Who knew coming up with strangely cryptic and illogical but nice-sounding post titles was so much fun!?

Okay, this break in storytelling is mainly brought to you by generic summer laziness, as well as possibly a tiny bit of chemotherapy adverse effect. There is only a little perfectionism involved, and that’s because this post contains a long awkward situation (you might have guessed already). I guess this is what it feels like to have oodles of stuff to blog about, but not enough motivation. Heck, these few days with running the TAIMC have long filled my list of rant topics with juicy stories until it’s near-bursting. But I need to end this self-pity party before I get carried away, so… back to the action.

Stranded in a foreign country at least 20 degrees Celsius below our comfort zone, having worn the same clothes for 36 hours of airplane travel, and still with less than 48 hours until the contest and zero out of six compasses, we were running out of options.

A quick inventory of clothes showed that, after including the vests and caps in the backpacks we got, we probably had just enough clothes to survive the cruel frigid environment. So, reluctantly, we left the games room and hit the street to hunt down some underwear and socks to change into. Not to mention toothbrushes and some T-shirts and jackets for good measure, because the inside of the hotel was not the right temperature for full cold-resistance gear.

Some haphazard wandering up and down the streets later, we found a store that suited our needs and picked up some clothes. The underwear came in two sizes: too loose and too tight. We picked the latter. Oh well, it would only be for a day or so… right?

Wait, are you serious? Under two weeks left, is that what it’s come to?

What happened to my majestic plans to go over every functional equation I failed on, ever? Or to go through a super-intense geometry-immersion period and actually try to develop some of that crazy “intuition” thing? And I have finals coming up too! I just finished a ludicrous deadline-extended geography project that I am absolutely confident is the crappiest paper of my entire school career so far! And despite a semester of (slacking) classes, my Spanish is still only barely at a usable level! Exclamation marks!

Don’t panic… let’s focus on the positive. I am absolutely prepared with my stationery. I bought three spanking new 0.4mm pens that say “Can write for 1000 meters!” because all of my current ones are annoyingly thick and constantly having almost-but-not-quite run out, plus three new mechanical pencils and enough matching 2B lead to last me through college. All the pencils and lead are Pentel. I haven’t done any research, so if something terrible happens in Argentina I know what company to blame, and I am writing it here so I won’t confuse the brands. Also, in view of what happened to SCH’s carry-on baggage last year (luckily there was no geo on Day 1), I got an extra compass I hope won’t be needed.

While we’re listing all the stuff I have gotten ready:

Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha look at all the services

ahem

So, if you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last decade, Twitter is a platform for microblogging, i.e. blogging with very short posts, called tweets, which have to be under 140 characters after they shorten all the links for you for no reason, often after you’ve already shortened it once somehow-or-other. And yes, I hopped onto the bandwagon during procrastination. Everybody who matters on the technological edges of the internet seems to have one.

I’m not arrogant enough to imagine I could compare Twitter to anything else authoritatively… I only barely count myself as using it. But a brief set of first impressions should be okay. Twitter is very public: you can see everybody’s tweets, who everybody is following, and who everybody is being followed by; the single privacy setting is a simple binary choice to lock up your account, so that everybody who wants to see what you posted needs your explicit authorization.

My Facebook feed consists of entries such as:

• photographs of people I barely recognize, which I scroll past quickly… unless my mom comes up and says “Who is that?” and spends ten minutes looking at more such photos while asking me questions like “How do you go to the next picture?” or “Why is this photo so blurry?”
• context-less fragments of some larger conversation, e.g. “LOL!” or “linglinglinggg” (copied verbatim from a status)
• alerts of J. Random Person having taken a Personality Test or scored too many lines in Tetris
• Meta-Facebook infographics, like a cloud of your closest friends or number of status posts. I tend to… have an extraordinarily negative impression of the type of narcissistic achievement-reliant… people… who need rewards at every step, except that they seem to be everybody… *sigh
  

Somehow my cousin deleted the Eragon game from his PSP. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted. Current project: get that secretary-problem paper done. It looks much nicer now, due to the references and big bold titles.

Now and then I find myself lapsing into a bunch of 42-related questions. The most recent occurrence was the day before yesterday, and I decided that the meaning of life is to find your meaning of life. Since that would tautologically entail that I had already completed my meaning of life, I decided to reject it, even though it has a pretty nice ring to it. Some goals:

I’m reconsidering. It’s not that boring. LOLZ. There it goes again.

Particulars… well, I got to play my cousin’s PSP. It was an instant like the instant when I saw the Krusty Kreme shop during our visit to Indonesia (shoot, my mouth is watering again), I found a very interesting game logo. A shining blue lowercase E. Most people would think of the Internet Explorer logo. But obviously, Microsoft is probably not affiliated with Nintendo or whatever company made PSPs; even then you can’t play Internet Explorer.

I have a life and I still don’t know what to do with it. I like making powerpoints, programming, typing tests, made-up hyperbolic IQ tests, Gmail, and odd things.

All that animation has gone to my nerves. And Bookworm Adventures pining. Best word so far: VORACIOUS, which earned me a blue gem tile, which froze somebody. I want to design games for PopCap too, because then I get to play the ones they already have for free.

Lolcode:

Yesterday I got to sit and vegetate on a bus for a total of four hours. My MP4 was already getting boring. In fact the time spent at the math lesson was less than that. Luckily the bus home had a TV that kind of worked, and showed a replay of the show that self-translates as “One Million Star”. I only watched a bit. The rest was highly tumultuous slumber. Dinner was spaghetti, which helped.

Yesterday I got persuaded by my mom to seriously use the LearnToSpeak Spanish CD we bought. I say “Hasta luego” into the mic and it says I selected “Estoy bien”. Still, the vocabulary it selects are far better than the ones I selected haphazardly. ¿Qué quiere decir “…”? Well, I’m stopping the finding of new vocabulary in Spanish madly.

Today I lost my Kitchen Midden rubric by clipping it into the questionnaires. I wasn’t sure until I found it there. I flipped through the questionnaires and found it in ten seconds. Wooooo! WHAT ARE THE ODDS? Luck.

Hooray! Something I ate today cured my cold! Well, they assuaged it for today at least. Perhaps by dinner I’ll be coughing like a donkey with terminal asthma again.

Okay, enough with horrible similes. Luckily or not, in P.E. class we didn’t do the lethal 100m dash timing. Instead we practiced jumping. Hooray! It’s not as exerting.