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Leaf Blowers Suck November 26, 2007

Posted by wes285 in Family, Holidays.
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You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone. You’ll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day one day and it’s just gone. And you can never get it back. It’s like you get homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. I mean it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.

-Garden State

I’ve talked and felt this idea before, but it never really hit me full force until this Thanksgiving. I slept in the basement the entire weekend. This isn’t out of the ordinary when I sleep in my parent’s house. I usually pass out in front of the TV. But, this time I didn’t have the option of sleeping in my bedroom. We had family staying at our house and they stayed in my room. Funny thing is, we have a guest room with two beds in it. This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy going home. I almost always do. But it really isn’t home anymore. D.C. is home now.

Moving along, Thanksgiving was a good time as always. The Turducken was fantastic. I suggest your family try one out next year. And of course, everyone who has graduated high school from Churchill, Wootton, Whitman and B-CC over the last 10 years was out in Bethesda on Wednesday night. It’s a little nauseating to have to wait in line at a bar in Bethesda at 10pm. But you do it because you want to see people you haven’t seen in a year and make banal smalltalk with them. Hey, it’s Thanksgiving, you’re happy to see everyone.

Saturday I got suckered into raking the yard with the rest of my family. I guess I shouldn’t say suckered, because it’s probably the most fun I’ve had doing anything in a while. My sister can’t pack the leaves down into a bag to save space for the life of her. My brother had a complete career progression as a leaf raker. He started out as an illegal Mexican, then a union leaf raker, to management and finally retirement. He kept clamoring about getting his union required break. Two problems (1) you have to work 4 hours before you get a union sanctioned break and (2) in order to be a union, you need more than one member. I’m sure you all don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about or why it’s funny.  But I suppose this is what happens when family gets together.  I guess you had to be there.

Anyway, to end this completely disjointed post, all I have to say is leafblowers suck. It takes longer using that thing than actually raking the leaves. Now that’s a little ass backwards, don’t you think?

The Big Bang Theory (Or How a Turducken is Made) November 7, 2007

Posted by wes285 in Family, Holidays, Plain Strange, School, Television.
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No, not the cosmological model of the universe whose primary assertion is that the universe has expanded into its current state from a primordial condition of enormous density and temperature (isn’t wikipedia great?). I’m talking about the TV show. My new favorite pastime is watching TV shows online and after I got caught up on How I Met Your Mother, I explored over onto The Big Bang Theory. It’s about two socially inept science prodigies and their smoking hot neighbor from across the hall. It’s certainly not a show for everyone, but I find it incredibly funny. Partly because I have a bit of inner dork in me, but mostly because I went to school with kids like these from 4th grade until high school graduation. There’s something about seeing the social retardedness that me and my friends in high school could only imagine. Oh yeah, Kaley Cuoco is also a lot of fun to look at.

See, told you so.

I went through the majority of grade school around kids like these. I don’t know if they were quite geniuses, but its the closest I’ve ever been to a group of prodigies. As much as we like to joke and make fun of nerds, I have always been just a little bit envious of these kids and the ease at which they grasp incredibly difficult math and physics concepts. My SAT score was on par with these kids and my grades weren’t much worse. But they did it with such ease.

I finished AP Calculus half way through junior year and got a 5 on the exam. But, I had to bust my ass throughout that class. It would take me an hour and 5 tries to solve an integral that would take them 10 minutes. If I remember correctly, the AP Calc exam had four 50 minute sections. I finished each section with maybe 5 minutes to spare. The kid sitting next to me, he would put his head down after about 20 minutes, completely done. If you haven’t a clue what I’m talking about, just imagine John Nash in A Beautiful Mind when he wasn’t hallucinating. These people see patterns as obvious that many of us would never see no matter how hard we tried.

No, I don’t want to be these people. I’m quite content with my social skills and intelligence level. But for a day or two, I wouldn’t mind trading social skills just to see what it’s like to be a genius and actually understand a Fourier series, not just be told why it works and how to use it.

Speaking of a big bang, my family wants one of these for Thanksgiving. Yes, my brother tells me we’re having turducken. That’s chicken stuffed inside duck stuffed inside turkey. So instead of having the usual 2 birds that we can never finish we’re going to have 3. Oh, and if you’re really hungry, you can lay strips of bacon on top or stuff the chicken with sausage. YUM! Talk about gluttony.

But, why stop at just 3? How about the 7 fowl turduckencorpheail. Or why not just go ALL THE WAY with the 17 species of the bustergophechiduckneaealcockidgeoverwingailusharkolanbler. I swear to God, I’m not making any of this up. Wikipedia said it’s true, so it must be.