Brettia

This won’t be much of an entry…but I changed the colors a bit to get away from the default MovableType interface. Red, gray, and black seem to suit me…for now. Anyone who has followed my sites for any time period would know that I am incredibly fickle and I like to change the colors and images and GUI pretty often. I can’t ever settle with any one thing.

Nothing much has happened in the McAfee (pronounced mack-uh-fee) Affair. My dad gets annoyed when I ask him to add sites to my allow list (the ones I can visit), but I just reply that he was the one who installed it, so it’s not my fault. I actually did find a way to solve some of the problems he caused, the largest victory being that I regained my admin powers. There is no super ADMINISTRATOR password, so I booted into Safe Mode and logged in as that. I created a new administrator and then rebooted. After that all I had to do was give myself back my powers and delete the temporary admin I had created and everything was fine. Best of all, my dad doesn’t know it, so it might be weeks before he finds out…as if there was a reason to change my user to a “limited account” in the first place.

My other victory is that I found that, by pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL and killing all the processes pertaining to McAfee, I can turn off the stupid parental control blocks. So everything is better now. Except that with the thing off I get some really nasty pop-ups now and then.

I have a fear of circles and all things circular. Especially perfect circles. Like those drawn with a compass. The thing is, things I hate and things I love are circular. Here’s a brief list:
Hate -
Pencils/Pens (schoolwork)
Spiral Notebooks (more schoolwork)
Stoplights (so frustrating…)
Wal-Mart (this has nothing to do with circles (except their smilie mascot), but I threw it in anyway)
Darts (I suck at it)
Sports (not all of them, just those played with balls (heh))
Blinking Lights (there are eight on my computer/cable modem/monitor)

Love -
CDs
DVDs
Floppy Disks/Hard Drives (circular disks inside)
Doughnuts
Pie (and pi)
Other Round Foods
Soda (comes in round bottle, can, glass)
Cameras (lens)
Sharpies
And there you have it. Round things. Some good, some bad, but all somewhat terrifying. AND NO CORNERS! What does one do if there is no corner to hide in/behind? No sense of dimension or space, just one long line. It hurts to think about it.

D’heelkyeh, let’s change the subject! (My friend Jim talking there.) I read Stefi’s blog pretty frequently. Her claim of being the Anne Frank of the new generation might not be entirely true (hopefully not, when you think of page 130), but she’s a good writer. Be warned, don’t read it when a parent is in the room, because the name of her blog might set off some alarms. I assure you, most of it is quite clean. Anyway, she recently posted a list of 100 things to do with chemistry goggles in praise of her former chem. teacher, Mrs. Rosenberg (sorry I misspelled that, Stefi), who sound distinctly like my horrible science teacher, Mr. Johns. Some of the uses, like jockstrap (!) and death artwork, are mildly funny.

Okay, I wrote the accursed name: Mr. Johns. I must now relate to you the story of how he came to be accursed, and how it might have something to do with circles. I first had him in seventh grade. I was still young then, untested and untried. My teachers had been relatively nice up until that point. Seventh grade was a weird year because I had Johnsie for social studies and English and another teacher for science and math.

Johnsie was…weird from the start. The difference between the beginning and now, however, is that he actually liked me then. I was a good student (and still am, most of the time), and he liked to pick me for questions and crud. It began to get very boring very fast: the repetitive lessons were hard to bear. I slacked off a bit at the end of the year, but he didn’t seem to notice. I finished social studies in December with 121% and English in May with 114%. An easy class.

Last year, in eighth grade, I got to “look forward” to having Johnsie for one of my second semester blocks. (In my school district, middle schools have six periods instead of eight: math, English, elective (changes semesterly), Science/Social Studies (one semester of each), lunch, and co-curricular (recess).) That was a bad time.

First, we (the class) did a lot of really pointless scientific methods. We learned the format and process of writing one, yes, but we knew the results before we even did our experiments because he had already demonstrated the outcome to us. There was no excitement whatsoever.

Second, he assumed we were prepared to spend great quantities of money on four science projects. (We weren’t.) The first project wasn’t so bad. A simple egg drop. About five bucks each. The second, though, could become very pricey. This was a catapult/trebuchet. Some made theirs out of PVC (not exactly cheap), some out of scrap wood, and some seemed to have had theirs fabricated in a factory or something, the quality of workmanship and parts was so great. I, on the other hand, did an alternative assignment to escape the expenses. I think the median value of the catapults had to be somewhere around $30-$50, though. Quite a lot for a school project.

The third project was a bridge designed to hold as much weight as possible while remaining within set dimensions and truss weight restrictions. Mine was balsa wood, quite inexpensive, and did pretty well, holding 25 pounds before collapsing in a heap. Some kids, though, managed to make bridges of steel or erector set and still remain under the weight limit, and they were able to do better than my wood could. I am still of the opinion that the contest should have been the highest weight held/bridge weight ratio, since I went to great lengths to make mine as light as possible and had to sacrifice strength. This was even what was said in our instructional packets. The median price for the bridges was $10-$15.

The final project was our “science fair” project. Since we only had eleven days and very limited equipment, most projects were pretty rudimentary. My group’s cost around $20. One of my friends, though, did a complex experiment with dry ice and liquid nitrogen, among other coolants, and used laboratory equipment and computer analysis software as well. His dad had had this stuff before his project, but to purchase it all at once would have run into the hundreds or perhaps thousands of dollars. This was only one of the problems we had with him: the rest are numerous and some are quite funny.

During our co-curricular, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, we have to do SSR (sustained silent reading), which was a program introduced schoolwide by Johnsie himself to the groans and moans of students and teachers alike. My friend Dylan was fed up with SSR by the end of the year (like the rest of us) so he decided one day to just not read. This didn’t turn out well, as you might have already inferred. He made some pretty good wisecracks to get Johnsie mad and then walked out of the classroom to the office. The funny part came when Johnsie called Dylan’s parents from the phone in the classroom and left a message. It was lengthy and full of lies and exaggerations about what had happened, and Johnsie finished as we all were leaving for our next block.

Knowing we were Dylan’s friends, Mr. Johns called Tyler, Jim and I over to his desk before we left and asked distinctly, “Does Dylan have any problems at home?”
The pure sincerity and tone of the question almost set me to laughing right then; Tyler and Jim seemed equally stunned. We told the truth, that Dylan was a good kid and didn’t have any problems that we knew of. The next day, at lunch, we told Dylan about what had happened. He said that Johnsie called the wrong number, his parents’ old cell phone rather than their new one. They never even got the message! We chuckled at that one for a long while and acted out scenes of Mr. Johns calling a Buddhist temple in the Himalayas or an AT&T never-ending voice-prompt system and trying to tell them about the “horrible hoodlum” who had refused to read.

I have one other story of Johnsie to share tonight, though there are many more. It is widely speculated among 8th graders that Mr. Johns is gay. Yeah, I know, it’s immature and probably not true, however likely, but we amuse ourselves with the idea anyway. It doesn’t help that he wears tight (I mean really TIGHT) black jeans and a pink shirt. Nor does it help that he enjoys standing right in front of your desk when you’ve laid your head down so that you look directly at his crotch when you wake up. Talk about shockingly horrifying.

It was a typical boring day in science class when this incident happened. We had a substitute, and we were working on model bridges. I went to one of his desk drawers for a pair of scissors, opened it, and found…a pair of pink plastic handcuffs with red hearts that said “Take me I’m yours!” all over them. First, you should know the slang definition of “take” in our school. I won’t write it, since it’s really wrong, but know that it has sexual implications. So I find this…atrocity and drop it quickly, not wanting to know its usage. I ended up telling (and showing) all my friends. They were shocked as well.

So now you see why there is such hatred toward Johnsie in the 8th grade at Sonoran Trails Middle School. Being the lucky duck that I am, I don’t have to go there anymore. But these stories are only the tip of the iceberg…