Seventh Grade

When I first arrived at the school, back in August, I expected the seventh grade to be difficult. But not this difficult.

I soon realized, however, that seventh grade’s only purpose was to remind kids that the world is a painful and unforgiving place. By October, I had no life. In sixth grade, you receive quite a bit of homework, however it is nothing compared to the overpowering, staggering, immense, colossal, mammoth, monumental, gargantuan, elephantine, jumbo, astronomical, king- sized buttload of busywork designed to ruin your life.

There’s a lot of homework.

The four most important things I learned in seventh grade are:
a) No matter how hard you try, something will go wrong. Your job is to just keep that to a minimum.
b) The stairs by the sixth grade wing are out to break your ankles. Avoid them at all costs.
c) Trust no one.
d) Teachers are not humans.

As the year comes to a close, I rejoice. My advice to next year’s seventh graders? Everything is evil. Trust no one. Make sure to leave enough (all) of your time to do homework.

Have fun!

How I Would Start A Book

Fire-breathing death griffins from hell are annoying. Whose idea was it to set those things free? As much as I love animals, I don’t love them enough to become a griffin’s meal. Especially not a fire- breathing death griffin from hell. I hate them. Regular griffins are bad enough.

Anyway, there I was, running for my life, shouting, praying, what you would expect in that scenario. Have you ever stopped to consider how much property damage there is in a griffin attack? I didn’t, but you can’t blame me. I was preoccupied.

Right. Sorry. Off topic.

Griffins.

Running away.

I began to think. Running was great, but it only bought me time. I might as well use that time. I needed something that could hurt the griffins. Something that a fire- breathing death griffin from hell would want to avoid. How about water? Only one problem: how to bring the griffins in contact with the water.

I would love to tell you that I cleverly found a way to trick the griffins to come near me, then quickly and expertly doused them with gallons and gallons of water. It’s not true though. The truth is, a sudden gust of wind blew them off course and they got tangled in a tree. All of them. Over a lake. All I had to do was find an axe and chop the tree down. Easiest monster fight ever. Hardly even deserves a story.

Prayer of a Selfish Child

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray The Lord my soul to keep,
And if I die before I wake,
I pray The Lord my toys to break.
So none of the other kids can use ’em…
Amen.

-Shel Silverstein

The reason I chose this poem to post on my blog is that it reminds me of my childhood. I always said a prayer similar to this(not identical, mind you) before I went to bed every night. Also, we were very selfish with our toys. If a toy was yours, it was Yours. Not his, not hers, yours.
We weren’t big on sharing, unless it was your best friend: a lofty title indeed.
Furthermore, Shel Silverstein meant a lot to me too. I have several of his books full of poems, and they are all almost falling apart due to years and years of use. Shel Silverstein is every kid’s dream. He sees things from a child’s perspective, he makes things rhyme, and his poems are always a little silly. What’s not to love?

Challenge Week Five: A Memory

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When I was little, my world was centered on transformers. Hour after hour, the sound of plastic hitting plastic filled the house. Yes, the same transformers from those movies. When I first saw the movie, I became transfixed. Everyone in my life plunged into this world along with me.

My best friend Jack came over sometimes. Transformers.

My parents went out to eat and I had a babysitter. Transformers.

Nothing special was going on at all. Transformers.

Every trip to the store was an opportunity to convince my mom into buying me one more of those shape-shifting toys (Mom remembers this too). What was it about these robots that so held my attention? Was it the mechanics? The roleplay? The power? I think it was the power. As a child, I had no power. Children have no power, so to be able to control these transforming, shape-shifting, beasts… it was amazing. It was empowering.

Despite the fact that I never play with them anymore, I still have my transformers. To throw them away would be throwing away two or three years of my childhood. I could never do that.

Photo Credit: Me

My Five Favorite Apps

1. Giant Boulder of Death:—: Wouldn’t you love to become a huge chunk of rock and roll through a never ending alpine village? Of course you would. With this thought in mind, the creators of the game whipped up an application for doing just that. But beware! Avoid the deadly spikes or else!

2. Desmos:—: Anything you have the math skills to conceive, Desmos can make. This graphing calculator takes your equations, your functions, whatever, and makes the graph. You can have many graphs on top of each other, so if you make each graph in the right shape, eventually you’ll make a picture. Also, you can just use it as a graphing calculator.

3. DudePerfect:—: The basic premise behind this game is to make the ball go into the basket whichever way you like. Wanna go for a straight shot? Fine. Wanna bounce it off seven different walls before arcing high in the air, the plummeting down straight to the basket? Cool. The more indirect and unlikely your shot, the more points you get:

4. Merriam Webster:—: If the word exists, it’s in there. The purpose of the Merriam Webster dictionary is pretty straightforward: it’s a dictionary. It’s still very useful though. If I’m in a hurry, and I need the definition of a word, I just grab my iPad. A couple of taps later, I know the word, and I can be at peace.

5. MetroTimer:—: As a musician, I know the importance of keeping time. Unfortunately, I can’t always trust myself to keep a steady tempo. That’s where MetroTimer comes in. It clicks steadily at whatever speed the piece is supposed to be at. You can change the type of click to whatever you prefer. One of the options is a person counting over and over. “One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three. Four.”

Those are my favorite apps, how about you?

Week II : P. F. Chang’s

A giant stone horse stares down at you. It’s easily fifteen feet tall. Welcome to P.F Chang’s, my favorite restaurant in Austin, Texas.

The food is amazing. I get the same thing every time. As an appetizer, I order the Salt and Pepper Calamari. Some calamari is hard to chew, but not this one. It’s just perfect. As a main course, I order pan fried pork dumplings. Those dumpling are to die for. The outside is just as delicious as the pork inside. One bite, and the flavors flood your mouth. It’s beautiful.

Also, it’s the place where my family always meets after my dad flies his plane, since it’s halfway between our house and the airport. My dad loves to fly gliders- these huge planes with no engines. He uses updrafts alone to stay in the air for hours at a time. He’s always happy at P. F. Chang’s since he’s just retuned from a long gliding trip.

So, it’s no wonder that I love P. F. Chang’s so much. After all, I’m always happy with my family, and I’m always happy with my food.

The Phantom’s Lair

Apple Smoking In The Darkness
Photo Credit: A Guy Taking Pictures via Compfight

It’s not exactly a friendly sort of place. You know, the nice, cozy little homes with a crackling fire and a sweet old grandmother passing out hot chocolate and cookies. It makes sense, of course, the Phantom is as far away from that grandmother as I think a living thing can be. Even that’s an understatement as we’re not quite sure he is a living thing.
Honestly, it’s not really a cave— it’s a cavern. If you were to look up, you wouldn’t see the top. A huge lake leaves almost no space to walk. The water is unnervingly still, disrupted only by the occasional drip from the unseen ceiling. The atmosphere is as cold as the creature who inhabits this void.

Oh— and there’s the organ. The monstrous mountain of pipes, some big enough to swallow a person. It towers over everything else, an ostentatious reminder of who’s in charge here. You can almost feel its power. It would be a good idea never to forget that…

Why Latin Makes More Sense Than English

Articles. Why do we need articles? They are a fundamental part of the English language, and they are stupid. Who had the brilliant idea to make the sentence “I went to the store and bought a turkey,” have two more words than neccisary? If we changed the rules of grammar, and did away with articles, it really wouldn’t matter that much. Sure it sounds stupid when I say “I went to store and bought turkey,”, but it wouldn’t if everyone spoke that way.

Latin uses far fewer pronouns. If you wanted to say he hits in Latin, you would say pulsat. If you wanted to say I hit, you would say pulsō. If you wanted to say you hit, you would say pulsās. It only takes one word.

Pronunciation. In English, if you haven’t seen a word before, there’s a pretty good chance you will pronounce it wrong. In Latin, assuming you learned the alphabet correctly, you will pronounce it right. Latin is a phonetic language, while English… what kind of a word is phonetic?! WHAT? PHONETIC? How do you pronounce that? Even worse, WHAT KIND OF A WORD IS SHOE? Shoe? Shoe? Really. How does “œ” make the oo sound? Shoo, articles. Shoo, pronouns. Shoo, weird pronunciations.

Signed, Him. The Julius

Why Chester’s Hamburgers Rules

I gasped for air, crawling toward the aroma. If I could only find the source of that delicious scent. It smelled like… bliss. I managed to lurch through the door, and the smell intensified tenfold. “I’ll have a number one combo please,” I gasped. Chester’s hamburgers serves the best hamburgers there could ever be.

The taste of those burgers is like biting into an angel’s lunch. The indescribable joy that floods through your mouth… I fell off my chair the first time I bit into one. I felt like I was flying though. As far as food critics go, I would be a pretty bad one. I hate everything. I don’t even eat pizza. Who doesn’t eat pizza? But those hamburgers, they could cure the blind, heal the sick, bestow hearing in the deaf. They are that good.

Not to mention the size. You could hide another entire meal under one of those burgers(although I don’t know why you would even bother with another meal when you have a Chester’s burger) and have room to spare. It has the diameter of a volleyball, but it tastes way better(obviously). You’ve seen my opinion on the taste, now imagine that, except is just keeps coming. So much deliciousness per bite, combined with tons and tons of bites, crates rapture. Never ending joy and happiness. Chester’s Hamburgers is the key to world peace.

Now I’ll leave you with a thought to ponder: are there any burgers better than Chester’s? I’m just kidding. The answer to that is obviously no. The actual question is: What is the meaning of life?

P.S. The meaning of life is Chester’s Hamburgers.

Expository Writing

Why I Like Pep Rallys

Pep rallys. The most wasteful waste of time ever. Glorious. So gloriously wasteful. I love pep rallys.

Pep rallys give you a chance to talk and relax. To talk to your friends. When I talk to my friends, I relax from the humdrum that is school. We pay no heed to the ongoing events; we just blab away. We can barely hear each other, but we can hear. That’s enough for me.

But that isn’t the only reason I like pep rallys. It’s not even the main reason.

You get to skip class! It wastes so much time! It’s great! It lets you get a break—a break. A break from the monotonous, dull, flat, empty wasteland that is the desert that nerds go to die in. Cardboard is more entertaining. It oozes with boredom. A peer of mine, Grant A, put it well. “As a teenager, it is my duty to hate school.” Wether it is duty or not, I hate school anyway. Remember, Cardboard. Desert. Nerds.

Sure, pep rallys have their drawbacks—such as ruptured eardrums due to the noise—but they’re worth it.

Pep rallys are a wonderful waste of time.

Sure, it’s bad, but it could be worse.

Choose the lesser of two evils.