conveyor belt memories

You graduate high school once. It seems like a "Yea, so?" kind of fact, but you graduate high school one time only. Let's go the chart: You can get multiple degress, buy multiple houses, get multiple cars, even get married a couple of times...Cap and gown, Pomp and Circumstance? Once, and only once. Everyone has a high school metaphor. Every valedictorian is capable of coming up with some "High school is like..." speech to make more profound an event that is already made of and drowning in profundity. Actually I guess a "High school is like..." speech would be a simile, not a metaphor...moving on. Here's my metaphor. High school is one of those moving walkways at the airport. We see it, and it looks like it'll be fun. We get on, quickly decide that the whole thing is the same, and eagerly await the end. But once we're there we realize how unique the ride is and how we've taken the whole thing for granted. From now on we don't have anything under our feet to keep us up and carry us along. We had one ride, and in a matter of minutes, it ends. Now we just have to find our way to the terminal, wait 3 months, and catch our flight. Although I'm not sure how I feel how about getting on an airplane dressed like this....

-alex

i'll admit it, i had to spell check the word "hypocrisy"

So I guess that complaining about something that always has been and always will be is kind of dumb. Then again most of the stuff you'll find if you scroll down can be classified as dumb so I'm right on track. I think political humor has run its eternal course. Count the number of movies, television programs, books, magazines, newspapers, and radio bits that fall under the less than endearing classification of "Political Satire" and, well, you'll probably become pretty good at counting...movies...and books....maybe just counting in general. Now count up how many of those can be classified as "Original" or "Clever." I'm guessing that it took you less time to count that up than it would take to count up how many times I've used the word classified or classification in the previous five lines. I suppose it's two more now. It seems as if a real comedian would recognize that the political humor well went dry a couple hundred years ago. You'd think maybe if someone was trying to be funny, they wouldn't go after a dead horse like politics. And please, let slide my blatant hypocrisy. When the president says something funny(stupid), doing a three minute TV bit on it isn't going to make it funnier. Drawing a cartoon where a missle is pointed at Iraq which is drawn 43 times bigger than Afghanistan isn't going to make anyone laugh, nor convince anyone to change their opinion on certain political decisions. Comedy isn't usually the best medium by which to send some persuasive message. Writing a book with a sophisticated title like "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" may return a nice paycheck from a publisher but in the time it took to write the whole book, the anonymous(cough) author could have come up with a one-liner that evokes more laughter. Talk about sandwiches. Joke about the different ways you can pop a balloon. Rant about the milk crust under the cap of a gallon of milk. Just don't talk about the most wrung out, humorless topic ever. And I'll do the same. Starting.....now.

-alex

the intricacies of chocolate and cheese

Putting these two topics in the same paragraph is kind of like mixing, say, chocolate and cheese. They're both alright on their own, together they're probably disgusting but the combination sounds interesting enough that most of us would give it a try. The first topic is a question, the second one is, well, also a question. So read on.
Have you ever thought about how rarely someone accurately answers a question you ask? We all ask people questions as part of daily life. In most cases the answer satisfies us so we move on. But if we stopped for a second and considered if our question was truly answered, we might be surprised at the answer. Think of a simple question....Hey, can you give me some help? "Give me a couple minutes." Ah ha! I did not answer your question. You assume that this means I will help you, in a few minutes of course. But really my answer has no connection to your question. I played you like a fool, like a fool! The problem is that in many cases, answering a question accurately sounds archaic or even rude. Do you know what time it is? "Yes, yes I do." And by actually answering what you've asked, I've annoyed you and ended our conversation. So we settle for giving responses that will simply appease the inquirer rather than address the question that was asked. What do you think of that car? "I like it." Well that's fantastic, but I didn't ask whether you like it or not. What's up? We've all heard the clever little answer to this classic. What kind of question is that anyway? What's up? Clearly we have an astonishing mastery of our language if we can come up with a dandy like "What's up?" In retrospect there's no real solution to all this. If you actually answer people's questions they're going to look at you funny and probably won't ask you questions anymore. So why did I write all this? It's probably best for the credibility of this rant that I don't try to answer that question.
How much extra gas does your car burn because it has an antenna? Think about it. Obviously the antenna creates wind resistance, which creates a force on your car in the opposite direction that the car is moving, which means the engine has to work harder to move the car. Of course the wind resistance is tiny, but it still exists. Let's say you have the privilege of owning a particularly reliable car, perhaps a 1997 Toyota Camry (ahem), that lasts for about 200,000 miles. The amount of extra gas the engine consumes is probably miniscule but the number still exists. Think of all the factors you'd have to consider to actually calculate this amount. You'd have to consider the altitude in order to find air pressure and obviously the altitude is changing with every dip or hill. That alone would be difficult enough. Then you'd have to take into account the speed of the car, the surface area of the antenna, wind speed, mileage of the car without an antenna, other measurements of the car that I don't even understand, and so on. I'm sure the master equation would be littered with atmospheric and structural constants and such. Everything considered, actually figuring out an exact number is impossible, right? I doubt it. Keep a couple instruments on the car that record factors like altitude and such and I'd imagine that you'd have enough information to calculate it. Not easy, but not impossible...I guess this really isn't as interesting as I thought it was when I was in the shower a while ago. Umm...yea, this paragraph is cheese, the first is definitely chocolate.

-alex

slowdance on the inside

It seems like there are some things that just shouldn't happen. Something that's just a mistake in the story that we're writing and we can go back to fix it all up. But we can't. It shouldn't happen. It does. It is and will be no matter how much it hurts. So what can you say? Today, a group of us stood under some trees down at a park and experienced something very few of us had experienced before. Some mourned the loss of a friend. Some the loss of a teammate. Others just the loss of a kid who shouldn't have a mourning group right now. It's a kid who should be hanging out with his friends right now. A few weeks ago he scores a state championship winning goal. Now, instead of continued celebration, he leaves a group of guys that are no longer the 2005 state champions. From February 15 until early this morning, we were. Now we are just a group of guys who played soccer together. Now we all take our prescriptions and go the the pharmacist, pick up our precautionary medication, and swallow the most bitter, most painful pill of our lives. As his friends and teammates, we join other friends and acquaintances in disbelief. We all just sit on the grass, stand against the fence, bury our faces in our hands, look off in the distance. That's all there is to do. Everyone there was part of something that not a single person wanted to be a part of. We can say it's not fair. It isn't. We can say it wasn't his time. It wasn't. We can search for consolation by saying that everything happens for a reason. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. But it happened. It was sudden, unexpected, and rare. But it happened. They'll be an article in the papers in the morning. It'll be on the evening news. Everyone who hears about it that didn't know him will say "That's too bad." For everyone who knew him, it just makes it more real. I feel like I should be doing something now. But there's nothing to do. There's no absolution anywhere. Only pain, for everyone who knew him, everyone who was close to him. I wasn't even close friends with him, but it's still damn hard. Stuff like this shouldn't happen. We should be able to learn about death without anyone dying. I'm sure everyone who is affected by it will take something away from it all. I don't know what I will take away. I don't like thinking that I'm gaining anything from something like this. That's all I've got. It hurts for us all, it will for a while. Life goes on, until it doesn't.

Chris, it's been fun.

-alex

despite my best efforts

So I suppose some form of attempt to get back into the swing of blogging is in order. It has been a little over two months since I convinced myself not to even apply to Stanford in my last post and enough has happened to provide some decent blogging material. I could talk about my soccer team and our recent state championship. I could talk about how I hung out with an old friend for the first time in months. There was an awesome concert at a terrible venue. There were scholarships and tests and bad grades and homework. There were T-shirts. There's Valentines Day. I could write about all the rain lately and attach some cosmic meaning to the movement of the raindrops on my windshield. I could talk about the reuniting of a band. A lost purse. New Years. Christmas. Collapsing Christmas trees. Personalized chess sets and their alterior meaning are certainly rant worthy. Maybe you want to hear about how I got two dispoable cameras for Christmas and after all the events and happenings since then I've taken only one picture. Of a soccer field. There wasn't even a game going on. It wasn't even a cool soccer field. I could write about Alias, golf, Halo 2, text message bills, Peter Piper Pizza, new clothes, "massage devices", newspaper pictures, futons, Honda Accords, winter break, chemistry study groups, All About Us books, foggy windows, khaki shorts, hang gliders, being a vegetarian, the immaturity of a Calc BC class, college, blood donation, being broke, lock picking, still owing money for lock picking tools, ping pong, the Super Bowl, four month anniversaries, three month anniversaries....two month anniversaries. I could cover crazy English quizzes, guitars, violins, pianos, Festivals, I-10, the pain I feel everytime someone recites a line from Napoleon Dynamite that I've heard nearly 4700 times, movies, Uno, porches, tennis racquets, Captain Morgan, the name Bryce, fish, Yavapai, GCU, ASU, clay pots, peanut M&M's, musicals, bracelets, Hemingway and Steinbeck, computer viruses, never having a full tank of gas, burritos, sweatbands, dodgeball, the Minnesota Vikings, and so on and so forth. Or I can just write about all the things that have happened since December 7 in one clever little list in one pointless moderate length post so I can catch up without having to write 500 words on every little occurance. Although that kind of is the basis of my blog....(insert shoulder shrug).

-alex