Posters...kinda.

I'm a member of LitMag (our school's literary magazine). Not just a member, but the student editor! Ooohh, ahhh...although I don't really do anything more than I have for the past 3 years as a member. However, I did get to make some awesome posters advertising the best school club ever! That being LitMag, in case it wasn't clear. Anyway, we put these crazy posters around the building and nobody seems to notice, although I did hear one girl say "That squirrel spider thing was weird, who would make that?" It made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

A couple days later, one of my teachers pulls me aside after class and asks me if everything is okay. I ask why, and they say that they saw my posters and thought I might be under some sort of emotional distress. What?!? They're not like cries for help or anything, they're just weird posters I made to get attention! I ended up seeing my school counselor about it. Again. I end up seeing her a lot for random reasons.

So, there wasn't really a point to this post, I was just bored. The end!

Doors, windows, and maniac squirrels

People in my school seem to have a real problem with opening doors. Its amazing to show up in the morning and watch 3,000 kids attempt to pile through one open door when there are 3 other closed ones right next to it. Same thing in between classes too, it takes like 2 minutes to walk down one hallway because there's only one door open at the end of it. How hard can it be to open a door, people? Whatever, I can't get started on this or I'll end up ranting about how much the human race sucks. I do that too much...

So I was sitting in Journalism class and had a flashback! Those are always fun. Note: Journalism is divided into 3 1/2 hour segments, the middle one being our lunch period. Just one example of how the schedule in our school doesn't make any sense. Anyway...

This one time everyone left Journalism for lunch and our teacher decided to leave the windows open in the room. You see, the weather was really nice, and the smell of moldy crackers in the room was not. Hopefully something wonderfully magical would happen and the smell would dissipate by the time we got back. And everyone knows wonderfully magical things don't happen when windows are closed. Duh.

So after lunch ended, I made my usual mad dash back to the Journalism room (on the opposite end of the school from the cafeteria) and managed to get back at about the same time as the teacher. He opens the door, we walk in, and this one girl that was with us starts screaming for seemingly no reason. "What's wrong?" asks the teacher in a slight panic, and the girl screams: "A SQUIRREL IS EATING MY BOOKBAG!" And sure enough, there was a squirrel sitting on her desk, nonchalantly chewing her bag straps off.

Now, I don't remember exactly what happened next, but I do remember that the result involved 5 desks, 2 bookshelves and 1 student collapsing, along with the destruction of once-perfectly functioning curtains. As more students slowly filed into the room, everyone kept saying the same thing ("What the ****?") followed by referrals for the use of poor language in class. Ahh, that was a fun 4 minutes of my life.

The moral of this story? Open doors, not windows! Or maybe the moral is just that squirrels are hilarious. Either way works, I guess.

On Dinosaurs and Pokemon: a short entry

Today I read a friend's status on facebook discussing how cavemen killed dinosaurs with bows and arrows. Now, I don't mean to be picky, but the latest living dinosaur was 65 million BC, and the earliest living humanoid was 7 million BC. Therefore, he is WRONG. Not to mention bows and arrows were used by Native Americans, not cavemen. Plus, I highly doubt these ferocious predators would lose to a bunch of monkies who can't even tie their own nonexistant shoes. I mean, come on, even if you tried to pass that statement off as creativity you'd fail. Cavemen even standing a chance against dinosaurs is complete fantasy. Pirates, on the other hand...

Anyway, I recently started a new file on Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team for GBA. I love this game! Its so much fun, although most people seem to think its just an abomination. These people, however, probably never even played through it twice. Pssh, what losers. Sure, the dialogue is a bit infantile, and the plot leaves a lot to be desired, but for a game designed for 10-year-olds it rocks on a general basis. Its like Legend of Zelda with Pokemon! Or maybe not so much. The point is that this is my 5th play through, and this time my all-star team is a Meowth and a Squirtle (which means I'll probably be mutilated on the forest levels). Although I just started, I already know Squirtle will be my favorite partner out of all 5 play throughs. He's just so damn cool!The only way he could be cooler is if he had a pair of sweet shades.

^ so cool ^

I wish I had a brigade of turtles who fought fires and wore cool shades like them there guys. Then I'd be the coolest kid in town! Or maybe just the coolest kid in my house. My house with 1 kid in it...nevermind, I don't wish that at all. (YES I DO!)

So, uhh...zee you necks dime!

Ethology

I absolutely adore animals, although I only have 2 pets myself, a gerbil and a cat. Salisbury Steak and Sprite Stenzel, respectively, although they are not named after food. Sprite was a stray we picked up while moving to our new house (when I was 5 or so), named for her elusive nature: a sprite being either 1) a small or elusive supernatural being, or 2) a large, dim, red flash that appears above active thunderstorms in conjunction with lightning. She was aptly named for eluding the disasters that befell every other cat in the Stenzel household. The last of her kind...

Salisbury Steak is another story. I had to purchase a subject to experiment on for an AP Biology ethology project. Ethology, as you may or may not know, is the scientific study of behavior in (living) organisms. Every year at our school the AP & IB Biology students have a major ethology project in late May / early June, as sort of a last hurrah after the major bio exam. In order to perform their experiments, they need some sort of living organism (obviously) that the school doesn't provide (obviously) and that they have to take care of once the experiment is done (obviously). They also have to keep their "subjects" in the school's science lab until the experiments are done, which I consider rather unfair to the poor li'l critters. But I digress.

Anyway, I decided to BS my project because I was lazy and had senioritis (going on 3 years). So I purchased a box of Dixie paper cups and decided to record what a hamster did with them. Probably the worst project in school history, with no set time frame or control groups or anything. What will a hamster do with cups? Ooh, how exciting! I dragged my parents out to Petsmart (the Pet Smart Pets Mart) and moseyed on over to the 'small rodent' cage to pick out some random hamster.

And there he was. Not a hamster, but a tiny little gerbil staring up at me with his puny paws up against the glass. "Take me home?" his big watery eyes begged, and I was helpless to refuse. Within mere seconds I was the owner of a baby bundle of panic and mayhem. But how was I to know his evil ways? He was just so adorable! So I took the little guy home, set him up in a fish tank (not full of water, I'm not that insane), and set on the impossible task of naming him.

Skip the migraines, trashed notebooks, and 8 days, I ended up picking Salisbury: the city 13 kilometers south of Stonehenge. Or the capitol of Zimbabwe. Either way worked, really. I bring him to class, excited and proud to have picked out such an exotic name. My friend Jeff asks what his name is. "Salisbury!" I declare proudly.

"Oh, you mean like the steak?"

And suddenly my whole world crumbled. Everyone I showed Sal off to asked the same thing, over and over. And no matter how much I denied it, there was no shaking that extra "Steak" from his name. So now I had a gerbil not named after a mystical and mysterious construction of giant stones, or the exotic capitol of a far off land, but a common food item. Crap.

My only option was to twist the words around: 'Salisbury Steak' became 'Salisbury is not a Steak', then 'Salisbury likes to eat Steak', and my favorite, 'Salisbury would totally win in a fight against Steak'. Finally a name set: 'Salisbury, not like the Steak'. Despite this small victory over his oppressors, 'not like the' slowly diminished away until just 'Salisbury Steak' was left. And, well, it stuck.

So there you have it: the story of how my gerbil got his name. The actual ethology project is a whole other (incredibly long and painful) story altogether...maybe that will be related later on.

Mubber's Day

I don't remember when or where this happened, but a while back some kid wished me a Happy Mubber's Day. When I inquired as to what a 'mubber' was, he merely replied "Why, one who mubs, of course." I gave him a quizzical glance, so he added: "Well, you're the mubbiest person I know!"

This confused me, to say the least. Was this 'mub' a verb or an adjective? It couldn't be similar to 'bread' or 'pickle' (you can have a pickle/piece of bread or you can pickle/bread something) since 'mub' was used as a verb and an adjective instead of a verb and a noun. It also couldn't work similarly to 'smile' (smiling or to smile). It could have worked if instead he had said something such as "you're the most mubbing person I know", but the "mubbiest"? No way, Josie.

Maybe 'mub' worked in congruence with 'wet' (the wettest or to wet) but it didn't seem to work out well, considering that being the wettest involves being wet instead of wetting others. However, since 'wet' seems to be the closest living relative to 'mub', I'm forced to go with that conclusion. Maybe this individual was actually wishing himself a Happy Mubber's Day, and I was an unfortunate victim of a mubbing.

Or maybe 'mub' is just 'bum' backwards.