My Pineapple fell in the Cake

My pineapple fell in the cake.

Except it wasn't a real pineapple. It was a plastic pineapple cup that we got at our cast party. And I dropped mine in the cake.

SPACE camp was almost over, the play was all done, the set had been struck, and it was cast party time. Excited people poured into a room decorated with grass skirts and flower leis and the occasional shrunken head.

At our seats there were these cool pineapple shaped cups that we were going to drink smoothies out of. When I went up to get food, I brought my pineapple with me to get some smoothie.

I was holding a plate and that pineapple and when I got to the end of the line I wanted to take a fork and knife and spoon. I kind of balanced my pineapple with my plate hand, and then, all of a sudden, my pineapple toppled over kind of and fell into the side of the cake.

Then, for some reason, I started laughing really hard. I returned to my table and laughed out "My pineapple fell in the cake!"

The person sitting across from me started laughing as well, and we were just sitting there, laughing, and nobody could figure out what was so funny.

Eventually, the cake was cut and eaten. Somebody realized there was a sort of indent on hers that was imprinted with a crisscross. I started laughing. That must have been the pineapple.

-Marianne

Amid the Mists of Lightning Beach

The rain pelted the wet, gray sand as shallow waves broke and shifted along the beach. It was a long trek from the Revere Beach station where we got out to the area of the beach where the changing rooms and restaurants were located. And it was raining. We looked out at the ocean, where the horizon of the sea merged with the rain and low clouds. Suddenly, the mist cleared enough that a ghostly piece of land jutted out near the horizon. Nobody else was on the beach; the landscape was isolated, misty, and gray.

Of course, we didn't mind. We decided that we wanted to go to the beach, and why let a little bit of rain stop us from having fun? But we couldn't help joking, as we trudged along the shore, about how ominously like the opening of some kind of horror movie the setting was.

"Mistake number one," said Derek, "deciding to go to the beach in the rain. Mistake number two: going into the water. Next thing you know, we'll be sucked in by some strange creature or there will be a portal to another land..."

Just then, I noticed the ghostly landscape across the water and said, "Maybe we could rent a boat and go there."

"That would be mistake number three!" someone shouted.

We walked on, conversing amongst ourselves, when suddenly Sachi pointed out Marena's hair. "Your hair is standing straight up!" she said, as others looked. Indeed, the hairs on the top of her head were pointed upward, as if affected by an electric field.

"Rebecca," I said, amused, "your hair is standing up too."

Then it dawned upon us: we were the only objects on a long, flat beach in the rain, and we all seemed to be electrically charged. I think you can see what I'm getting at....

"Too bad I didn't bring my collapsable metal cage," Derek joked. "Actually," said Sachi, seriously, "that would be really useful now. Don't be mocking about it." We decided to try to get closer to the buildings, away from the shore, before any lightning-related catastrophe struck. So we made our way up toward the street, and eventually managed to get into a pizzeria, and the rain eventually stopped, without any lightning strikes.

So we enjoyed the rest of the day at the beach, aside from a few minor flaws, such as trying to carry chocolate ice cream cones from the ice cream stand to our place on the beach and getting covered with dripping ice cream...but since I was spared that experience and only got a mild dripping of Italian ice, I can't complain too much. Needless to say, there is no reason to buy a cone when you can buy a cup--even when the person before you ordered a cone.

-Philip

The Sex Talk

This was a conversation I had with a few other people last night. Names are disguised for privacy.

Ellen: Yeah, the only sex talk my mother ever gave me was 'Don't have sex until after you're married, and don't use tampons.'
Sarah: So wait, does she not buy you tampons?
Ellen: I don't use tampons. Tampons are so weird.
Tim: You know, on a scale from 1 to 10, this is about a 2 on conversations guys don't want to hear.
Rhea: What's a 1?
Tim: Anything that starts with 'We need to talk'. Those are always bad conversations.
Rhea: So where does 'We need to talk about tampons' fall?
Tim: Now you're getting into negatives.


Sachi

Meet me at the Old Triangle!

I sometimes get very strange messages on my cell phone, which are evidently intended for someone else (wrong number, I suppose?). They usually have accents, and I've heard just about everything from the foreign-sounding "Alo? Alo?" to repeated messages from a man working at a delivery company begging me to give him directions to the place he's delivering to.

Today I turned on my cell phone to find six new messages, none of which were from anybody I knew. The first three or so seemed to be in a loud background with occasional children screaming, and a Russian-accented woman said something like, "Thees miessage is deerected to Natasha ----... Plees respondt immediately efter hearingk thees message...sahmone may be falsely usingk your identity..."

Then came an enthusiastic message from a girl's voice, saying, "Meet me at the Old Triangle!...it's where everyone's going...Yes, the Old Triangle, just one tree from the boat...I love you...see you there!"

Then came a few more Natasha calls, this time with a male Russian voice. I was repeating what I heard to Rebecca, accent and all, as we walked to the forest to meet Sachi for lunch. Just as I was repeating something about "your seeblingk Natanya" Rebecca said to Sachi, "Philip is listening to his phone messages."

Sachi responded, "Yes, I can tell. And he's talking to them too!"

Da, wis Rahssian eccent and all.

-Pheelp

I can see again!

So, yesterday, I went to the eye doctor. And I left my glasses there by accident. But that's not important. Anyway, the technician-person, who by the way was only a few years older than me, which felt really wierd, was testing my eyes, and she said something like "Are you enjoying your summer?" but she said it in a kind of serious, unnatural voice, so I felt like this whole conversation was a little awkward. But fortunately, since millions of people have asked my what I'm doing for the summer, I already knew how to answer, even though it's kind of complicated. So anyway, feeling foolish, I described my summer and stuff.

Then I had to wait for a long time in the examination room for the doctor to come, so I was looking at my information on the computer screen. It said things like "No abnormal medical history in the family except hypertension (paternal grandfather)." Bellow that, there was some boring stuff, and then, "Orientation norms: Patient is aware of people and surroundings. Recent and remote memory is intact. Disposition norms: Patient's mood is pleasant and sociable."

I found this kind of wierd, but at least I was glad that my awkward conversations hadn't given them the impression that I did not meet the orientation and disposition norms.

-Rebecca

Apple spinach stirfry pear!

Apparantly my previous post was written in ignorance. I have since found out that Zandra was not saying nonsense words to us, but rather speaking in a peculiar language called foodtongue. This language, which I happened to stumble upon, was invented by people at Mathcamp and has a vocabulary entirely of food words. If this isn't confusing enough, I found that it is very difficult to find out the meaning of a phrase, for instance, "Banana 'apple lobster' grass chocolate"* because one of the principles of foodtongue is that it should not be explained in any language other than foodtongue.

Fortunately, I was able to decipher some words by carefully watching a video of people speaking foodtongue with English subtitles. Now, I'm attempting to read the foodtongue dictionary, which defines all the words in foodtongue. Needless to say, this is a very difficult task. Maize green pepper apple tofu stew tongue-slice fish foodtongue.

*In my previous post I left out the word apple by mistake.

-Rebecca

That Magnificent Lunar Cake

In honor of the Apollo 11 moon landing 40 years ago, Rebecca, Philip and I decided to bake a moon cake.
Apparently Rebecca and Philip have never made a cake before. I could blame this entire cake fiasco on them, but then again it turned out pretty well, so I'd like to take a share of the blame, too. We started out with some cake mix, mixing it together. Unfortunately while I made Philip hold the egg yolk I had sifted, he was slowed down so as to miss the point at which the butter should have been taken out of the microwave, and our butter melted.

But we continued on, just as Neil Armstrong continued on by manually piloting the Apollo 11 when the autopilot was going to land them in a rocky zone. We baked the cake in two layers because the only suitable pans we could fine were very thin, but we figured this way we could frost between the layers. Next, on to the frosting! I had bought vanilla frosting mix, though I prefer chocolate, because I thought it looked more moon-like. However, we all decided we wanted chocolate, so in the entrepreneurial spirit of the astronauts, we decided to add cocoa powder to the frosting.

It worked pretty well! Although, the cake kind of came apart when we were putting it together, we frosted it enough that it looked decent. Then we decided to make craters. We accomplished this by sticking the teaspoon and tablespoon measuring spoons into the top.





































We added rays to the craters using uncooked spaghetti.

I'd be concerned if it were a regular cake, but for a moon cake, it was one magnificent lunar cake. (Of course that does not mean we can now divide the cake up for European colonization—the space treaty prohibits that, for one!)

And what cake would be complete without Neil Armstrong, the lunar module, and the American flag?


Sachi

A Washtub, of course!

I'm in a musical at a sort of theater camp - it isn't really a theater camp, but I'm in the theater program.

We were blocking a scene when the costume designer rushed in with a cell phone and gave it to the director. She picked it up, waited a second, and then said, very decisively, "A washtub."

A few more seconds passed by, and the director spoke again. "That is not what I was expecting!"

And then she hung up.

-Marianne

Banana Lobster Grass Chocolate

Or, How We Got a Free Dinner

Hello! Is anyone actually reading this? Or is everyone doing fun summer activities? Anyway, yesterday I went to MIT with Sachi, Philip and Marianne to visit our friend Zandra. We found her on a couch, sleeping. But that's later.

First, we bought Sachi some coffee. Because she hadn't slept in a very long time. As we tried to cross the street, Sachi reminded us, "I'm holding coffee. We have to remember to do everything at coffee speed."

"That sounds like it would be fast though," Philip commented.

"Okay, what about coffee-holding speed." That was better. So eventually we crossed the street at coffee holding speed, only to eventually decide to go back to the building we had just been in, in the hopes that Zandra would be in the ESP office there. After wandering around the building for a while, we found the ESP office.

"Is Zandra in there?" we asked.

"Yes, but she's sleeping," was the answer we got. We entered to find Zandra partially asleep on a couch in the room. We went out into the hall and sat down, and tried to talk to the half-asleep Zandra.

"Is that Gennie N----'s sister?" Sachi asked Zandra. (Names are removed to preserve anyonymity). "No," said sleepy Zandra. "That's Abby N----."

"Yes," said Sachi. "Gennie N----'s sister."

After a few more incoherent utterances, Zandra suddenly said, "It's Alex!"

Alex came over and talked to us. "I'm here because I had to drop off my glasses," he explained. A minute later Zandra said to Sachi, "Wait, why is he here?"

"His glasses," Sachi said. After some conversation, Alex said, "I wouldn't have recognized you from down the hall except that you said, 'It's Alex!'"

"What?" said Zandra. "Do I look so bad that you can't even recognize me?"

"No," said Alex. "I coudn't see you because I don't have my glasses."

"Oh," said Zandra. "That kind of glasses!" A little later we discovered that Zandra was creating a puzzle hunt for her friend. She was much more awake by this point. We asked if we could look at it and she said if we tested the puzzles for her, she would bring us to dinner. We consented, and got to work.

The first clues we recieved told that we had to give some kind of sacrafice. It said, "a sacrafice of any nature" and somewhere else, that the sacrifice was "heathen's choice". We spent a long time debating whether or not that meant we could give anything as a sacrifice, until eventually I decided to "call a priest" which the instructions said you could do for help. We pretended to call the priest (Zandra) and I asked, "What is a heathen?" She said "you."

This was enough, we decided that it must mean we can give anything. Instead of giving real objects, since we weren't really doing the puzzle hunt, we were supposed to write what we would give on a piece of paper and give it to Zandra. "Can we sacrifice God?" asked Sachi, loudly, as someone walked by.

So we did, and the sacrafice was accepted. Our next puzzle resulted in a code that turned out to mean "Apple lobster". We went to Zandra and said "Apple lobster", and she responded, "Banana lobster grass chocolate." We didn't know if this was important or not, so we wrote it down, while an amused Zandra smiled at the fact that we were looking for clues in her nonsense. It soon turned out that that was irrelevant and we had to use the same method to decode a different message to get our answer.

Eventually it was time for dinner, only we were late. At this point Zandra revealed to us that we were going to Junction dinner, Junction being a program for high schoolers that ESP was running. After running to the building, Zandra deposited us into a line and disapeared. When we got to the front of the line we realized why it was so urgent to get there on time; Zandra had to serve food.

-Rebecca

An Excusable Mistake, Of Course

Hi everyone! No one has posted in a while, so, with nothing else to do I thought I'd post something here. This is actually a story that happened a few months ago. (While we actually went to school!) Anyway, yeah.

I was in math class, listening to the teacher explain some concept or other of math. A student, Dan, got up from his seat and went to the front of the room where the teacher keeps a tissue box, graph paper, a stapler, etc. He reached into the tissue box and found it empty.

"Sorry," said the teacher, "we're all out."

He walked back to his seat. The person who sat behind him, Max, reached into his binder and pulled out a piece of graph paper, and gave it to Dan.

Dan looked at him strangely, then blew his nose on the paper.

"Oh," said Max. "You wanted a tissue? I thought you wanted graph paper!"

-Rebecca