A Piece of Resistance

I know, I know, you people (I’m still under the delusion that this site gets visitors) were expecting an update concerning pumpkin scooping. You want it? Alright. I’ll spare you no detail:

I arrived at the compound at 9:30am. These two women told  me to walk along a path to some “palettes”, which had pumpkins on them. At this point, I was expecting, y’know, painter’s palettes. For painting. So I followed the path along some admittedly cool-looking pumpkin carvings, which seemed to be expertly scooped (gulp). I reached the end of the path, looking around for some “palettes”. There were none. There was only a pavilion, which was roped off. I jumped the rope and serched around the area, finding just benches, knives, and several cans of Raid. Which is used for killing ants. Gulp.

But no palettes. I backtracked along the path, then tried taking the other path at a fork in the road I hadn’t noticed before, but it led to the same place. Fortunately, at this point, one of the people in charge came and pointed out some “palettes” (which are those wood grills you hit people with in Half-Life 2) that held about thirty pumpkins, and informed me that these were the rejected pumpkins (so, there’s a quality standard then. Dammit.) and needed to be moved ten feet to the left to rot away in piece. She gave me some gloves, and I started lugging them around. I figured out what the can of Raid was for at this point, by the way.

After that, which took about half an hour, she gave me the job that I did the rest of the time: Not scooping pumpkins, but moving them out of their boxes onto some other palettes (wood grilles). Not rotten ones, but newer, significantly heavier ones. She also told me to clean them, but I didn’t bother. After I did this for two hours, still no one had shown up, and I was dirtier than the pumpkins I was carrying.

So that’s why I didn’t update: It made a two-paragraph post. That’s it. Fortunately, Over the week I had not one, but two, public-restroom escapades (No, not like that. You have a filthy mind. Shame on you, imaginary reader.) They both took place between noon and one o’clock, both in the same school bathroom, and both sucked.

So, on Tuesday, I go to the bathroom. I, ahem, step up to the urinal and begin, as it were, and some guy walks up right to the urinal next to me. Now, this is in clear violation of guy code; there was a perfectly good urinal that wasn’t uncomfortably close to mine, which would have given the guy not one, but two (2!) buffer urinals. So, I blame this other kid for what happened.

My cell phone, which has the oh-so-convenient feature of simultaneously ringing and vibrating, went off. My pants started vibrating, and loudly emitting the Free Credit Report.com Song. The vibrating freaked the hell out of me , and the song definately scared the guy next to me, as he moved a urinal over. Like, while peeing. I have never seen someone successfully do that before. So, I answer the call, only to listen to some old guy asking for a Bradley. Ooh. Wrong number.

On Thursday, I had another rather interesting encounter. This time, I had just finished washing my hands, and there was no paper, so I wiped them off as best I could in my pockets, then pulled the door’s handle. Off. Like, the door’s handle became a separate entity from the door. And I was trapped. In the bathroom. Another person was in the bathroom with me, but he seemed quite busy in the stall (I mean he was taking a shit. Not that.) I managed to bang the handle onto the door, quite loudly, which probably creeped him out, and left. Later on in the day, by the way, I saw a guy leave and just take the handle with him. I wonder if it’s still gone.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering if the reasone I hadn’t been posting is that I got into the Resistance 2 beta, you’re totally incorrect. I did get into the beta, yes, but I’ve been largely unable to get into any games. The first day I had it, I was fine. It was awesome, even the severely nerfed carbine and shotgun. And the online Co-op is nice. Especially this one time where we had like six Ghostbusters Medics shooting at the ginat guys at once, and everyone started humming the Ghostbusters theme in perfect harmony. Beta gamers are polite like that, not like their “Dude I am so totally high right now” non-beta bretheren.

A Matter of Honor

So, I was contacted by the National Honor Society recently. Apparently, I’m part of an elite group consisting of everyone in my grade who fulfills the requirements necessary to join. When I saw the letter informing me of this, my initial reaction was, “Do I have to, like, do anything?”

Apparently, the answer to this is yes. They require forty bucks on my part, apparently to fund the important activities they perform, such as mailing letters and demanding money. In addition, they require at least twenty hours of community service, at least three of which have to be completed by the eleventh of November. Not too bad. In fact, they even gave us a sheet listing possible volunteer activities, such as:

• Scooping out pumpkin goop for a jack-o-lantern festival
• Visiting old people, who we’ve never met before and probably never will again
• Cleaning public buildings
• Making sandwiches

Clearly, they want us to aspire to gretness. Since I’ve never thought of myself as much of a “people person”, in that I never have interactions with people, at least not in person, the old people angle is out. I won’t much enjoy cleaning things, especially since my house is decorated in the popular “stuff everything in the closet” method. And, if I ever made someone a sandwich, they would only be able to use it as a sponge.

So, I had to go with the pumpkin-scooping job. I called the listed number, but got to her answer machine, which stated, “We no longer require pumpkin scoopers. If, however, you were to leave your name and number, there is a slight chance we have an opening for you. Thank you.” I left a message, not expecting much. Fortunately, by some miracle, she called back, telling me to come on Sunday for three hours. Which is a convenient amount of time, to say the least. So, I’m going there tomorrow, to scoop goop out of pumpkins for three hours straight. Sounds like fun, no?

Oh, also happened this week: I bought these four awesome shirts. Which brings my grand total number of awesome shirts to… four.

Get Active

Not physically, I mean. That hurts too much, what with the pulling of tendons and the moving and the muscles contracting and the joints turning and the tendons stretching and all sorts of other nouns verbing. I meant this website. Which has been inactive since around September. In case anyone has been paying attention.

This is not because my life hasn’t been busy. In fact, my life has been surprisingly interesting lately. Too interesting. Now that it’s resuming regularly (except for PSAT’s tomorrow, which are these silly tests that tell us how well we would do on a test if we took it with a year’s worth less information than we will be) I can once again post with aplomb. (Look in a dictionary).

So, what has been happeneing? Well, I got into the LittleBigPlanet Beta, for one thing. It was cool, but I did notice a little thing. See, the beta went active on the 23rd. Of September. At around this point, I got tons of emails telling me to go to Sony’s official homepage. I didn’t. October came around. The beta continued. Sony, apparently, had wanted, wanted, to give me a beta code, but I, fearing salespeople, had shied away from their site. Great. So then, finally, on the eighth, Sony finally, begrudgingly, sent me a code.

Yay! Except… the beta ran out less than a week later. So, I missed out on fifteen whole days of awesome. But I can only guess that they did this because I didn’t go to their site. I will be going to the websites much more often now. That Resistance 2 Beta’s just around the corner.

As for the beta’s actual content, it was pretty cool. They gave us a handful of editing tools, way too many stickers, and the first area from the game (including the final iteration of the first level we saw, an awesome throwback). A few qualms, however- most notable with lag and the fact that gamers, appaerently, are not very creative. I noticed LittleBigColossus standing out from the pack, as did… wait… there’s gotta be another one…

So there’s that. Other exciting things that heppened whilst I was gone? Well, I became quite excited about the upcoming Fallout 3. After all, it features a unique experience concerning blah blah blah you can punch a guy so hard, his head falls off. That deserves a look-see. Plus, it’s made by that same guys as Oblivion, which I liked. A lot. Even though I got… wait for it… THE CONSOLE VERSION. I KNOW. Apparently, there’s some sort of unwritten rule that allows PC gamers to subjugate and cutterly control the lesser, console-playing masses. Judging from forums, this seems to be the general attitude. So, please accept my apologies. Also, if it makes anything better, I do occationally play Peggle.

Also, my body was recently brutally assaulted by some kind of martian death virus clearly not of this world. Perhaps this explains the headaches, stomachaches, armaches, and aches in various other body parts as well. I am thankful this is over with, as sickness effectively halves all my stats. Should I continue the metaphor, or end the article? I thought so.