The Best Way to Play Laser Tag

So on Saturday my day was pretty much packed. I had an art class at one thirty, which is pretty normal, but I have to take the train to get to it—actually, I have to walk two miles to the train station and then take the train to get to it. Then within the first five minutes of the class I managed to stab myself in the face with a pencil and it frickin’ hurt. See, I’d just sharpened the pencil and I was trying to get some stray pencil shavings off of the sharpener when the pencil, which was still in my hand, flew up and gouged me in the face. It actually drew blood.

Anyway, after I stopped bleeding I did some art and then I left the class early to go to a LASER TAG PARTY! Yaay!

I get to the place and it’s like the one time in my life when I’m not the last one to arrive at the party. Seriously, I have a problem with being late for things.

We waited for everyone to arrive and then we waited some more in the MASSIVE LINE—seriously, it was huge—and then we went in and shot each other with lasers and stuff. 

If you've never played laser tag, here's how it works: There are three teams, red, blue and green. Each person wears a vest that has lights of their team's color and a laser gun attached. There's a big indoor structure with lots of walls and passages, and you run around and shoot people from other teams. If you get shot, your vest turns white and you can't shoot anything for a few seconds. Each team has a base, and if you take out another team's base by shooting it four times, you get like two thousand points. The same person can't take out a base twice.

My friends and I were taking up both the blue and the green spaces and we were going to make an alliance, but apparently that went straight out the window as soon as we got inside.

I was on the blue team and I had NO idea what I was doing. I’m just running around shooting anything that isn’t blue. Actually, I shot some of the blue people as well, but luckily friendly fire doesn’t register on the vests so I couldn’t actually get them out.

My team won and I was happy. I wound up getting ranked number sixteen! (Out of something like thirty, so yay.) So we waited for like another forty minutes to get in again—actually, we got shut out twice because apparently my friends operate on an “If all of us can’t go in NONE of us are going in!” basis and I love them SO MUCH for it.

Then when we finally got in again, we were all supposed to be blue. But they ran out of blue vests so I wound up as green.

Here’s the best way to play laser tag: Against your friends, having heard their strategies, and with a rigged vest.

Seriously, there was something off with my vest. It only registered, like, one out of five times I got shot. I found the red base pretty fast—it was totally unguarded!—and took it out, then got someone else on my team to take it out again before moving on to the blue base (which belonged to my friends). I took that one out too. Then I found my own base, the green one, and stopped some of my friends from taking it out. I shot them all and then just kept shooting so that every time one of their vests reactivated I got it again immediately.

That’s when my friend Sally, who is an expert at laser tag, noticed that there was something up with my vest. I didn’t believe her, since people had been getting me out (infrequently), so I let her shoot me a few times until my vest turned white. It took several shots, though, so after the game was over I asked the Game Master about it.

Her response? “Oh yeah, some of the vests have power-ups, especially if you take out a base. Like they just don’t register as many hits.”

So yep. I had a rigged vest.

AND I got ranked NUMBER ONE! Woo! It was fabulous!

That was a fun day. The rest of the week, not so much. Lots of homework, and I'm doing cello for the school's production of Evita, so lots of rehearsal for that too. I don't actually know the story of Evita yet, but I'm sure I'll pick it up eventually.

A Short Story

Because my last blog post was lackluster, and I don't have anything witty prepared, here's one of my short stories. I read it aloud at the Conservatory Open House last week.

It's called The Hitchhiker's Tale.

It was just my luck that my car broke down on a deserted rural road in the middle of the night. Moreover, my cell phone was absolutely drained, preventing me from calling a cab. Fortunately it was a warm night, but that didn’t change the fact that I was squarely in between Danville, where my plane had landed, and Littlestown, where the mythology conference was. I was to present a paper on the symbolism behind Loki’s imprisonment the next morning, and I could not be late.

            That was what prompted me to stick my thumb out when the headlights snaked down the road ten minutes later. Inadvisable, I know, but I was desperate. It was almost thirty miles to Littlestown.

            The headlights turned out not to belong to a car, but a pickup truck. It pulled over and the driver, a ginger-haired boy in maybe his late teens or early twenties, leaned out of the window. “Hey, you want a ride?” he called amiably.

            “Thanks.” I got into the front seat, settling my briefcase under my knees. The car was, I had noticed, badly dented and scraped in several places.

            “Where are you headed?” asked the boy, pulling back onto the road and glancing at me curiously. I must have been quite an atypical hitchhiker: a thin man with academic glasses and a briefcase, wandering the empty roads at midnight.

            “Littlestown,” I told him. “I’m on my way to an academic conference on mythology. I specialize in the Prose Edda, you know.”

            “Oh yeah? I haven’t heard of that,” said the boy, a smile tugging on the corner of his mouth. “I don’t get out much, though.”

            “What about you?” I asked. “What brings you to this stretch of road so late at night?”

            “Me?” He shrugged. “I just like driving.”

            A thought struck me and I chuckled. “This is like something out of an urban legend. When I get to Littlestown and describe you, someone will tell me that you died ten years ago and still keep driving around picking up hitchhikers.”

            “Twenty-three, actually,” said the boy, turning the wheel slightly as the road curved.

            I frowned. “Twenty-three what?”

            “It was twenty-three years ago,” he explained, “not ten.” He glanced at me, deadpan.

            I laughed and after a moment his mouth quirked upwards and he laughed with me. “Nah, I kid,” he said, checking the rearview mirror. “So tell me—what do you do for fun?”

            The drive took less than half an hour, and the boy, who introduced himself as Asa Baker, let me out beside the hotel. I walked into the lobby and called in my reservation, planning to rescue my car the next day (or rather, that afternoon—it was one-forty-five a.m. when I got to the hotel).

            After I presented my paper, I got a ride from one of my colleagues, a woman who taught creative writing at Littlestown University and had presented a paper on story tropes. When I told her where my car was, she stared at me in confusion and said, “How on earth did you get all the way here in time for the conference?”

            I told her that a young man called Asa Baker had picked me up and brought me to the hotel, and she looked at me with half-lowered eyelids.

            “My students put you up to this, didn’t they,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

            “What do you mean?”

            “Asa Baker. He’s one of the more popular urban legends around here. He was a nineteen-year-old farm worker who died in a freak road accident twenty-something years ago. People say he drives around in his pickup truck and offers hitchhikers rides. My students are always joking about meeting him on a dark road in the middle of the night.”

            I stared at her. “You’re kidding.”

            “Nope.” She raised an eyebrow. “So how’d you really get here?”

            “But…” I shook my head. “My God, he wasn’t joking. He actually wasn’t joking.”

            “Who wasn’t joking?”

            “Asa Baker. It really was twenty-three years!”

            


Did you like it? Let me know what you think.

I have no energy for an actual dance music.

I meant blog post. My friend was saying something about dance music and I started typing the conversation. Creative Writing Conservatory can get surprisingly rowdy. Right now someone's trying to do a standing splits while everyone else is talking. And my dance music friend just stole the pencil from behind my ear and stuck it in my other friend's hair.

My pencil-hair friend just gave me the pencil back and now they're talking about whether people can actually slip on banana peels. (Dance-music friend says that according to Myth Busters they can't.) And now they're wondering where the popcorn went and poking splits friend.

The reason that we have no more popcorn is that it was right behind me and it was delicious.

I have no energy for an actual post, so have some pictures. Yes, some of these have been on the blog before.

Something I made when I was bored. 

A shark is eating my head. 

Cosplaying Cousin Itt.

Mad scientist hair.

And here's some I found on the internet. 

Yay internet.

YouTube Tutorials Are Not Good For Everything

So our AP English teacher has been out sick all week, and today's sub had instructions to let us see our essays and vocab quizzes, which are locked in a filing cabinet. Ms. P (the teacher) said that Mr. B (the sub) should go get the key with the smiley face sticker on it.

But no one could find the teacher who has the key, so some of the girls decided instead to watch a YouTube video on picking locks and then try it themselves. Couldn't hurt, right?

The drama unfolded before my eyes.

They clustered around the filing cabinet, trying to wiggle a paperclip into the lock. I'm not sure exactly what they were trying to do, but it was fairly amusing to watch.

Then the paperclip got stuck.

It didn't break, but they couldn't get it out of the lock! Google yielded up no sufficient answers for "how to get a paper clip unstuck from a lock" (although according to one of those "ask questions here" sites, we're not the first people to do it. One person recommended taking the door off its hinges, which would be fine if we weren't talking about a filing cabinet). The paperclip remained stuck.

I'd like to point out that you don't often see a group of students trying to pick the lock on a filing cabinet for the sole purpose of looking at old essays and vocab quizzes. I love my school. :D

Anyway, things got worse when the paperclip actually broke off inside the lock. My friend Felix (who works with jewelry) says we'll need pliers to get it out.

One of the maintenance people is now using pliers to extract the paperclip from the lock. It doesn't look like it's going well. We may need dynamite next.

Now he's using a Swiss army knife.

He just left and came back with a different pair of pliers, which he is attempting to...ooh, I think he might have gotten it!

Nope. Now he's leaving again.

Okay, he got it! The cabinet is now fixed! Yay! And the teacher with the key just showed up too!

UPDATE: Turns out they were picking the wrong lock. The essays weren't there! And since there was only ten minutes of class left, no one wanted to look at the vocab quizzes.

UPDATE AGAIN: Apparently the Physics class had an interesting block too. While we were trying to get the paper clip out of the lock on the filing cabinet, they were getting busted for going off campus to do experiments (with their teacher, of course). Then they got back and discovered the gas leak in the building.

It's that time of the year again...

You know the time I mean. The time you dread all year long. The time that haunts your deepest, darkest nightmares. The time that, were you a wizard, would manifest itself as your boggart.

That's right. Next week is Finals Week.

Oh joy.

I know a lot of schools already had their finals before break, but we have ours afterwards. And it SUCKS. Because then you're studying and dreading it all through Christmas and New Year's and all the studying just ruins it.

So have some Christmas art I did before Christmas.

It's called The Angel and the Elf, and it just came from me wanting to draw a random Christmas angel hanging out with one of Santa's elves. There's not really a story. They don't even have names. It was for this Christmas card charity thing I did. 

Here's the other side of the card. 

So yeah. That was fun. Yay. And yes, I realize that it's completely irrelevant now, but what the heck. It was fun to draw.

THE COCKROACH. Or: My thrilling bout with the flu

So a funny thing happened to me at the doctor's office yesterday...

I better back up and tell you why I was at the doctor's office first, though.

Let's just say that this has not been the best Christmas ever.

I got the flu on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve. Thanks, Santa, but could I get a refund for that one? I felt tired all day (especially since I had been gallivanting about till 2 a.m. and then slept past 11 a.m., which is very weird for me). By that night I was nauseous (no throwing up, thank goodness) and generally miserable. I spent Christmas Day mostly lying around feeling to ill to do much. My Christmas candy is as yet untouched. I had a pretty nasty fever too. The day seemed to drag on for a week.

Then yesterday I woke up to the worst neck cramps of my life. You know how sometimes you sleep on your neck wrong and it aches a bit when you wake up? Try that times, like, a million. It was AGONY. I couldn't turn my head, couldn't bend over, couldn't even sit up for very long. I couldn't get comfortable either, and I tried like five different pillows in various combinations.

Worse yet, it meant that I wasn't going to get to hang out with my friends this break! They go to different schools now, but we were going to get together at Izzy's cabin. Well, Izzy and Alkira are up at the cabin right now and I'm stuck back here, still with (I think) a slight fever. Am I bitter about this? Oh heck yes. Did I mention that I haven't seen either of them in over a month?

Anyway, back to the neck cramps...

Mom decided to take me to the doctor, just to make sure I didn't have meningitis or mono or something. So we get there and I am totally miserable. Try a thirty-minute car ride when you can't move your neck.

Anyway, I'm sitting on the medical table. Dr. Chapman and Mom and I chat for a few minutes, she asks me about symptoms and stuff. Then Dr. Chapman comes at me with a tongue depressor and a light thingy.

As she leaned towards me, I noticed that she was wearing some very pretty jewelry. Two necklaces, one of which was a golden chain with a green pendant. There seemed to be a big amber beetle-shaped brooch attached to it too.

And then the brooch stuck out a barbed leg and crawled onto her sweater.

I let out a shriek and jerked away. Dr. Chapman looked confused. (She thought I was scared of the tongue depressor.)

"THERE'S A HUGE BUG ON YOU!!!" I screamed.

The thing was enormous! Seriously, it must have been two or three inches long--at least!

Almost life size!

Then Dr. Chapman shrieked, dropped the tongue depressor and the light thingy, and started trying to get the bug (which she still hadn't seen) off. She accidentally got her necklace instead, which exploded, sending gold chain links everywhere. A couple of them landed on me, but I thought they were little pieces of bug and I screamed again.

She calmed down a bit, thinking it was gone.

I screamed again. "IT'S STILL THERE!" I yelled, scooching away. The thing had crawled onto her back!

Then Mom saw it (she thought I was hallucinating for a minute there). Showing incredible bravery, she grabbed the thing--with her bare hands-- and deposited it in the trash.

"It's going to get out!" I said.

Mom glanced into the trash can. "Should I kill it?" she asked. (It was a rather pretty bug.)

"YES!!!" screamed Dr. Chapman, so Mom squished it with the trash can liner.

We all spent the rest of the appointment recovering from that. On the bright side, it distracted me from my neck for a few minutes, if only by way of sheer terror. Have I mentioned that the bug was freaking huge?!

(The building was undergoing repairs, which is probably how the bug got it. If you were wondering. Oh, and I don't have meningitis or mono--just a random virus.)

So that was my wonderful Christmas. Hope yours was better :/ I'm on the mend now--my neck only hurts when I turn it. It's a lot better than yesterday.

Oh, and I was in a video, put together by the wonderful and utterly amazing Derek Landy!

Watch it AND part 2 here: http://dereklandy.blogspot.com/

Happy Holidays!

Merry Christmas, People!

Let's see, what have I been up to lately?

Well, I got a new haircut. Totally changed my hairstyle too. It's extremely short and it stands straight up in the mornings.

I can now pull off the mad scientist look. Yay.
(Yes, that's a bathrobe.)

The last couple weeks of school were insane. Seriously, I can't even function. I have sooo much AP English homework to do over break. O.O

I went to see Frozen on Thursday with my friend! (We got out on Thursday and had Friday off.) It was awesome! It's now quite possibly my favorite Disney movie ever.

My immediate reactions to it:

FINALLY!! A Disney movie that points out that you can't marry a guy you met that day! THANK YOU, DISNEY! 

The music was awesome, the animation (especially the snow) was beautiful, and aside from one or two cliched moments, I really liked the story.

So yeah. That happened.

I finally figured out how to do the spells on Pottermore. Yay!

Oh, and I went to a party last night. That was fun, but I ate too much too late and felt awful this morning. Good food, though.

Merry Christmas!