A Day In The Life Part 2

Fifth Hour – Biology

Red Dog (the male associate of 5) has changed his Birthday Song from second hour from a Chinese one to a “Communist Leader” one. Problem is, he can only come up with those two and one other Russian guy, so he’s sitting in Biology class trying to think of some more.
RD has this little quirk – attention deafness. It’s like the opposite of ADD. When he starts paying attention to something, he REALLY pays attention to it; and is literally oblivious to anything and everything around him. I proved this once before. He was two feet away from me talking to Biology Teacher. I said his name 4 or 5 times, getting louder every time, then I half-shouted “I want to make hot, passionate love to RD!” The entire class heard (I had some explaining to do, since most of them didn’t hear my buildup of trying to prove that he couldn’t hear me). He turned around a few minutes later, completely oblivious, and asked “What'd I miss?”
Anyway, so this attention-deafness kicks in. The following exchange between me and him:
“I can’t think of any more Communist leaders!”
“Joseph Stalin.”
“Man, I know there are more.”
“Jo-seph Sta-lin.”
“More Russian guys.”
“JOSEPH STALIN.”
“Can you think of any?”
“Yes. Joseph Stalin.”
“Right, Stalin! What was his first name?”
We then proceed to get into a class argument about whether or not Boris Yeltsin was communist or not. When I get a pass to go to my locker to get a worksheet I forgot, RD comes with, and we detour to History Teacher’s room. We walk in on him standing at his podium lecturing a bunch of freshmen.
Red Dog: Are you busy?
HT: ….
RD: We have a question. Was Boris Yeltsin communist?
HT: Yes. He was democratically elected, but he was a communist first.
RD: Thanks!
(RD and I are leaving and are halfway out the door)
HT: Wait! What the heck for?
RD: I’m writing a Birthday Song –
Me: - Inspired by your second hour today.
HT: Aren’t you two supposed to be in Bio right now?
RD: Yes.
On the way back, we decide to add Lee Harvey Oswald to the list, broadening the scope from “Communist leaders” to “famous people who were probably kind of communist”.

Sixth Hour – Language Arts
We’re starting Going After Cacciato. After an argument about how to pronounce “Cacciato”, we start reading aloud. “Oyster” is mispronounced. Swear words are read. A deep literary discussion ensues about whether or not a “roach” only refers to marijuana or also a hand-rolled cigarette.

Seventh Hour – Pre-Calculus
For the annual writing project, we were assigned to write songs, poems or short stories with three trig concepts in them. One boy from my class wrote three love songs to our math teacher, and performed then on guitar with vocal help from his friend in calc. (Side Note: Both performers were also members of the Nads.) The songs are priceless, with lines like “I want to be adjacent to your hypotenuse” and “together we can defy the Law of Cosines”. (If the two brilliant minds who wrote the songs want to send them to me, I’ll happily post them here) I comment aloud that I think the district kind of frowns on that. Math Teacher has to leave, and a sub oversees while we sit on the floor and discuss music, religion, our criteria for the opposite sex, and global warming.

A Day In The Life

Strange as it may seem, this isn't an anecdotal compilation or anything. This all happened in one school day (Thursday, April 26). And while today was a little more colorful than most, this is pretty much what it's like to be surrounded by IB kids all day. I'm stretching it out into 2 posts because it's long. This is also your formal introduction to 5, Red Dog (*eyeroll*) and Ex.

First Hour – Psychology
Today we’re working on a worksheet that gives us situations in life and has us write down all the parts of the brain that it takes. At the end, you have to come up with a few examples. Since Psych is the smallest class we have, personal discussions have a tendency to become class discussions. This causes some tension between Roi, who sits behind me, and her ex-boyfriend, who has a tendency to make inane or obnoxious comments, to which we respond with an irritated snarkiness fueled (at least in my case) more by amusement than any true grievance. So for one of my examples, I wrote “Ex makes a stupid comment, and you get annoyed”. Roi and I find this incredibly hilarious and share with Goa, another member of 5 (our 5-girl ‘clique’ composed of me (Sal), Roi, Geo, Goa, and Meg). One of Ex’s friends reads it and informs us that we are being “bitchy” about the assignment, to which Roi replies “so?” which cracks me up again. Later on, Ex is having a conversation with another of his friends across the room, and says “but retarded people are always happy!” I turn around, looking confused, and say “but you get into bad moods all the time!”
“I’m not retarded!” he snaps back, and right on cue, Ex’s friend shouts “That’s not true!” in response to Ex’s original statement. The overlapping banter keeps us amused for a while.

Second Hour – History
It’s Meg's birthday today, so History Teacher calls her up to the front. We sing to her. “Spanish!” the class shouts, and despite the genuine Spanish-speakers protesting that the version we learn in Spanish class “isn’t even the real song”, we perform a rousing rendition anyway. After singing it a third time in French, a girl who knows Farsi sings that version. Then History Teacher gets into the act, demanding multilingual versions of the Birthday Song from all the bilingual kids in class. We hear it in Albanian, Japanese, Romanian, Chinese, and Hindi, even though “Hindi doesn’t have a birthday song!” The +1 Guy member of 5 - who is henceforth referred to as "Red Dog" (don't look at me, he chose it) - decides to write his own Chinese version and starts singing “Mao ze Dong, Chiang Kai Shek” to the tune of the Birthday Song. Then we talk about the JFK assassination.

Third Hour – Spanish
We’re working on the skit for the Cinco de Mayo skit competition. Our skit is a life-size re-enactment of the board game Clue. You may remember from your childhood that one of the weapons is a lead pipe. What you may not know is that when you try to make a long, cylindrical item like that out of a large piece of cardboard, the outcome is, as Spanish Teacher put it, “wrong”. Add that to the fact that the Spanish word for pipe is “pipa”, pronounced “pee-pah”, and you’ve got a problem. We decide to change the weapon to poison in a chalice. The problem is, the kid playing the pipa just won’t let go of the idea, and insists that he cam find a way to make it work. What he ends up doing is making a long cardboard thing that attaches to the front of him. To kill the victim, a tall, muscular football player, instead of hitting him over the head with a long piece of cardboard, he sort of… jumps at/on him a few times.
We start working on the chalice.

Fourth Hour – Lunch
We eat outside, at a table adjacent to the IB Seniors. One of them explains his “Homie don’t right-click” t-shirt to Meg. A “nerdy t-shirt” discussion follows. (Favorites: “I wish I were DNA Helicase so I could unzip your genes”, and one that says “Schrödinger’s cat is dead” on the front and “Schrödinger’s cat is not dead” on the back.) Food is thrown. I am informed that “emo kid” (from the scavenger hunt) goes to our school and was spotted in the hallway that morning. More food is thrown.

Target does not like Scavenger Hunts

Last night, a couple of the senior boys set up a scavenger hunt for a bunch of their friends (almost all in IB), and it was hella fun! Proof that IB kids really can have a killer time, stay out till curfew, and annoy Target employees. We divided into two teams of four (which were later added to as more people arrived) and had an hour to drive around town taking photographs of team members with the items on the lists. We did this three times with three different lists of ten items.
Some of the things just required luck and a bit of attention, such as “tagging” (which we jumped a fence to get to, as we couldn’t park on the highway, so we parked in the parking lot of a sex-toy store right near my school and laughed at the couples coming out with shopping bags) and “a painting” (which we found in a closed Starbucks, so we took a photo of a group member pressed against their window). Others required a little bit of ingenuity, like “three things mentioned in the title of a movie” – we used a toy penguin, a Finding Nemo toy, and a Cinderella Barbie; and “all group members holding things that rhyme” – we used a lock, a clock, a sock and some baby blocks. Still others took balls. For “guy in a pink shirt”, we gave up trying to find one and instead went into a clothing store, grabbed one off the racks, and asked a man waiting for his girlfriend to try on clothes to model it for us, which he agreed to. An “emo kid” also let us take a picture with her, and a mother let us photograph her baby. We got shot down by a Target security guard who wouldn’t take a photo with us for “person in uniform”, so we got some Target employees out for a smoke break in the background of a photo. We cheated on a few – for “construction vehicle” we used a toy Tonka truck, but for others we were serious – for “every team member on a swing set”, we all squished onto two swings (at this point we had 5 team members) and held out the camera at arm’s length to take the photo.
Other highlights: These things were al about speed – we all piled into someone’s car and zipped around our town looking for things. At one point, for the “arrow” sign, my friend and I jumped out of the car as it was stopped for a left turn into a parking lot, and darted onto the median. (On the way, we got whistled at by an old guy in a pickup truck – gross!) By the end of the night, our team had two girls in walking casts, but we still made good time, thanks to powerful cars and piggyback rides from the two guys on the team.
Upon asking someone in Target to take a photo of us all holding “things that begin with the first letter of all team member’s names”, one of the employees (who has a history of following my friends around in the store) told us that we couldn’t take photos in Target! Why, I’m not quite sure, but the other team got the same scolding as well.
For “barbed wire”, we stopped outside of a juvenile detention center and took a photo of the security fence, which aroused the interest of the security guards, so we left.
Disclaimer: We did nothing illegal (with the possible exception of take photos in Target?) or dangerous; just mildly irritating and stupid.
We never actually tallied points, but I’m pretty sure our team won. Afterwards, we all went to a nearby 5&Diner and had ice cream and made a lot of noise.