Achoolera

   Today in community time (a very pointless class that is similar to the old B-block) we were supposed to do homework or read. The problem was, we didn't have any homework. So we had to read.
   Most people didn't have any books with them, and since my community is in my science classroom, there were science textbooks on the tables. One boy started reading one of them.
   "What is Chloria?" he asked. The class looked around, confused.
   "You mean chlorine? asked the teacher.
   "No - chorine-a," the student (we'll call him Joseph) insisted. "It keeps talking about it in this book. It says that it is in water."
   "That's chlorine," laughed one student in the room.
   "But why would a book about the human body be talking about chlorine?" I asked.
   "It's not!" shouted Joseph. "It's Chlorine-a!"
   At this point the teacher stood up and went over to Joseph's desk and looked at the book. "Not chlorine-a," she said. "Cholera."
   Students exchanged glances. Cholera sounded nothing like chlorine.
   "But what is it?" Joseph persisted.
   "It's a disease," answered the teacher.
   "But what is it?" he asked.
   "A disease," somewhat said.
   "But what does it do?"
   "Well," the teacher began, "people die from it..."
   "But what does it do?!" Joseph said in a rather loud voice.
   "Vomitting, diarrhea... I'll look it up," muttered the teacher.

   Later, in that same class, Joseph sneezed. He is one of those people (as am I) who doesn't sneeze normally, but rather makes a big scream-like exaggerated sneezish sound completely involentarily.
   "Joseph, you're full of bologna," the teacher muttered.
   "What was that?" snapped Joseph.
   "She said you were full of bologna," laughed one student.
   "But that was a real sneeze," Joseph responded. He seemed completely confused.
   "Of course it was," the teacher replied.
   "No, really, that's how I sneeze! I sneeze like that all the time! Do you want to hear how I fake sneeze? That's more realistic than a fake sneeze. Here's my fake sneeze: ACHOO!"
   At this point the entire class was laughing, and the teacher was looking at Joseph strangely. "What are you talking about? I never said it was a fake sneeze. Did I?"

-Rev. Samuel W. Wheet

Googlestalk

Today, I had a free last block of the day, but since I had to wait for the bus, I couldn't go home. Instead, Jared and I spent the time googling people in the library.

First we googled Jared. Turns out, according to one genealogy site at least, "Jared Kalow", son of Bruce and Celia and brother of Julia and Jonny, is supposed to be dead. His parents really are named Bruce and Celia and this brother and sister are Julia and Jonny. Something's a little strange here...

A little while later, Jared decided to google the name of the person I had a crush on earlier this year. He couldn't spell his last name, so I spelled it out loud for him. Unfortunately, just as I was spelling it, the said person we were googling walked by. Twice.

Then we decided to google our math teacher. The first few results were normal things, like "Ms. B tutors after school" and a ratemyteachers.com result... but then we found a youtube video at the bottom of the first page. So, naturally, we watch it. We skipped over the beginning parts, until you found her. Laughingly, we called over another girl in our math class, and the three of us watched a little more. It was pretty loud in the library, so we couldn't hear what the video was saying, so when we got the the "after-sex" scene, it was a bit shocking. There was our math teacher, and a half-naked guy, under rumpled sheets. Can you say TRAUMA?

How am I ever supposed to go to math class now?

<3 Helen

You owe me a salad and a half!

I've been involved in several photography projects as of late.

As we all know, photography projects can produce strange situations. About a week ago, Rebecca and I were helping Sachi with a photography project in which pictures would be taken of visual puns (such as "a wok in the park," a "pan tree" and things like that). So of course, we had to carry pans and a wok through the forest and to the park. The park was by the elementary school where Sachi works. When we got there, Sachi saw to her dismay that the playground and the park were filled with students that would recognize her, as well as faculty members. She then proceeded to cringe in embarrassment that they might see her carrying pans. At one point, she tried to hide them behind me (I don't know how this was supposed to work, but what do I know?) Nobody noticed her, and we then took some pictures. But walking back, we forgot about people seeing us as we noticed a fallen-down sign.

"We have to take a picture of that," someone said.

"What pun could it be used for?"

"Seinfeld!" Rebecca realized, excitedly.

We were so caught up in taking pictures of the felled sign that we forgot that people might see us. Suddenly, some people in the playground recognized Sachi. Sachi was quite embarrassed indeed.

"What are you doing? Trying to drive the snakes out of Ireland?" someone said (it was Saint Patrick's Day).

"It's a photo project," Sachi said, defending her dignity.

Someone else, in the park then said, "What are you cooking, Sachi?" At that point, we just tried to get out of sight as quickly as possible.

Yesterday, I had the lovely opportunity to participate in Rebecca's (not my sister from the blog--the other Rebecca) photography project. In this one, I had to be part of an Asian arranged marriage. This in itself is strange enough. But standing in the cold wind without a jacket for minutes on end and bending my knees so that my head would be at the same height as Sachi's (my assigned bride) ALL IN PUBLIC VIEW was quite unpleasant. When it was over, Rebecca my sister and Rebecca the photographer and I went to see Anything Goes. Rebecca the photographer said something to Rebecca my sister about owing her money. I then joked to Rebecca the photographer that she owed me a salary for all of the unpleasant work that I did for her.

"What?" she asked, looking very strangely at me.

"I said you owe me a salary for the modeling work I did for you."

She squinted her eyes strangely at me again, but accepted what I was saying.

Soon she decided to borrow money from me so she could buy a ticket. I gave it to her, and she said, "Now I owe you a salad and a half."

"What?" I asked, now I being the confused one.

"You said I owed you a salad for the work you did for me."

"No, I said you owe me a salary."

"Oh."

Salad, salary...what's the difference? Both words were derived from the same origin, after all!

-Philip

Hacking MIT

Today I was at MIT a few hours earlier than my classes started, hanging out with some friends. We were debating where to go: one person had suggested the engineering library, another said there was a secret garden he wanted to find. I piped up: "Oh, you mean the garden by the basement of building six?" I said, having stumbled across that particular daisy field a few years ago. We soon came to a general consensus that we should head there, and I, the fearless leader, lead them to it.

The garden consisted entirely dead, brown stalks of flowers that no longer existed. "This is depressing!" Tori commented. There were two small buildings (the garden was kind of a courtyard but in the middle of nowhere) that were some kind of electrical storage place. On top of one of them were two chairs. Noah, a very tall guy, started to climb up one by grabbing onto the roof (which was 7 or 8 ft high) and pushing his foot off a protruding pipe that had several valves on it. Then John, who is slightly taller than me, ran up to the building and jumped, managing to grab the roof and push his foot off a door hinge. Then Tori, taller than John but shorter than Noah climbed onto the roof. There were four of us left on the ground, but the other three had very little interest in getting to the top of the building, while I stood there wishing I could get up there.

I obviously could not go via Noah's method; I am not nearly as tall as him. I tried jumping, but to no avail. Finally, they brought over one of the chairs from the roof, and I used it to get a hold of the roof (even with a chair I could barely touch the top) and push myself up using the pipe. John pulled me the rest of the way up.

Up on the roof, I looked down in triumph. Then I began to explore. I climbed up onto the window ledge of the second story windows and skirted my way around that, hugging the wall in the space between windows where the ledge was only a half foot wide. I looked down the twelve or so feet from me to the ground slightly terrified, but mostly triumphant.

Soon it was time to head to class. Noah just hung from the roof and dropped, again the advantage of being tall. Tori also did a similar dismount from the roof. John turned around, felt around with his foot for the door hinge and carefully lowered himself down. I tried to turn myself backwards and find the door hinge, but couldn't find it. John came over and grabbed my foot, moving it to where the hinge was. I stepped down onto it, but couldn't go any farther. Noah came over and grabbed my foot. "Just lead on this, I'll lower you down."

"NOAH," I excaimed. "Do not grab my foot! That's not going to work!" But he wouldn't let go. So I lowered myself onto his hand and jumped down.

Just as we were leaving, John decided to get onto the roof of the second, taller building. He easily shimmied up a pole to get to the roof and was standing there as we started to leave. "Guys!" He screamed after us. "Don't just abandon me. I need help getting down."

Tori grabbed the trash can and moved it over next to the building. We cajoled John into turning backwards and putting his feet on a small hitch in the pipe. Noah started to grab John's foot, but John yelled at him for doing so and so Noah stopped and John got down onto the trash can. On our way back inside we realized there was a ladder right beside the door.

"Well, it was good practice," someone said.

"Practice for what?" someone else asked.

"This, without a ladder," the person responded.


Sachi

Note: Hacking is a word that has two meanings at MIT: the more common is a prank, particularly a clever one, such as putting a car on top of the dome, or turning part of the campus into a board game. The second meaning is exploring dangerous, secret, out of the way, or off limits places.

What is the moment of inertia of a cone?!?

I will warn you in advance that you might appreciate this post more if you have taken physics.  But I will write it anyway, with the hopes that it might amuse some people (and hoping not to scare anyone away from taking physics--I think all of you should!)

We were going to have a test today about rotational mechanics.  At lunch, some people from my physics class were joking about the strange, complicated problems that sometimes appear on our tests.

"I've determined what the first problem on the test will be," someone said, grinning.  "There's a vertical rod with a cone on top, and it's in equilibrium, so it stays in that position.  But then a torus that someone threw lands on the cone, and the system starts to rotate."  The cone was because we have a continuing joke that our teacher tells us that we only have to know the moment of inertia for a disk and a hoop, and then he accidentally puts some other weird shape on the test. 

This was enough to make people groan, but we continued, various people adding to the problem.

"Since the rotation is vertical, you have to consider gravity."

"And the rod rotates about an axle, but there's friction in the axle."

"And the axle shifts around an elliptical path, like one of those baby toys where you push the thing through the path.  And the question is, how far along the path does the axle go!"

"No, the axle is connected to three gears, but the gears don't mesh perfectly, and sometimes they slip--"

"And each one has a different coefficient of friction."

"And one of them is a triangle!"  

By the end of the musings, we had created quite a nightmarish problem.  Someone sitting nearby said to me and another boy, "Can you fail the test so that Mr. H. decides that it was impossible and puts it on a curve?"

I was thinking to myself, that of course I wouldn't do such a thing, that I tend to be very good at physics, I did all of my homework relatively easily, and I would probably get an A.  

But the sad thing is that the actual test didn't seem much better than our musings.  Maybe my brain wasn't running at full speed, or maybe the test was harder than usual.  And I really do think that there were some moments of inertia on there that were not hoops or disks.  Yes, I really do think so.  

-Philip 

A day of awkward conversations and laughing

In science today we watched a video about the human reproductive system. It was as unawkward as these videos go, but that didn't help much. Afterwards, we had a discussion about the video.
Somehow we got onto the topic of types of diseases or problems passed on from the mother to the child. The substitute (we'll call him Mr. G) said, "If you were walking in the park and all of a sudden your leg gets chopped off..."
Before he could finish his sentence, the class burst out laughing. Somebody stood up and started walking around, then suddenly collapsed to the floor, hiding one leg behind his body. From where I was, it actually looked like his leg disappeared. Mr. G told him to go back to his seat and tried again: "If you were walking in the park and all of a sudden your leg falls off, your baby would still have two legs."
This wasn't much better. In fact, the image of a leg suddenly falling off was funnier than a leg being chopped off for no reason. Mr. G noticed this and tried one more time.
"If you somehow lost a leg, your baby would still have two legs."
I'm not sure whether anybody other than me heard this, because everybody was still busy trying to think of scenarios in which one's leg would fall off while walking in the park. Mr. G noticed this as well, and tried to change the subject. We ended up talking about Siamese twins.
"Did you hear about those Siamese twins that were connected at the head?" one student asked. "What happened to them?"
"I'm pretty sure they died," Mr. G responded.
"They died? Why? They were talking about them a long time ago when they were born and the news said that they were healthy..."
Mr. G looked at the student strangely. "Why did they die?"
"Yes."
"Because they shared a head!"
"What?" asked the student. Now everybody was confused. "They shared a head?" Suddenly, the student seemed to realize something. What it was, I'm not sure, but he remembered what he was talking about. "Oh, of course they died."
We continued talking about Siamese twins, but the focus changed to separating them. "Well," Mr. G said, "sometimes it's safe, but other times it isn't. Like, for example, if they were connected at the chest and shared internal organs."
I heard someone say "You get the lungs, liver, and stomach; you get the intestines and the heart."

Later that day, in English class, someone made a joke. It wasn't very funny, but I started laughing anyway. And, as much as I tried, I couldn't stop.
First, people weren't really paying attention to me, but as I laughed for longer and longer, people started to watch. My teacher, after locating the source of the disturbance, told me to get a drink of water. I did, and I seemed to get better. For a few minutes.
I was editing my essay and I came to a sentence that made no sense. I started laughing before I could even process the information. This time was even worse. I couldn't stop laughing for even a second. I started to rock back and forth in my chair. Then, not long later, I fell on the ground and rolled around. I couldn't help it.
Again, my teacher ordered me to get a drink. I pushed myself up onto my feet, but no sooner had I reached a kneeling position then I fell over again. I couldn't keep my balance. I started coughing and laughing and laughing and coughing.
At that point, I realized that half the class had dropped what they were doing to stare at me, and I awkwardly inched out of the classroom and bolted to get a drink. I somehow managed to stop laughing before I choked on the water.

-Marianne

Searching for Service?

Forgive me if this is a bit off, I'm a little zany seeing as I've been up for twenty three hours as of now (6AM.) So today was what is called sophomore sleepover at our school, where the sophomores all go and have a giant party with hypnotists and inflatables and food and music from 8:30 PM to 5 AM.

One of the rules was 'No cell phones'. As I was picking Helen up to go to sophomore sleepover, she commented, "It wouldn't be that hard to bring in a cell phone. It's not like they're going to pat us down or anything. Just stick it in your pocket and wear a long tshirt."

Five minutes later we arrived at the school and they were separating us into lines of girls and boys. I turn to Helen. "Not going to pat us down, you said?" One of the teachers explained that we had to have our bags and person searched.

"Do we have to take our clothes off?" Asked one boy, joking.

"No. Especially not you!" The teacher responded.

As we went in they asked us to declare everything we had. "I have..." I said as I checked my pockets. "Chapstick." The chaperone let me proceed.

I overheard Marena, just in front of me, saying, "...chapstick, twenty five cents, oh and this pencil I stole from the Boston Public Library."

"We're going to have to report you!" the chaperone joked and let her pass.

Helen and I continued through until we got to the end. "Well," I said, turning around, "I guess we didn't get pat down after all." As I say this Marena, right behind me, is the first to get pat down for a cell phone. "Run!" I whisper to Helen as the vice principal sticks her hands in Marena's pockets and turns them inside out. We rush to the tables on the other side of the cafeteria, successfully avoiding getting pat down while the vice principal continues on to our friend Emily, pulling up her pants to check her socks for anything she might be hiding.

As people arrived at the table, stories of the searches were told. Annie ran into the interim housemaster who introduced herself and asked Annie what she had. "Midol and a pad," Annie remaked.

"Oh. Go on...Wait, no. Give the midol to the meds people." Annie did so and then found our table just as we were discussing the best way to hide a cell phone—one's bra.


Sachi

Wild Goose Chase

Let me reach into my memory and pull out an experience from my trip to Washington DC:

Capitol Hill day. I hadn't been super excited about it until my brief visit to the Capitol the previous day. Walking through the office buildings, seeing Ron Paul's office, asking Nancy Pelosi's secretary for gallery passes to the senate--It was simply amazing. So here I was, on the real Capitol Hill day, all of us dressed up in formal clothes, with a couple hours of free time. We decided we wanted to visit a committee meeting, and glancing through our scedule of committee meetings we decided that the Senate budget meeting would be interesting. So off we went to Dirksen Senate Office room 324.

Upon arriving at room 324, Caitlyn tried turning the handle, but the door wouldn't open. Maddie pulled and jiggled the handle, and the door opened.* It was a janitor's closet. Well, so much for that. We looked on a board in the hallway that told where meetings were taking place and chose another interesting one: Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, room 328 A, Russel building. Of course, going to another building meant going through security again, but it was worth it.

So, we arrive at room 328 A. We walk in, and ask the person working in the office if we can enter the meeting, only to be informed that the one we are looking for isn't here, and the one that is here is private. I forget what happened next, but I believe we somehow managed to go to the Hart Senate building. There, we found out that the Dirksen building had a lot of meetings going on there, why don't we try that? They told us we could go through the underground tunnels, so we did.

We were told there were meetings in room 106 and 523. I tried to remember the numbers but somehow all of us managed to forget the second one. So we tried going to 106, finding that it was empty. We looked on a board on the wall, and it listed the Senate Budget meeting in room 624.

"Let's try to go to that," someone suggested, as we realized that it must be the one that our paper had told us was in room 324. When we got there, we asked about it.

"Sorry," the woman there said. "That meeting was postponed to next Tyuesday." Fortunately, she recomended we try room 215--a finance meeting was occuring there with Timothy Geitner. We decided to try that one, after all, it sounded very interesting.

With only 20 or 30 minutes until we needed to meet up with the rest of our group, we wondered if this time would be the one. "Each place we try has been more and more legitmate," I commented. "Maybe this one will actually work." On the elevator, we asked the other people on it if they knew whether there was a finance committee meeting in room 215. They didn't know. They must've been wondering why four high school students would want to know.

Room 215, ahead. A blonde-hairded woman was standing by the door. She affirmed that this was the meeting we were looking for, and said that we could go in--but there were only three open seats. We were making plans to switch off who was watching when she peeked in, and informed us that there were actually four. So we entered, sitting in the front row of seats at a committee meeting that other people might actually watch on TV, literally ten feet away from Tim Geitner. Unfortunately, I was unable to understand what they were all saying, but the experience was amazing nonetheless. Afterwords, the others told me what they were talking about. ;)

-Rebecca

*This was the second time that week that she had opened a seemingly locked door. She assumes that they must have not been locked but I maintain that she is a wizard and this is her first sign of magical ablities.

P.S. By the way, I will affirm that Sachi was not lying http://dial-a-for-awkward.blogspot.com/2009/01/just-because-metro-contains-letter-t.html when she said that the DC Metro makes you pay to get off it!

P.P.S. There might be more Close-Up stories coming, but it's not super likely since this was by far the best story I have.

Mission: Avoid Awkwardness at All Costs

On Sunday evening, Sachi and I decided to go to the practice session after our swing dance class. We had never done this before, and we didn't know quite how it worked. There was about an hour between our class and the practice session when another class was taught, so we decided to spend the time eating dinner. We wandered around Washington Street, looking for restaurants that appealed to us. Sachi thought she knew of an Italian one, and I followed her. What I did not know was that she has no sense of direction and she was leading me the wrong way. So we decided to just try going into one of the restaurants nearby. First we entered a bar, which was dark, menacing, and weird, so we quickly escaped. We finally decided on a welcoming little pizzeria.

After we had looked at the menu and decided what we wanted, the woman at the counter said, "How can I help you?"

I immediately responded, "We would like a barbeque chicken pizza." The woman seemed to be ignoring me. That was when I realized that she was taking an order on the telephone, and didn't even notice me. Sachi did the rest of the talking in there from then on.

When we had finished our dinner, there was still time before the practice session, so we walked onto a bridge over the highway and watched the cars streaming below us. We soon began a game: we would straddle two lanes, and as the cars came below us, we would jump in place, pretending to step on them. It occured to both of us simultaneously that this was like DDR. Eventually, it was nearing 7:30, the time when the practice session would start. Or would it? We realized that we did not actually know when the practice sessions started.

"It's your job to ask them," Sachi insisted. "I don't like to do that kind of thing."

"If you don't like it, why don't you do it?" I asked, mixing up my words. "...er...I mean...if you like it, why do you do it...Person at nine o'clock! Let's stop jumping." As the person walked by, we simply stood there, gazing at the view. We didn't look so strange, anyway.

As we were walking towards the church where our dance classes are held, Sachi prompted me, "What are you supposed to do?"

"I'm supposed to ask Matt when the practice session starts. Let's see. What will I say..."

"I think this is the reason why I always do the talking. I don't like it, but you would probably mess it up. You have to learn to not be awkward. That will be your goal."

"To avoid awkwardness at all costs."

"Even if you have to die trying."

With that harangue still ringing in my ears, I walked confidently through the door. I then stamped my feet to shake the snow off of my shoes. It came out louder than I had expected.

"That's exactly the kind of thing I was talking about," Sachi hissed. "There's a class in there. Now they've probably heard us."

At that, I nearly bolted outside again. I caught myself, and let the door close slowly, as quietly as possible. As we walked through the hall, we heard sounds indicating that the class was indeed still in session. We found an inlet to another hall and stopped there to wait for the class to end. Suddenly, a woman found us and asked, "Are you looking for anyone?"

"No," we quickly responded, "we're just waiting for the swing dance class."

After she left, I asked Sachi, "Was that awkward?"

"It wasn't not awkward."

We decided to move because it could be awkward if our instructors were to walk by and we would ambush them from our niche and ask when the practice session starts. So we returned to the entrance area. Eventually, some people from our dance class came in, so we followed them. Yet when we reached the door to the dancing room, I was stuck.

"Go in," Sachi ordered, and naturally, I obeyed. The practice session was starting, so we didn't have to ask anyone anything. We had lots of fun, and improved our dancing skills. And we even managed to be pretty normal. Except...

"Philip! We're not trying to waltz!"

"Oh. I'm sorry."

-Philip

Awkward Silence

Today I had a concert in which I played a Vivaldi concerto for four violins, and the Vivaldi Gloria. Nineteen whole pages of Vivaldi, it was quite torturous, especially since we were accompanying the singers in the Gloria. Before it started, we were rehearsing and once we finished rehearsing the chorus and a few orchestra members took off to go get a drink of water, use the restrooms and such. The orchestra members all returned within five minutes, but the chorus was conspicuously absent, and it was five minutes past the time we were supposed to start at. However, all was going well until it started quieting down.

The problem with this was that once it got quieter less and less people wanted to speak because they were afraid of being the only one talking around them. So finally it got to the point where everyone was dead silent. It felt like hours as the orchestra and audience sat there silently in a silent stand off. We couldn't start without the chorus. We looked around at each other, trying not to burst out laughing. It was so awkward. We didn't know what to do with ourselves. It went on for a whole ten minutes of complete silence. Somewhere in the middle I whispered to one of the cellos, "We could claim we're playing John Cage's four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence." Finally, the chorus walked in and we tuned and played the piece.


Sachi

March comes in like a lion...

Rebecca just went to Washington D.C. for Close-Up, where she will have political seminars and discussions with students from all over the country, visit the Capitol Building, and things like that. All seemed to be going well, and we repeatedly checked the weather forcast for Washington to make sure Rebecca packed appropriate clothing, jackets, umbrellas, and such. She left early this morning, before I woke up.

Soon after I awoke, I turned on the TV to find that today's snow would be light, but a second snowstorm would barrel through the next day, dropping up to more than a foot of snow all across the East Coast, as far south as Alabama. I quickly checked the forecast for Washington; it predicted six to ten inches of snow overnight. This was a problem. Rebecca had not brought boots, and she would have to walk all over Washington D.C. in the snow. Boston is good at plowing the streets, but Washington probably doesn't know what to do with so much snow.  Why couldn't they have predicted this unexpected storm earlier?

My father, who is always good at finding clever solutions to problems, called me downstairs later, saying, "You know how when astronauts are having a problem in space, the people on Earth test solutions before telling the astronauts what to do?"

I did not know where this was going to go; my father often tells me about interesting science-related things. I answered, "Yes," and came downstairs.

He was wearing plastic bags around his feet. "Do you think these would work as boots?" he asked.

"Yes," I responded, quickly figuring out what this was about. "Good idea." We eventually decided to try calling Rebecca to tell her about the plastic bag idea, and we thought maybe the entire Close-Up class could do it too. After all, who would want to spend the day in the hotel room when you could see the Mall all glittering white with a fresh cover of snow?

We were eventually able to talk to Rebecca, and we told her about the plastic bag idea. I don't know what will come of it--probably nothing--but it was a fun exercise in problem solving nonetheless.

When you return, Rebecca, please feel free to share your experiences in Washington on this blog. We are excited to hear about them.

-Philip