Brettia

It rained today. Hard. It seems that rainy days always bring on heated discussions between Jim and I on the subject of school food. Here’s my opinion. (This may end up as a rant, so I apologize in advance.)

First of all, it’s hard to consider the food served at my high school as actual ‘food.’ Take the pizza, for example. I have had a boycott on school pizza since sixth grade, when I somehow ingested a mushy piece of the french bread variety and ended up with a high fever (102 degrees) and serious nausea. I blame the pizza because I can, and because I want a reason to hate it, other than the horrible taste. Jim put it best:
What they do is take a piece of rancid, old, fit-to-be-used-as-leather cheese and barf all over it, place that on a slice of white bread, freeze and thaw it not once but four times, and serve it lukewarm and mushy on a styrofoam tray probably made up of the same ingredients as the pizza.
– Jim Grant
Yup, that’s about it. Cafeteria pizza is almost always served as an option along with the regular entrees, except on Mondays when the cafeteria orders it from a local restaurant for $5 per large, cheese pizza and swindles us students by marking it up to $2.00/slice or $3.50 for two slices. That’s both outrageous and wrong. Five dollars per pizza amounts to fifty cents a slice, assuming that the pizza has ten slices. The company who runs the cafeteria could easily profit by selling the pizza for $1/slice, but no, they have to price it at a level four times higher than it should be. Some students just order a pizza themselves and have it delivered to the school to save money. (The same pizza that the cafeteria gets is $8 without the school discount that the restaurant gives the cafeteria.)

And if you think those prices are blasphemous, at Sonoran Trails, which, like the other schools in the district, has its cafeteria managed by the same company, We were once charged four whole dollars for ONE slice of pizza. They weren’t even big slices! And even worse, kids actually bought it, because they had to if they wanted to eat. The only other option was to brave the snack bar, which was always plagued by insanely long lines and lots of “straight” jerk children who liked to hump your backpack.

Now, for the piece de resistance (spl?). A year or so ago, my family and the family of my mother’s friend all stayed three days, two nights at the Scottsdale Princess hotel, a fancy resort/waterpark where we had a timeshare thing availalbe. Sure, it’s only ten miles away, but it was still fun. Anyway, my mom’s friend who used to work with her, Laura, was laying out by the pool and decided to order a cheeseburger from the hotel restaurant that doubled as a bar to serve the pool area.

I saw the tell-tale silver and blue wrapper and knew what was coming. Yes, this was a hamburger from the same company that runs the cafeteria at Cactus Shadows. This famous burger has been found on various occasions with green cheese on it, a piece of blue plastic tucked inside, and, once or twice, a bit of charred bacon under the bun. I still end up eating it (I actually prefer it to the pizza), but I know it’s bad for me.

So, Laura bites into her “burger” hungrily while I watch from behind, chuckling. She almost seems to choke, and then she swallows forcibly to get it down. She didn’t vomit it back out, but let’s just say that was about the only bite she took.

This poses a question: if adults hate the cafeteria food as much as the kids do, then why are we still forced to eat it? And not only that, but why must we pay a full $2.00 per day to eat such garbage? In Utah, lunches were $1.25 and you actually got something that was both nutritious and tasty, qualities of which CSHS’s cafeteria food possesses neither. Furthermore, why do they grade kids by their performance in PE (rather than effort, as it should be) when they feed them such crap that it is impossible for them to ever get a good grade?

I’m not trying to blame my out-of-shape-ness entirely on the cafeteria food, but I can only imagine how much healthier I’d be were I able to eat a good lunch everyday instead of somethng that barely even amounts to grease-injected fast food.

I apologize for leaving you hanging on Monday. Here’s what happened since:
A first draft for an English project was due Thursday, and I lazed about, not starting on it until Tuesday afternoon. After about a page and a half of writing (it’s a creative story project), I got the bright idea of installing Fedora Core 2, Test 2 while I worked. I got the ISO images downloaded in a brisk two hours (awesome speed for two gigabytes of data) via BitTorrent, and I burned them to CDs, all while writing my story, which had grown to two single-spaced pages.

When the ISOs were done, I took a break from writing to repartition my hard drive. Not exactly most people’s idea of a break, but it had to be done. A few clicks in PartitionMagic 8, and it was done, ready to be applied. I clicked the Apply button (having already saved my draft and uploaded to this webserver for safekeeping while I installed) and waited ten minutes for the restart to take place. (My computer takes forever to shutdown, for some reason, though I’ve tweaked it to be pretty quick in starting up.)

Once it had rebooted, the PartitionMagic batch file (put simply, just a program that does stuff) ran and made the changes that were needed to install Linux and Windows on the same computer. For some this can be problematic, but I’ve never had an issue, until now. Once PartitionMagic was done the system rebooted again, and I inserted my Fedora installation disc into the drive. Anaconda (the Fedora installer) booted and ran fine, and I made my choices as to configuration options and packages without a hitch. Two hours later, all packages were installed, and the system rebooted.

Rather than go to Windows to make sure it was still fine, I excitedly booted into Linux to check out the changes made in Fedora Core 2, Test 2, which uses the new Linux kernel, version 2.6, that was recently released about a month or two ago. Compared to version 2.4, 2.6 is supposedly faster and more stable, with new features like the ALSA sound subsystem. Finding everything to my liking in Fedora Core 2 (though I couldn’t print), I rebooted, and selected the Windows option.

Uh oh. About thirty seconds in, I get error messages saying that xmnt2002.exe and AUTOCHK could not be found, and this results in a stop error and system halt. Windows is now inaccessible.

At this point (sometime around 10:30 PM), I panicked, desperately trying to print my story so that I could work on it during school on Wednesday. Remember, I couldn’t print in Fedora, though I could access the document because I had saved it to my webserver. Defeated, I went to bed with the thought that I would fix it in the morning.

Morning came, and nothing was fixed, except I somehow got Fedora to print the story for me. I still was afraid at this point that Windows is gone forever, and since I can only edit the document in Word 2000, I stayed after school and typed most of the rest of it in Trapani’s lab. Thank god for that, because I’d have been dead otherwise.

With a solid five-page (single-spaced) draft now taken care of, I went home and worked on fixing the problem. Through using the Internet in Fedora I found PowerQuest’s support page (PQ makes PartitionMagic) and was able to download a clean up utility and burn it to a CD. Using the PartitionMagic recovery CD, I ran the utility, and guess what? It worked! (Now is when I dance around the room, shouting for joy.)

It turns out that the only reason Windows wasn’t booting was that for some reason PartitionMagic didn’t mark that it was finished with its changes when they were finished, so it kept trying to reexecute the batch file every time I booted Windows. The batch file had already been deleted by the program earlier, and this caused the stop error. The fix utility told Windows that PartitionMagic was done and did not need to be run any more, thus allowing me to boot.

Though that could easily have been much worse of a problem, I stand by my proclamation about a year ago that PartitionMagic is the single best partitioning utility out there. So don’t forsake it just because you read this; it’s still a great program.

Wednesday night I finished my story, which ended up being a grand total of 14 double-spaced pages at 10pt font, though the limit is 10 pages. Oops. Hopefully Kulinski will forgive me, though if she won’t, I can always set the page margins to 0.25 so that it will all fit. She’ll learn to not put limits on any more papers if she has to read 10,000 words at 6pt font. Then again, she could also just hand it back to me with a big zero on the front, but what can I do? There’s no way to shorten it. And I use a lot of dialogue, so hopefully she’ll see that. There will be no describing my extreme anger if I get a zero on that paper after all the stress I went through just to get the first draft in.

Otherwise, this week was pretty uneventful. I should tell you, though, of a new student teacher who rivals the infamous Mr. Johns in intolerability: Mr. Musselman. Or, as I like to think of him, Mussolini. Interesting that he was called in to lecture on World War II with a name so closely resembling that of an Italian dictator. Though I suppose he really isn’t a dictator, just boring.

I should begin from the beginning: Mr. Fogelson, my normal, cool social studies teacher (in comparison to Mussolini, at least) is not dead or gone; he just was given the charge of helping to train a student teacher mainly because he is a new teacher himself. (Supposedly new teachers get poor treatment compared to long-time employees.)

My computer just rebooted abruptly. Luckily, I had just pulsed my 8,000 keystrokes and backed up this entry in a Notepad TXT file. The cause of the reboot could either have been Azureus, a graphically-nice-but-unstable BitTorrent client, or perhaps I caused the real Mussolini to roll over in his grave and curse me. Ha, your curse backfired just like your plans to invade Libya.

So, back to Mussolini. He came just before spring break, and his first assignment was to help the class review for a test over the first half of World War II. We were all somewhat excited and amused, since Fogelson is a good lecturer/reviewer and we were eager to see if anyone could top him. As it turned out, Mussolini sucked. He droned on and on, firing questions every once in a while under his breath, practically scaring the questionee out of their wits. Then, when someone gave a correct answer, he’d say something along the lines of, “Good point,” or “Good answer.” This ticked me off because the answer was not “good,” nor was it a “point” (as in an opinion). It was the truth, according to our textbook, and nothing more. It feels uncomfortable to receive praise for doing nothing more than spout off what everyone knows already.

That was the first thing. As he got into the review, which was conducted by having students answer questions in order by row, with the classroom divided into competing teams, he made the questions harder and harder, as if he didn’t know that the test was multiple choice with no essay or short answer questions, or anything else of the kind that he was giving us practice for. But the worst part was that his questions were poorly phrased and confusing, making it hard to even understand what he wanted us to do. Worse, the aforementioned question length problem meant that we each only got one question, so if you botched the single question you were given, you had no chance of redeeming yourself.

Once I had done my question (I got it “wrong”, though I knew the answer), I ended up just dozing off and looking up periodically when Mussolini would focus his bulging eyes on me as if expecting me to answer out-of-turn just because I was “the one he would turn to if no one else knew the answer.” Wow, didn’t I feel special. I had answered one easy question right at the beginning of class before the review, and that automatically made me Mussolini’s pet. I was King Victor Emmanuel III.

Now, however, I do exactly what King Victor of Italy did - absolutely nothing. I just sit in my “spacious” palace of a desk and wait for something to happen. Hopefully the Allies will come sometime soon so that I can have Mussolini “removed from office.” Yeah, that’d be great.

I should cut him some slack, since he’s new to teaching; the people I really should be griping at is the administration for even cursing us with him in the first place. What kind of evil principal gives a class a new student teacher only eight weeks before finals without even considering the impact that teacher might have on students’ grades. I wonder if I could stop doing my work in that class and get bad grades and blame it on Mussolini. Would it work? No, my grades would be attributed to “a problem at home,” or, an “altercation.” I wish adults (and everyone in general) could just admit it when they’re wrong and take steps to fix the problem rather than stand around passing the blame. At what time do adults not admit it when they are wrong? All the time: just look at the Kerry/Bush campaign advertisements.

Bush: Kerry wants to mess up our economy by repealing my tax cuts.

Kerry: Bush messed up the economy by giving us tax cuts in the first place.

Bush: Kerry wants to remove our troops in Iraq to improve foreign relations. We shouldn’t trade foreign policy for national security.

Kerry: Bush is wrong.

Bush: Kerry sucks.

Kerry: Oh, I now agree with everything Bush says. *One day later.* Now I disagree with everything Bush says. I have no personal opinion on anything.

Bush: I should be president because my daddy was, and look at all he did for our country compared to that Clinton fellow. That’s why my daddy was in office for four years and Clinton was in only for eight. Four’s more than eight, isn’t it?

Kerry: Bush is wrong.

Bush: Kerry still sucks.

When will it all end?