Spring break

Truthfully, I didn't need spring break last week. I need spring break NOW. Yeah, that sounds silly, but I've found life to be so much more stressful/pressing/in need of a break this week rather than last week. Normally breaks come at the right time, but last week I actually didn't want to leave campus. Right now, I'm counting the hours until after my orchestra concert when I go home.

Times like these when I need a break make me so grateful that I live close and have the option of escaping the IMSA campus every so often to regroup myself and eat some actual, non-cardboardy food.



AND, I'd like to close with the greatest quote ever....

"They are trained to fly at you out of the sun just like military pilots."
-Bondi (on the geese at IMSA)

Problem Sets

So Mr. Sea got the shock of his life today when he discovered that (believe it or not) many people copy Problem Sets. Aha.

There was a random problem about a missile launch on our last problem set that was actually quite easy but that everyone was missing. The Math Team calculated statistics, and over 80% of MI4 got it wrong.

The best part? 60% of my specific MI4 class, he tells us, had the EXACT same work (and the work didn't even make sense) and the EXACT same answer. Now he's threatening to go through our problem sets after the graders do, to make sure the work actually makes sense and to make sure we're not just copying.

Moral of the Story: Don't copy something that SIXTY PERCENT of your class is copying with you.

April Fool's Day (again)

Well, Shelly and I wanted to do something to Ankita and Sharada. So we convinced the RC to let us into their room and turn everything upside down. So now they will have to turn everything over (including every single picture, the ENORMOUS lord of the rings poster, and even everything in their bathroom). It was fun. and I will be putting the pictures up on Facebook. :)

April Fools!

my room mate (ryan walach, for those of you who don't know...) woke me up this morning stringing twine through our room, swapping my clothing with our shower curtain, pinning my shoes to the ceiling among other things.

4:30am. I didn't know anyone was that into April fools day. anyways, when he left the room to tie my door to the door across the hall (this is a funny one for those of you looking to 'get' someone...), i decided to take it down and give him a taste of his own medicine.

five minutes later, everything was down and returned to its rightful place. i have never been a big 'prankster', but i figured i would give it a shot.

i took all of his left shoes and hid them within my room. this didn't work out so well. he found them right away, from what i am told.

i bike-locked andrew ericson's right shoes to ryan's laundry basket and to our shower (note: handicapped room showers are perfect for securing things!). this was kind of funny, no real purpose. i guess it prevented him from showering.

but, in preparation for his shower later in the day, i put some crunched up sweet tarts in our shower head. i once read this prank in a book called 'unclogging the truth about bathrooms, and it was supposed to leave the prankee with a nice sugar coating after his/her shower. it didnt work.

so, im 0 for 3 so far, but im not giving up!

fun fact:

Smokey the Bear (the actual bear, not the icon) was so popular in the 1950's that he got his own zip code.
He died in 1978.

YouTube video

If anybody likes Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or indie rock in general, look at this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtv3fSbuKvc. I found it very amusing at 12:00 last night. It's a video of the band playing The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth (an AMAZING song), while a fan dances/head bangs/jumps up and down rather enthusiastically.

fun facts

my 7:30 BC2 class seemed like it went on forever this morning.
on average, 121 people visit this blog for 6 min and 56 seconds.
23.7% of views are from MacOSX compared to 70.1% windows.
83% of viewers use firefox.
100% of users have english set as their computer language.

some things are hard to tell your parents

Like that sleeping in until 5 PM wasn't actually because I was tired. It's just that there's no possible way to make me go to church after 5 PM, because all the churches in a 50-mile radius are done by 5 PM. But how do you tell both your very Catholic parents that you don't really think this God fellow is such a nice guy anymore?
It's not a giant hatred of religion or anything. I have nothing against other people being religious, but I'm kind of tired of this entire "our-religion-is-the-only-way-to eternal-salvation" thing. It seems like most religions have no trouble with the fact that everyone who isn't going to their services and drinking the metaphorical Kool-Aid is going to die and immediately be sent to hell. I don't really think that's how the afterlife should work, if there is one.

Krispy Kreme donuts now advertise that they have 0 grams of trans fats. I don't see the point.

Hello World

So I discovered this blog through Kevin's status on Google Talk, read a few posts, and thought "hmm...this is something I might want to get involved with." So I e-mailed Kevin and he added me to the author list. Then I realized that I don't have anythingto talk about.

I could talk about my Spring break in Cali and the colleges I visited there (Caltech, Stanford, and Harvey Mudd), but I don't know how interesting that would be to people.

Let's take a look at my Twitter status:
ilyanep 4 hours until I leave for terra firma. less than 10 seconds ago from im

(Quick aside: I highly encourage you to get a Twitter. It's a service where you can send status updates up to 140 characters, something called "micro-blogging." You can then "follow" other twitterers and set it up so that it sends you a text message or an IM every time someone you follow sends an update. Or you can update over SMS and IM. The place where Twitter shines is that you can put "@username" at the beginning of a post to reply to their current status and it notifies that user. This can be useful for just talking in general, or even making plans. By the way, my updates are protected so you'd need to get an account and ask me or request on the site to follow me to see them. Okay I'm done...I promise...)

After a week in Cali at my dad's cousin's house near LA, I've decided that IMSA is my terra firma.

So hopefully I'll actually have something to talk about in the future. I'm going to try to keep from ranting on here (I have strong opinions on a lot of things), but I apologize in advance if I can't help myself at some point.

Seek the Joy of Beng Alive

A couple weeks ago, I saw the movie "Into the Wild." It reminded me of all the reasons why I like the wilderness so much. For those of you who don't know, I spend most of my summer in Northern Minnesota/Canada canoing and having fun in the middle of the wilderness at a camp. For me, the wilderness is an escape. It's where I can go to be "free" in a really philosophical sense, and that's why I like the film "Into the Wild" so much. The film's protagonist leaves civilization to go into the wild in Alaska, kind of like how I leave civilization for camp every summer (except I don't die).

Camp and the wilderness in general has always been a huge part of my life. For vacations, my parents would take me and my brother to places like Olympic National Park and the Rocky Mountains instead of Disneyland and all the places we actually wanted to go to. Now, I realize how much I love the wilderness. That's why IMSA can be so difficult. Going to school in a wanna-be 70s bomb shelter isn't exactly my idea of being in touch with nature. So, I have to figure out ways to connect my life at school with camp and the wilderness. I'm starting to find a way to do this. At camp, there is a code called the Law of the Woods. I have found that I can incorporate this into my daily life, and in the process can feel more peaceful and connected to the wilderness.

Of the 12 Laws of the Woods, the last one is the one I find the most important for my life at IMSA. It says "Seek the joy of being alive." Now, seeking the joy of being alive is kind of hard to do when I have Victory summatives, MCB tests, and Student Council elections to worry about. But then I have to stop, think, and realize the little things that make me happy and the fact that being at IMSA makes me appreciate the wilderness even more.

I'm sure that some of my future posts will be devoted to camp stories, but if anyone has questions about my camp/ wilderness stuff, I love to talk about those things as many of you know :).

Son of a Bitch...

was the first thing I said as I did a double take at my megabus ticket. Departure Time: 8:30 a.m. -- time displayed on my phone 8:38 a.m. ... great. You've got to be fucking kidding me (apparently repeat this like 10 times according to Matt). At this point, it is obvious that I assumed the bus was leaving at 9:00 a.m.; presuming that this bus would leave at the same time as the one that I took to St. Louis did. As soon as the MetroLink hit the Union Station stop Matt and I legged it. No sleep, soccer game the day before, and asthma made that a fun run, not to mention the nice weighted bag hanging off of my shoulder. As we approached the drop-off/pick-up area we thought we saw the megabus still there, only to be dissapointed to find out it was some other company. The worst part is it was only 8:44 a.m., and the first bus I took over to St. Louis left 15 minutes late. No such luck.

I have no way to cleverly phrase things at the moment. This is really a dead entry.