. He knew from the moment he looked at Parsifal’s smirking face what exact dare he would get: “go kiss Amadea on the cheek”. Without a doubt, Dalziel’s prediction was correct and he was faced with the toughest decision he would ever make in his raging hormonal adolescent life. Would he do it and potentially start a relationship with Amadea? Or would he chicken out and be the lame, shy Asian boy that couldn’t interact with girls?

Dalziel could not decide and spent a long, long time pondering what to do. He was weighing and reweighing each option, considering the different pros and cons. Then after much deliberation he was just about to make a decision, but then the bus came to a stop and all the band kids had to unload and prepare for their pre-Six Flags competition. (Looking back, I was really, really, really, really, extremely lame)

As the competition came to a close and the kids re-filed into the bus Dalziel made his mind up for sure. On the way back to the school he would return the favor and kiss Amadea on the cheek. But one thing had slipped his mind, he would not be returning home with the band on the bus. It was the start of a long weekend and Dalziel would be attending a conference with his family and to save time, they would be picking him up at Six Flags. At the end of the day, Dalziel walked back to the bus with the rest of the band and sorrowfully said goodbye to everyone as he walked away with his father to the car. He vowed to himself that he would somehow return Amadea’s favor before the school year ended.

… and we will find out whether Dalziel does so or not… IN A FUTURE POST! =O