My Musings

PS-Ashley Rocks!

Thursday, April 24, 2003

Insight

This entry is titled “Insight” because it will hopefully give you a small insight into what kind of a person I am. If it works out well, then I just might make a whole series of “insights,” who knows. Anyway, on with the story…

Ben’s wallet fell out of his pocket during musical practice today. I, sitting next to him, noticed this. We both play in the pit. After the song ended and Ben made no move to retrieve his wallet, I concluded that he hadn’t noticed its absence. So I got up, walked over to the spot behind Ben’s chair where the wallet had fallen, picked it up, casually stuck it in my left pocket, and sat back down. My standing, bending, and sitting must have seemed a little odd, but nobody said anything.

The rehearsal was in the orchestra room. After it ended, I was sitting around and leisurely gathering my stuff when I suddenly realized that Ben was gone already. He had hurried off to the band room to put his euphonium away because he needed to go pick up his tuxedo for the upcoming prom. Oh, shit, I thought, I need to find Ben and give him back his wallet before he leaves. I rushed out of the orchestra room and caught Ben in the hallway just as he was leaving the band room. Then I was struck with a great idea. Here’s what happened:

Boris: hey, Ben, could I borrow a dollar?
Ben: sure! Do you mind if it’s in change?
[he reaches into his pocket and starts to jingle some coins]
Boris: um, actually, could I have a bill?
Ben: why?
Boris: because you don’t have your wallet!!
[here I proudly produce Ben’s wallet. At around the same time, Ben’s investigation of his other pockets confirms that he does, in fact, not have his wallet]
Ben: dammit Boris.
[I give Ben his wallet]
Ben: thanks.
[we part]

.: posted by Boris 9:30 PM

Saturday, April 19, 2003

Lab Groups

Some of the labs we do in AP Bio are individual or two-person labs, but a lot of them require big groups of four people. When Mr. Logsdon said at the beginning of the year that we’d be allowed to pick our own groups, my first thought was to try to get in a group with Sam Weinberg. For you non-Bexley people who don’t know him, Sam is one of those guys whose immense intelligence is paralleled only by his laziness; he loves talking, explaining things to people, and just generally taking charge. For these reasons some people don’t seem to like him, but I think he’s pretty cool and I knew that our lab group would have no problems if Sam was in it, because he’d make sure everything went well.

I suppose I need to mention that I am abominably awful at doing science labs. You’d think they wouldn’t be so bad seeing as how they have step-by-step instructions that most moderately intelligent four year-olds could probably follow, but for me, complications always seem to arise and in the end the lab either fails completely or churns out pathetically wrong and nonsensical data.

My luck with lab partners has been as bad as my luck with the actual labs. Sophomore year—many of you have probably heard this story at least a thousand times already—Adam, after putting up with my incompetence all year and completing most of the labs himself, finally couldn’t take it any longer and excommunicated me from his lab group when I accidentally knocked his fruit fly gassing chamber on the floor and all of his fruit flies escaped. He went on to join Chelsea’s group and had great success there.

Last year, Andy was in my chemistry class. This might not seem significant to you until you consider the fact that starting in 7th grade, Andy and I had never been in one class together. So here it was, junior year, and finally we had the same class the same period—chemistry—and Mr. Minot was letting everybody in the class pick their own lab partners. That’s right—you could pick anybody in the class, and they’d be your lab partner! Isn’t that great? Doesn’t it just make you want to partner up with Boris, your best friend since fourth grade? Apparently not. Apparently it makes you want to partner up with Brian Moenter, somebody you’re not even remotely friends with and with whom you’ve never talked to before or since, leaving Boris to stand there and gape open-mouthed with no other choice than to wander around and wait to see who the other loser was that couldn’t find a lab partner and partner up with him. I ended up with Phillip Berg, who moved away in the middle of the year and left me utterly partnerless, at which point I became a rogue lab-doer who prayed at the beginning of every lab that some lab group would pity me enough to let me do the lab with them. Often I ended up working with Dara’s group or with Julie’s group…but never with Andy.

In fact there was only one time in the history of mankind that I ever worked with Andy on a lab. One day Brian was absent on the day of a lab. I didn’t have a partner; Andy didn’t have a partner. The situation was perfect. At last we would work together. I eagerly walked up to Andy, almost shaking with excitement, and asked him breathlessly if he wanted to be my partner. I was fully expecting him to eagerly agree—surely the fact that he had partnered up with Brian at the beginning of the year was some sort of sick accident!—so I was very surprised when his face immediately turned sour and he hesitantly stammered, “Um, sure!…yeah!…I suppose you can work with me and Megan…” making it painfully evident that he would rather have carved a replica of the Venus de Milo out of his own jawbone with a chainsaw than do a lab with me. The thing is, I approached him so quickly that in order to have gotten another lab partner without my knowing it, he must have asked Megan at least a day in advance. I swear he was doing everything he could to avoid being my lab partner. And in that instance I was the one who ended up feeling bad about it, because when the three of us tried to do the lab, it soon became apparent that three people were way too much and Megan left the group, which really sucked because I had basically kicked her out. So I finally got to work with Andy, but at the cost of feeling like a complete jerk. And we really screwed up that lab, too.

Anyway, my point is, I wanted to work with Sam. But on the day of the first lab, I was too slow in getting to him and he found another group before I ever even approached him. I groaned in frustration and was about to resign myself to whatever terrible lab fate awaited me when Amy (or perhaps it was Eleni) saved me. “Boris, do you want to be in our lab group?” she said. The group would consist of me, Ming, Eleni, and Amy. Ming I was friends with; Eleni I didn’t know very well, but she seemed okay; and Amy used to be my least favorite person alive back in elementary school, but over time my reasons for hating her eroded and grew more and more vague until finally I had to admit that she was pretty nice. I had nothing against any of the members, and also Mr. Logsdon had said that the groups were by no means set in stone—we could even have different lab groups for every lab if we felt like it—so it made sense for me to hook up with the girls. “Sure!” I said.

Several months and many labs later, I was liking my lab group a lot less than I had at first. For one thing, Amy was never there, and while I don’t resent that at all or blame her for it, doing four-person labs with only three people is not fun. It also turned out that Eleni was only slightly better at doing labs than I was, which wasn’t very good, and while Ming was fairly decent, she spent a great deal of time wrapping random objects in Parafilm. When she ran out of objects to wrap, she would just take out the Parafilm squares and stare dreamily at them while stretching them as far as she could, one square after another, kind of like a chain smoker, actually, only a lot weirder. Naturally, most of our labs were utter failures. Mr. Logsdon fortunately doesn’t dock points for messing up the procedure and/or getting really bad data, but botching the labs again and again began to get irritating.

Aside from the repeated bio lab failures, another thing that began early in the year was a “bio group” that still stands to this very day and consists of me, Marina, Julie, Ming, Lila, and Josh. The idea was that we’d get together and study biology, but in reality the bio study sessions take the cake for complete and unabashed lack of any productivity whatsoever. Our efforts to prepare for looming tests somehow bring us from biology to the following conversation in an unnaturally high frequency of cases:

“Dude, did you know that so and so [from BBYO] hooked up with so and so [also from BBYO]?”
“Really?! So and so?! With SO AND SO?!?!”
“Yeah!”
“How do you know?!”
“Because so and so [also from BBYO] told me.”
“How do you know they’re not lying?”
“Because so and so [one of the hooker-uppers] told so and so, and so and so told me.”
“[still a bit suspicious. After all, it’s so and so we’re talking about here. Ugh.] Well, if you say so…”
“It’s true! I’m not lying.”

If not that, then we either hear from Marina’s endless of stock of stories involving hot guys she fell in love with but never managed to get on, or from Julie’s endless stock of stories involving guys she never really liked all that much but still somehow always ended up making out with anyway. [Marina's comments on the above statement: “Okay, that makes me sound like I’m a dirty whore, but I'm really not."] Lately, thongs have become another popular topic for discussion. Needless to say, very little studying actually gets done and actually I think Ming got fed up and quit coming ages ago. Oddly enough, Julie is the only one who ever actually succeeds in forcing the group to do anything, but unfortunately she’s always leaving early for one reason or another—she’s got homework to do, or she has to watch Alias at 9 o’clock, or she needs to go home and study for a big biology test tomorrow—and all work ceases the moment she leaves. In short, we don’t get a lot done, but we have fun, and so a few months into the school year I became better friends with everybody in the group, most notably Josh and Lila, who are also in my 4th period bio class. They were in a lab group with Ross and Elan and it turned out that they were just as annoyed with their partners as Ming and I were with ours, so we decided to ditch our current groups and form a new lab group with the four of us. We didn’t think it’d be a big deal; after all, Mr. Logsdon allowed and even advised people to form new lab groups if they didn’t like the ones they currently had.

I don’t know if four intelligent people have ever been so wrong. Switching lab groups almost caused a riot. Probably our biggest mistake was that we didn’t inform our group members of our plans in advance; the bombshell was dropped on the same day of a new lab, so our former group members had absolutely no idea what was coming. Boy were they pissed. In effect, we forced Amy and Eleni to team up with Elan and Ross, an arrangement that apparently pleased none of them, and our move was widely regarded as the biggest scandal to ever hit AP biology. Ross went so far as fling water at Josh and make him the receiving end of a very nasty word and possibly also a very nasty gesture; Amy, meanwhile, gave Ming and me the following speech in a quiet but very bitter voice: “Boris and Ming, we just want you to know that we think what you guys did was really mean, and we’re glad that you switched groups anyway because they are a lot better than you are, and we don’t like you anymore.” Yes, those were tense times. People muttered about our daring coup behind our backs for a long time afterwards. But eventually the antipathy began to subside, and even the ditched group members got over it. Heck, Elan asks me for help with homework all the time. “Ahhhhhh I have no idea what the hell I’m supposed to do!!” is an AIM message I often receive from him late at night. Sometimes I even help Elan with bio labs, ironically enough. Usually, though, I end up getting really tired and going to sleep before Elan finishes asking me for help and then he gets mad at me.

So anyway, my point is, I’m against the movement towards “hands-on learning.” I’d rather read about an actual, useful experiment that an actual, useful scientist performed at some point than go and do one myself. Blank and pointless regurgitation of facts all the way, baby.

.: posted by Boris 11:18 AM

Monday, April 07, 2003

Keyboard Antics

My last blog entry ended with, “Put THAT in your oven and bake it, Mandy!”

To which Cherie writes: “...since Mandy is your best friend's girlfriend you might not want to be telling her to put things from you ‘in her oven.’ If I'm not making sense to you then here's the reason. ‘She's got one in the oven’ is a term that means a woman is pregnant.”

This is something I definitely did not know. What I was going for was a take on the well-known (or possibly not so well-known) phrase, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.” I had never heard of the idiom Cherie points out and, for all I know, she just made it up to make me feel stupid and is cackling gleefully as she reads this. But if that idiom really does exist (which I’m tempted to think it does), and if any of you other than Cherie ever heard of it and were therefore extremely perplexed by what I said at the end of my last blog entry, then rest assured that I was merely making a bad joke off of another idiom, not trying to impregnate Mandy.

In other news: the S on my keyboard broke today. The speed with which it did so astonished me to the fullest; having just successfully typed the word “because” whilst talking to Sarah online, I was peeved to note that the word I was now trying to type (“use” or something) was missing the letter S, and that no amount of pounding on the keyboard would get the S to appear. Frantically informing Sarah that the letter on my keyboard in between the A and the D was broken, I then tried to be all fancy by purposefully avoiding using the letter S in my speech. Have you ever tried this? It’s really hard. A while ago I heard that some people have written entire books without using the letter E, and I even found an E-less version of Poe’s “The Raven” online. (“But wait,” you’re wondering. “How could they do that when the title of the poem itself has two E’s in it?” Well, the guy cheated and changed the title of the poem to “Blackbirds.” It was actually pretty cool, with rhyme and everything.) After my adventures with dodging the letter S while talking to Sarah today, I have officially decided that whoever does this kind of stuff needs to get a life right now. As for me, I went on for a little while without using any S’s, driven by a desire to feel smart and also to impress Sarah with my amazing mastery of the English language in online conversation.

This of course backfired, because to avoid words with S in them I had to rephrase things in ridiculously long ways that made me look, in hindsight, astoundingly dumb. (To avoid “isn’t” I used “ain’t.” Aren’t I slick?) Eventually, though, I broke down and had to give up, when I hit a sentence that was so chock full of superlatives (-est endings) and plurals (which end in S) that I couldn’t find any way to worm around it. So I came up a brilliant idea—why not just use the dollar sign every time I need an S! They look the same! I guess I was still trying to impress Sarah with my creativity, because it wasn’t until much later that I finally realized I could just copy one letter S and paste it with Ctrl + V every time I needed it. Duh!

So is that what I’ve been doing this whole blog entry? Was every S that is on your screen right now at one time painstakingly pasted into Word? Of course not. My incredible powers of elegant problem solving triumphed after all. The answer was not wacky phrasing or dollar signs or paste—the answer was a broken toothpick. Yes indeedy—there’s a piece of toothpick under my S key as we speak. When my dad got home earlier today, he popped the S key off the keyboard and tried to fix it, but to no avail. That’s when I suggested getting a toothpick from the kitchen and breaking off just the right amount of it to stick under the key before putting it back on. My dad was doubtful that this would work, but after a few attempts we managed to snap off the proper size and now the key works just fine. The only problem is that it’s a little too sensitive—you don’t get that satisfying push; you barely tap the thing and it stops. The S’s do appear, though, and that’s good enough for me.

Well, that’s my exciting story for the day. I sure hope you guys all did something useful with yourselves. Once again I extend my apologies to Mandy and Sarah for my extreme stupidity.

.: posted by Boris 12:26 AM

Wednesday, April 02, 2003

Changes and Toenails

Well, I can’t really post a new entry without first explaining why I’ve neglected this blog for over a month. So here’s some background info:

Many of you share the extreme and bitter contempt in which I hold the pitifully small AIM profile character limit. There’s so much stuff I want to put in there, yet so little space. Where to stick all those odd little stories and pointless bits of garbage? One way is to make a SubProfile, but I’m scared of those things, and anyway they have too much advertising clutter. I was so desperate for more space, though, that I was about to break down and make one, but then Ashley introduced me to blogs and so I made one of those instead. That’s right—this blog was originally only supposed to be an extension of my AIM profile. How it became a place for me to post long, coherent, carefully edited, and (hopefully) amusing essays is completely beyond me. Right now, though, I think I’m going to revert back to my original intentions.

The basic reason for this change is that when I actually work hard at my blog and try to make it good, the whole thing becomes too stressful. It’s sweet that people like this blog and think it’s funny, but when my readers like it so much, I become more concerned with what they will think of an entry than with writing the entry itself. I worry so much about making an entry “good” that I make entries less often, and then I worry that I’m not updating the blog enough, and then people egg me to update more frequently, and then it all somehow becomes a stressful, futile effort to update as often as possible and at the same time amuse my readers. My point is: I can’t do it. When my goal becomes to entertain and hold readers, to get a high hit count, to get praise for my blog—in short, when my goal is to satisfy the people who come here—I end up not satisfying myself. I miss the days when I would update this blog instead of doing homework, or when I would hastily post a new entry while my parents erroneously believed I was asleep. And those days will never return if I’m always worried about making this blog “good,” because when I write for quality, it isn’t for fun.

So anyway, I’m going to try to bring back the old blog, crappiness and all. Lisa’s diary has run-ons in it that would make an English teacher puke, yet it’s still one of my favorite things to read online. It shows that you don’t have to spend days on an entry to make it worthwhile for others. I might lose readers and get less hits, but if I try to keep things going the way they were, I’ll lose the fun of having a blog.

With that issue aside, we move on…

I am periodically asked about my long fingernails. “Why are your fingernails so long, Boris?” people ask. Lately it’s been getting worse, too—now Mandy not only asks why they’re so long, but insists on my cutting them. I’m not sure why. It’s not like I scratch her with them, or hang around in public with her all that often where she would be embarrassed to be in the company of one such as I who has long nails. And even if I did hang out with her a lot in public, it wouldn’t matter, because who the heck looks at fingernails, anyway? And even if they look, who among them cares? And even if they care, who’s willing to make a point of it?

But fine. I will humor you all and explain why I don’t cut my fingernails. It’s a lot simpler than you thought—I’m lazy, and I don’t care if they’re a little on the long side. At Mandy’s urging, I do sometimes grudgingly cut them sooner than I’d like, but I get my revenge. Ohhhh, yes, I get my revenge. I get it in the form of my toenails. Because toenails, as you are all no doubt aware, grow out of your toes, and toes extend from your feet, and your feet are covered by socks, and your socks go in your shoes, AND SHOES ARE OPAQUE MUAHAHA! The point I’m getting at, of course, is that nobody can see my toenails. So here’s my secret—my toenails are LONG. Really long!! Put THAT in your oven and bake it, Mandy!