I have decided that saying "...or my name isn't Aaron," as in, "I will get some comments on this post or my name isn't Aaron," is too risky. Therefore, from now on I intend to say "...and/or my name is Aaron." It's much safer, and still gives me a nice colloquial way to say that I'm pretty sure of something.
"I will get some comments on this post and/or my name is Aaron."
For all those of you who are so scared by my profile picture, I suggest getting Firefox and installing the Adblock add-on that I mentioned in a post last week. It will enable you to avoid being forced to look at Aaron van Beethoven while simultaneously affording everyone else the pleasure.
Now on to other and more important things:
This week was full of sickness and school. I'm glad it's over. At the same time, however, it would be nice if I could just keep repeating Thursday or Friday until I was completely finished with all my schoolwork so I wouldn't have all this blasted pressure. (Why can't I just graduate without doing any work?!?!? WHY!?!?!?!?) Of course, we all know what happened to the man who asked for a month of Sundays (supposing we all have read the Book of Virtues), so maybe I'd better be careful what I wish for. Plus, if we had a whole month of Thursdays, there would be no Saturdays on which to relax, and - possibly even worse - no Tuesdays on which to turn eighteen! Horror of horrors!!! I think I'll stick with the good ol' 365-day year.
Now, please humor me as I skip back in time for the rest of my post.
I had an OUTSTANDING time at the last youth weekend! It was terrific fun, and I don't know why I didn't think to write about it before now. Actually, I'm not sure I want to outline the whole weekend for you, so maybe that's why. I would still like to point out that it was a great time, with great meetings, awesome games, fun sports, and grueling competition. I still think that my team's snow church was better than Cara's team's snow "fruitbowl," but I had a good time anyway. One of my favorite parts was creating a TV commercial for Bruce's Canned Yams. Such fun! I'll have to try to get the video and post it.
Now I'm going to skip even further back in time to the game time on Friday night: one of the many fantastic games Andrea thought up was... the game where you have a label on you where you can't see it and you try to guess who you are. (If that game has a name, it is not in my vocabulary.) I took a while with Rush Limbaugh, but I took even longer with my next one. I had narrowed myself down to a member of the British royalty, but I still couldn't figure it out! Was I Prince Charles? Prince William? Prince Harry? Prince Andrew? Prince Phillip?
"No! What gave you such highfalutin' ideas?" laughed Andrea gaily.
But what other princes were there? Was I actually a duke or a lord? I was beginning to run out of male royalty when my dear friend Ben said, "DO YOU EVEN KNOW YOUR GENDER!?!?!?"
Oh, right...
I asked whether I was Queen Elizabeth, and know what? I WAS! I had never known it before.
I haven't had much to write recently, other than "I hab bed bery dired ad sduffy because I hab a code." But since I have said something to that effect once before, and I'm already recovering anyway, I figured I should write about something else. Yet nothing presented itself! Not, that is, until this evening, when I was scanning FoxNews.com.
BIG NEWS!!!! ONLY ON FOX!!!! YOU'RE NOT GOING TO FIND THIS KIND OF REPORTING ANYWHERE ELSE!!!! It's so exciting! You'll never believe this!!! Good thing you've got Fox News to keep you updated!!!! Anyway, here's the big only-on-Fox bit of news:
[If Hillary is elected,] Bill Clinton could be First Man for first woman president[!!!!!]
Happy Valentine's Day again! Don't worry I didn't eat more than one chocolate bar, although I did have a number of marshmallows, some angel food cake, chocolate-covered strawberries, whipped cream-covered strawberries, and ice cream.
Ahem.
Speaking of Valentine's Day, what better day is there in the year to play through a book of old "classic" American love songs? Some of them are really quite funny. It seems that sentimentality was pretty popular back in the nineteenth century. Some of my favorites are "I Love You Truly" (the very same song that was sung by Bert and Ernie in "It's a Wonderful Life"), "Just A-Wearyin' For You", "Down By the Old Mill Stream", "In My Merry Oldsmobile" (yes, the book is old), and "Gypsy Love Song." They're all so...so old-fashioned! And funny! Maybe some time I'll try recording a couple of them, but it's too late to do it tonight.
On to other, more modern, less soupy, and probably more interesting subjects. ADBLOCK! I love Adblock. If you have never experienced it, you don't know what you're missing! It's an add-on for the browser Mozzarella Firefox (as it has been recently dubbed by a member of our family who previously called it "Maxamilla Foxfire" but broke that habit), and it lets you right-click on any picture on the web and Adblock it. BOOM! No more ads from THAT website! It's so much fun ("Feeeeel the power!" "Whoa, I feel it!"), and there are hardly ever ads on the websites I visit anymore, at least after I've been blocking things for a while. Life is good again!
My final subject:
I just remembered what my "ambiguity" post was going to be about: the relativity of the word "long" in reference to blog posts. Some people in my family think everything I do is "long," and others don't. Some think "long" is anything with more than one paragraph, others don't think it's too "long" unless it both has 37 paragraphs and is boring (or at least dry). An interesting subject, to be sure, but I don't have the time to write a disquisition on it now. Schoolwork calls.
I caught some sort of sickness yesterday afternoon that left me feeling tired and weak. I can’t usually fall asleep in the daytime when I’m well, but I had no problem then. I think I must have had a fever, too, because I woke up covered in sweat even without any covers. Mama thought I had one today, too, although the only symptom I still exhibit is a general feeling of fatigue. Further supporting my theory that I had a fever, I dreamed some interesting dreams yesterday afternoon, dreams with more plot than any I’ve had in a long time. Here they are for your benefit:
My first dream began with me driving Bria along some street in the commercial section of some town. I don’t think it was a real town, for I cannot conceive of its location in reality. I have all these perplexing “memories” of places suddenly popping up in my head, too, that were either long-forgotten real places or the fruit of my feverish imagination. Anyway, to return to my dream…
I was driving along some road a bit like South Willow St with shops on only one side and hills on the other. There was not much traffic, and the road was smooth and long. As I turned right to go into a large shopping plaza with Ames on one side and some other building on the other (at least it wasn’t Caldor or Bradley’s or Rich’s), I was excited to perceive Diane R. following us into the place in her red SUV. I wove around the parking lot looking for a good spot, although I ended up parking right in the middle for no clear reason.
The parking lot was unusual in that it was, shall we say, inhabited. In fact, there was quite a community! There was a “lot overseer” and many people just living in the parking lot. It was very much like the trailer park in “The Long, Long Trailer,” except that people lived in cars. One fellow asked if he could park there “until Tuesday”, and everyone shouted his joyful assent. (“Welcome to the best parking lot in New Hampshire!”)
I got out of the car and looked for Diane, but I had been mistaken: it was not she. Instead it was a teacher from the Christian school where I took the Stanford Achievement Tests in every grade from first to eleventh. I walked over toward the building into which she directed her steps, and it turned out to be the schools new location! And it was time for the tests! I was rather peculiarly unsurprised to find that Bria was no longer with me and that Daddy and Cara had taken her place. The three of us walked into the building. Interestingly, the first floor was the basement of the church (CHC), and it was full of preschoolers painting at two long tables that took up most of the width of the room. Cara and Daddy forged their way through to the door leading to the stairs, but in the hustle and bustle of the crowd, I could not keep up. I even tried diving between the backs of two long rows of chairs, but all I got was paint on my new white jacket (which I don’t really have). I did make it through, but my family had disappeared.
I continued to climb level after level in search of the “Executive Office,” as I called it. People laughed at me when I asked where the Executive Office was, but I didn’t know why. I finally reached the second-to-last floor (I think there were four stories in all, including the basement) and found that the stairs to the final floor went in a circle getting increasingly narrow without rails. It all looked rather perilous. I can still picture it clearly, although I cannot describe it well. I was in the middle of trying very, very hard to gather enough courage to go up when Mama called me on my cell phone. I don’t remember what she said, but I think she was angry that I wasn’t home yet. I thought that was strange, since I was at tests, and just hung up without answering (an action I would never consciously consider, I assure you).
I headed down the other way just in time to see Cara go into a classroom and close the door. I didn’t want to interrupt her tests, so I explored the building looking for someone who could tell me where to go. I knew the principal of the school could help me, but he was giving tests to some of the younger kids, so I just hung around waiting for light to be shed from some other source. When Cara emerged for a break, I was just starting to talk to her when I suddenly remembered that twelfth-graders do not take this kind of SAT, and that I had no reason to be there. I left feeling both relief and embarrassment.
Then I was Spider-man watching Cara’s store for her while she ate dinner, and I stopped a bunch of robbers by making a cool web, but that’s another story for another day.
By the way...
Click here to discover the secret source of the soundtrack for The Gigantic Amoeba at Medfield College! In case the audio doesn't work, or you don't want to take the time to check, it's the second movement to Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 21 in C: Elvira Madigan. It's a fantastic piece, and if you don't have it in your music library, you should definitely add it.
"Best Short Film: The Gigantic Amoeba at Medfield College"
I think it's a winner, don't you?
I wrote the title of this post a day or two ago when I had a terrific idea for a post. I didn't have time to write the actual body of the post then, so I wrote the title thinking that the word "ambiguity" would of course be sufficient to jog my wonderful memory. Well, folks, it seems I overestimated myself. I opened the "Manage Posts" page without even the faintest recollection of what I was planning to write, and the single title word is doing nothing to resolve my perplexity. Therefore I will now move on to other things.
Such as...Samson. Have you ever thought about how many elements of that story are truly bizarre, especially in the context of modern culture? The first thing we hear about Samson (besides his birth) is that he took a trip to the land of the Philistines, nemeses of the Israelites, and came home saying, "Hey, Mom and Dad, I saw a girl while I was in Timnah. Go see if she'll marry me. She looks good." I don't know about you, but I can't imagine saying that...even if the Timnah part were replaced with Manchester!!!!
Samson ended up marrying the girl, but he didn't stick around after the wedding for more than a week, and the impression I get from the Bible is that he spent that week celebrating with a bunch of guys who weren't even his friends. Feasting buddies, or something. Then he went off who knows where, so his father-in-law said (of course!), "Well, there goes Charlene's husband, off who knows where. I guess I'll just have to give his wife to his best man."
I must admit that I do not know that her name was, in actuality, Charlene.
Well, Samson came back "a while later, in the time of the harvest," for his honeymoon. Rather poor prioritizing, in my opinion. In fact, he lost his wife because of it. As his father basically said, "Oops. So you did want to marry her after all. [nervous laughter] OK, hmm, how can I resolve this situation peacefully? Do you want to marry Darlene instead? She's actually even more good-looking that her sister." But Samson would have none of it. He was so mad he burned down the entire wheat field, and in the time of harvest, too!
"Who has done this?" cried the Philistines, and then again they cried, "Samson hath done it! He did it because his father-in-law gave his daughter, his wife, to someone other than him, who happened to once have been his friend." Then they all got confused because of the ambiguity of the pronouns. Which pronoun went with which antecedent became a matter of great conjecture among the lot of them. Some argued this, and some argued that, but eventually they determined that the fault lay with Samson's in-laws, so they killed them.
This turned out to be a big mistake. "You have gone too far!" cried Samson. "I will get revenge again, but then I'll stop." He was wrong (about stopping), but that's not the point of this post. The point of this post is that people weren't always that level-headed back in the good old days.
Here's another example to back my point: the story of Samson with his second wife, Delilah. I will never understand why on earth Samson gave the secret of his strength away to his wife. After all, every time he bluffed, she tried to take advantage of him. "Just tie me up with seven new cords, and I'll be helpless," said Samson. Delilah tied him up with seven new cords." Just tie me up with new ropes, and I'll be helpless," said Samson. Delilah tied him up with new ropes. "Just weave my hair into a cloth, and I'll be helpless," said Samson. Delilah wove his hair into a cloth. (I know Samson had inhuman strength, but how he disentangled his hair is beyond me; maybe he just kept it like that and used it as an umbrella when one was needed.) Every time Samson told Delilah a false secret and she proved it false, she cried, "You don't love me!"
I would have shot back, "Well, hello!!! You obviously don't love me either! Why do you think I don't tell you the truth when you keep trying deliver me over to the bad guys who happen to be your relatives?" But I was not Samson.
Samson had different ideas. He said, "OK, I know you have tried to deliver me over to the bad guys (who happen to be your relatives) again and again and again each and every time I pretended I told you the truth, so I guess I might as well tell you the truth and be delivered over because, um, because, um... just because." So he did.
Sometimes I think Samson had more brawn than brain.
