Uni High Gargoyle Staff Blog

For those of you who’ll be sophomores next year, here’s what you can generally expect in some of the classes you’ll be taking. Now keep in mind this is all based on my own experience, so don’t just take my word for it. If you’re curious, ask some other Class of ‘09ers.

Chemistry: On most days, you’ll either be taking notes during a lecture or doing a small-group lab activity. In addition to unit exams, expect frequent quizzes — most of which are announced only the day before, so keep up with the material.

Oh, and did I mention that you should keep up with the material? The very first few sections may seem extremely basic and easy, giving you the illusion that chemistry’s an incredibly easy class that you don’t have to study for. Well, in chemistry you build from one section to the next, so in order to do well on the next section, you will need to have mastered the previous sections. This is basically true for all classes, but especially important for chemistry. Pay attention in class and don’t procrastinate, and you’ll do fine.

• Typical homework assignments: Read section, do problems from textbook.
• Grading system: No weighting; quizzes usually 20 points, exams usually 100.
• Extra credit: Usually a few points on every quiz/exam; also a few extra EC assignments.
• Do most students take notes in class? Yes.
• What should I bring to class? Notebook (provided on first day), pencils, calculator, goggles (when announced).

English: Usually, class periods are spent discussing the previous night’s assigned reading. Every Tuesday and Friday, you’re given a portion of the class to read a book of your choice; every Friday a reading journal entry about your chosen book is due, and once per quarter you will give a five-minute “book talk” about a book of your choice (it doesn’t have to be the one you’re reading for the reading journals). Also happening on a quarterly basis are essays (typically four to five pages) and exams.

Quizzes on the previous night’s reading are given on an unannounced basis; there are several of these per quarter. They are usually worth eight points: two vocabulary questions and one question about the reading. Quiz grades — together worth about 15 percent of your quarter grade — tend to be the weakest part of most people’s grades, but you can avoid this by actually doing the reading and learning the vocabulary words each night. (It seems to be easier said than done.)

• Typical homework assignments: Reading.
• Grading system: Quizzes, presentations, papers, exams, reading journal entries, and participation are each worth 10 to 20 percent of your quarter grade.
• Extra credit: Occasionally you can get extra credit by doing optional assignments.
• Do most students take notes in class? Yes (but occasionally), when literary terms are discussed.
• What should I bring to class? The assigned book and a notebook for copying down definitions of literary terms; on Tuesdays and Fridays, also bring your independent reading book and reading journal.

History: If classes are split the same way they were last year, two-thirds of the class will be in Chris Butler’s sections, and the other third will be with Billy Vaughn. I was in Butler’s class, and most days the routine goes like this: You turn in the homework assignment (a flowchart summary), and Butler talks about that flowchart in detail for the rest of the class period. Unit tests usually consist of date questions, short-answer questions, longer-answer questions (which most people answer with flowcharts), identifications, an essay, and usually up to seven points of extra credit. Regarding the tests, some will tell you to “just memorize the flowcharts,” but you really should also read through the attendant readings to get a deeper understanding of things.

On the first day of class, you will be advised to spend a short amount of time per night looking over the unit flowcharts (in addition to the required homework, of course) so that you don’t have to cram seven or so the night before the test. Heed this advice to reduce the need to stay up late the night before a test.

The other things you’ll experience in this class include movie clips, timed slideshows showcasing art from the relevant period, and quiz bowls. You’ll like them.

• Typical homework assignments: Summarize a flowchart.
• Grading system: Average of all homework (20 points each) worth one test; paper (100 points) worth one test; each 100-point test worth one test; each 50-point test weighted to be worth one test.
• Extra credit: For class participation, winning quiz bowls, and on homework and tests.
• Do most students take notes in class? Many do at first, but it trails off toward the end of the year.
• What should I bring to class? Just a notebook, if you’d like to feel more studious than the people sitting around you.

All of the other classes I took this year are equally as important as the aforementioned ones, but I won’t give a detailed preview of them since they’re not ones the majority of you rising sophomores will take. Basically, just make an effort to do well, and you’ll do fine.

As you might expect, there’s a lot more homework and studying to do sophomore year — don’t be surprised to get homework in every class even on the first day of school — but you’ll still be able to find time to have fun. And when the year is over, you can rejoice about the fact that you’ve completed more than half of your Uni High career.

— Jason He

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 2:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am a senior. You know, Class of 2007, about to don the awkwardly fitting gown that makes my shoulders look too broad and that silly-looking cap with the tassle, that whole shebang.

But you know what else I am?

I am studying. I am studying for finals.

Right, so is the rest of Uni, I understand that. But you know who isn’t? An entire gang of seniors at nearly every school but Uni.

From Blacksburg High School to Centennial High School, seniors are usually exempt from their final exams if they have maintained a specific grade point average and not had an excessive amount of absences. If the senior fits the aforementioned criteria, then taking a final exam is optional and if taken, only counts if it raises the final grade.

Here are three quick reasons (in no particular order) why Uni should consider (very very very seriously) about implementing such a senior policy with regard to final exams:

1. Seniors Love Senior Privileges!
   
   As a senior, it is always nice to feel as if your seniority has its own perks. Most schools have rules where only seniors can park in certain spots, go out for lunches, get out of school a few days early, etc. Although I like the fact that at Uni it is difficult to feel serious differences between the various grades, one small (and very helpful) extra senior privilege is great.
   
   

2. Sick Seniors!
   
   We are graduating. We are off to jobs and colleges. And I’m sorry, I know that we have all heard this several times, but at this point of the year, senioritis has turned into full-fledged senior ebola, senior meningitis, senior typhoid fever … you get the idea.
   
   

3. Seniors Love Quality Time!
   
   Come on, rather than administering an exam, wouldn’t teachers rather swap good old Uni stories with their beloved students who are about to leave?
   

I could probably elaborate more and come up with better reasoning that would not make teachers roll their eyes, but I really have to go study some more calculus, but in short, let’s have a senior policy with regard to exams!

— Dana Al-Qadi

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 7:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Because today should not go unnoticed.

Because some things should reach across partisan lines.

Because some people think patriotism is a dying chauvinistic institution that belongs in the forgotten annals of world and American history, but they are wrong.

With the advent of the Internet, there are hundreds, thousands of tributes to American troops. Some are cheesy and silly, some are heartfelt, but all the real ones give you a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes.

Some of my best, most real memories are visiting Arlington Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, or traveling to the Lincoln Memorial and reading the Gettysburg Address inscribed into the south wall.

It’s a wonderful country. Thank you to all the men and women in uniform who served and continue to serve. Other people, from Lincoln to Reagan, have said it better than I ever could, but thank you.

— Ben Hyman

Posted by bhyman at 6:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Hey guys, this is the last day of school, and I am having a hard time getting motivated to write a true blog entry. I decided since Wikipedia has been the inspiration for countless blog entries over the year, I am going to give my opinion on random articles I select.

OK, here we go.

The first article I have randomly chosen is: “Certified Server Validation.” After further reading, I learned that this is a method of e-mail authentication intended to prevent spam. Well, there is not much to say about this one; at least you now know what CSV is.

The next article is: “Air Saint-Pierre.” It is a small airline that is headquartered in France. It has seven destinations, a fleet size of four, and 41 total employees. Impressive. Didn’t know an airline is worth operating with such a small infrastructure.

The next article doesn’t get any more interesting. In fact, I have absolutely no opinions on “Pikelot.” Supposedly, it is one of the outer islands of the state of Yap, part of the Federated States of Micronesia. Where?

Let’s hope we get a fun article to talk about. I randomed and we now get to learn about “dammar gum.” It is used as a glazing agent in foods. It is obtained by tapping the Dipterocarpaceae family of trees in India and East Asia.

Next we get “footpad.” It is basically an obsolete term for a stealthy thief. The term comes from the padding thieves use on the bottom of their shoe so they won’t make excessive noise. What can I say about this? I just hope you don’t go astray when you grow up and become a footpad.

Alright! We finally get a beefy article on William P. Foster. He created the famous Florida A&M University Marching “100” Band in 1946. I have personally seen the band at halftime during one of the Illini football games. I didn’t see anything special in the band that made national headlines. Nonetheless, I don’t know much about marching bands, so props to Foster.

If you ever visit Mexico City, be sure to stop at Tlalpan, because according to our beloved Wikipedia, it is home of Ajusco, a volcanic mountain peak, and National Park, one of the highest mountains in Mexico City. Many native farmers have been forced out of the area due to new developments. One of those developments is Restaurante Arroyo, the world’s largest Mexican restaurant.

That’s all folks. Sorry I didn’t land any more interesting articles for you. On the upside, at least you now know some random facts that you can impress your family with.

And shoutouts to the boys track team. The 4x800 squad is in the state finals.

— Ranny Ma

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Have you ever been in that situation where you know you are supposed to be doing something, but then you don’t do that something, and instead do something else that is completely unrelated?

Or, have you been in those situations when you know you aren’t supposed to do something, but then you do it anyway?

Well, those situations are the ones I find myself in more and more these days. With the sweet summer getting closer and closer, I am finding it harder and harder to do the right thing. It’s like some alien has taken over my brain, and in any situation I get myself into, it screams to me, “Carpe Diem!”

So what are the “bad” things little Miss Andrea Park has done?

The first is I bought a kitten without my mother’s permission. These kittens were being sold off at the senior auction. I couldn’t resist. I wanted a cat. So, I bought a cat.

Furthermore I didn’t tell mom that I bought that cat until four days later when I knew she was in a very, very good mood (and I was out the door, leaving for prom).

The second is I went to the “Pirates of the Carribbean” movie premiere last night instead of studying for finals.

I know, you’re probably thinking, “Man, that Andrea. She’s bad.”

But for me, it felt pretty bold and badass. Especially because I’m going to Michigan this weekend, which leads me to the third bad thing.

This weekend I am going on a fun weekend trip to Michigan with a couple of friends. Well, this wouldn’t be “bad” if it were any ordinary weekend. But, it’s the weekend before finals! Not only that, it’s the weekend before finals of junior year (which are perhaps the most important finals I’ll ever take).

I’ve weighed the pros and cons over and over again. Honestly, the cons probably outweigh the pros. However, I still want to go to Michigan!

Although these “bad” things are on the mild side on the scale of “badness” (if they are bad at all), I still feel guilty (which is why this entry is a sort of confession). But, what’s weird is that this feeling of guilt is mixed with feelings of total take-charge and freedom.

I’m making these decisions myself. I’m doing things that I want to do.

Even though my parents have pressed very hard for me not to keep the cat, go to the movie premiere, or go to Michigan, I still did.

I feel more responsible, adult-like, and mature from my irresponsibility.

So for right now, I’m going to stick with my bad “bad” decisions. I’m going to be proud that I made them. I like the weird feeling I get from doing the wrong thing.

— Andrea Park

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wow. Junior year is, for all intents and purposes, over. Finished. Done. No more.

Where did all the time go? Last time I actually thought “Wow, I’m going to be a senior soon!” was at the beginning of the year, and now look where I am. Time flies when you’re having fun, you might say.

I’m sure all rising seniors go through this same thought process, but I’ll still go through it. In less than one year, I’ll have applied (and hopefully been accepted) to colleges. I’ll have gone through the final year of high school. I’ll have run my last cross country meet and attended my final prom.

In a little over a year I’ll be out of the house I’ve lived in for about 14 years. That’s a big deal. I won’t have my parents there to wake me up when I sleep late, or to make me the food I enjoy eating so much. I’ll be living in a dormitory, in a hall with tens of other students who are more or less like me, but whom I may not get along with.

Ah, just thinking about being a senior makes me become less motivated. Is it possible to have senioritis before senior year starts? Because if so, I’m afraid I’ve got the beginnings of it. The summer won’t last forever, and when I come back I’m going to have to go through the exact day-in day-out grind I’ve gone through this year. I’m definitely looking forward to that.

I can once again look forward to getting up, going to school, then going to practice, going home, doing my homework and eating dinner, and then going to bed, only to look forward to the same thing the next day, and the next.

On the other hand, maybe it won’t be so bad. There could be senior year perks that I hadn’t thought about. The senior trip will be cool, for instance. I think for now I’ll just try to put it out of my mind until senior year actually starts, and just enjoy my summer.

… The last summer in high school!

— Carl Zielinski

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Summer is just around the corner, and for the first time in my life, I’m a little sad that the school year is ending.

This might largely be due to the fact that next year I will be a junior, a year that is notorious for being the hardest year in high school. Probably once the year has started I’ll think it’s not as bad as I thought it would be, but all the same, right now the apprehension is great.

But I have another reason making me wish the year wasn’t over. Two of my classmates will be leaving at the end of the year, and the chances that I will keep in touch with them are very slim.

I’m a terrible correspondent, and since I don’t have IM or a Facebook page, my only methods of communication are e-mail and the telephone, neither of which can replace the face-to-face conversations we have had during the past two years. I’ve never been able to talk well on the phone because I can never seem to think of anything to say, and e-mails feel a little too impersonal.

I’ve had a few friends move away before, and now I’ve completely lost touch with them. In fact I’ve even lost touch with a friend who lives right across the street. If I can’t do that then how can I maintain a long-distance friendship?

But maybe I’ve changed. After all, technology has changed since I was little, so perhaps now I’ll be able to keep in touch with the people who are leaving. Nonetheless, it’s a bittersweet moment.

— Avanti Chajed

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It has finally really truly hit me that I am going to be a senior next year. And that this year’s seniors, the Class of 2007 … well, they’re going to be gone.

There will be no more upperclassmen. The members of the Class of 2008 will be the rulers of the school. There won’t be anymore upperclassmen to talk to, no one to talk to about classes that they had taken last year. This strikes me as odd, and scary, but exciting all at the same time.

When I first walked into Uni as a scr … no, sorry, prospective student, I was in awe of the current seniors. They were so … big. And scary. It didn’t help that they day that I was there, many of them were dressed up because they had senior debates that day. They were big, and grown-up, and completely untouchable.

There was the same aura of mystery surrounding the seniors during my freshman and sophomore years. However, that disappeared this year. The seniors this year weren’t terrifying; they were actual people who I could have long conversations with, commiserate with, laugh with.

And next year, it’s hard to think that I am going to be one of those seniors that I was so frightened of. I don’t think I’m that big; in fact, I’ve grown a maximum of maybe four inches since I came to Uni. And I don’t think of myself as a very scary person at all.

Funny how perspective changes.

— Michelle Gao

P.S. Over the summer when people ask you what grade you’re in, do you say the grade you just finished or the one you’re going to be in? Because I just think it’s obnoxious to say the grade I’m going to be in, because I haven’t actually experienced being in that grade yet; but on the other hand, I don’t want to say I’m in a grade that I already finished. Oyyy.

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Handsomely rugged, smart, great sense of humor, equipped with a large vocabulary, and charming are all excellent qualities for any man to possess. When I recently heard a recording by standup comedian Dane Cook from a CD called “Retaliation: Want,” I immediately found myself laughing along to many of the witty one-liners and clever anecdotes and wishing to meet him in person.

His frantic pace and unexpected randomness keeps listeners on their toes as they anxiously anticipate his next creative and wildly outrageous thought. In addition to this is his excellent use of vocabulary. His ability to sprinkle in large and interesting vocab words elevate his humor to a more sophisticated level, and it also makes me realize that although Cook’s humor may be crude at times, he actually is a rather intelligent man.

His storytelling skills rival those of Aesop’s, and his wild imagination can keep you giggling for hours after hearing him. After all, who wouldn’t crack up at the thought of a bunch of friends being tossed around in the back of a cement mixer?

Cook’s comedy is all over the place, and though there isn’t much of a connecting thread between jokes, comprehension remains at an all-time high. From hearing about Cook’s dream pet (an armor-clad monkey) to his dream house (a mystery house, fully equipped with secret laboratories and trap doors leading to a swamp three miles away) you get a wide variety of ideas and funny comments which keep you smiling constantly.

Great for summer laughs and that wonderful rest and relaxation after a tough week of finals, I highly recommend listening to Cook’s comedic masterpieces.

— Shivani Khanna

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 8:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As weird as I think it is, being Jewish and all, I was confirmed last night. In the reformed movement of Judaism, once a child reaches 16, he or she goes through a confimation ceremony that essentially represents his or her graduation from religious school.

And so, I, along with fellow Uni students Sam Imlay, Hannah Leskosky, and Laura Dripps, and the rest of the confirmation class, was honored in such a ceremony.

The evening consisted mainly of a service led by the confirmation class, as well as a speech by each confirmand. The service also celebrated Shavuot, the holiday on which God handed down the 10 commandments.

The whole thing was kind of uneventful. One kid messed up his prayer, no one stood up on cue, and someone else had to pee so bad that they were forced to get up and leave in the middle of the service.

But, other than that, nothing really happened.

Besides, for most people, this ceremony doesn’t mean anything. It isn’t like the Bar/Bat Mitzvah, the other big deal in a Jewish childhood. We didn’t have to read Torah, and we didn’t have to spend the whole year studying and practicing.

I especially felt no strong connection to this whole confirmation schtick. I had one of the lowest attendance rates during the classes. The essays that I had to write for the class were last-minute and awful. And, I didn’t volunteer to lead any parts of the service, so all I did last night was carry the Torah during a processional and then deliver my speech.

However, there was one aspect to the evening that was significant for me.

Let me tell you a little something about Champaign’s Sinai Temple: They think that we are still in the 19th century.

The rabbi was going to make us wear skirts for the service. When I requested that the girls be able to wear nice slacks instead, he flat out refused, saying that we had never done it that way. By that logic, no change would ever happen.

I wasn’t going to let this go. Skirts suck, and I wasn’t about to wear one to this confirmation service. Especially because we all had to sit on the bima, the raised platform where all the religious bulljive goes down, which put our crotches right at eye level to the congregation. So, unless some perverted old man wanted to see a lot of panties all night, then it seemed to me that skirts were not a good idea.

Finally, it just seems ridiculous to tell a girl that, in this day and age, where nice slacks are becoming just as fancy as skirts, that she can’t wear pants. We go to a reformed synagogue; women wear pants all the time.

Thanks for bearing with me through that little rant. The point of my story is that I won. The rabbi caved, and talked to the parents. Enough of the parents supported my side that the girls were able to wear slacks to the service, and four of the six took advantage. Yay!

And, in the spirit of the event, where we were celebrating our adulthood, I did feel very accomplished and grown up. People had listened to what I had to say.

Now, I don’t really know what one should take away from this rambling. But I guess now you know that the next time you are confirmed at Sinai Temple, you can wear pants regardless of gender.

— Sarah Pfander

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 7:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today I rushed to school, because I knew what I was going to see when I arrived. I, unlike most of the Uni school, was one of the privileged seniors who knew just what lay behind the lounge doors before Ms. Kovacs swung them open.

Balloons. Lots and lots of balloons. Different colors. Different shapes. And even one that was termed “the butt balloon” by some of the guys for its resemblance to well … a butt. Mature, I know.

I don’t want to call our bit of ingenuity a “senior prank,” because I’m not sure it qualifies as one. It’s hardly daring and definitely doesn’t make a statement. I doubt people are going to say, “The class of 2007?!? They were too cool! They put balloons in their lounge!”

The initial idea was playpen balls, but the cost caused us to rethink that idea. Another idea was discarded because of the potential for too much school damage.

Although some people expressed their opinions of our action on the balloons, I thought it was a senior antic that fit our class very well. Subtle, colorful, and non-inciting of faculty wrath.

But I especially liked the chalk drawings in the front. I liked seeing “We Love Ellen” scribbled underneath her window and the soccer records displayed in bright and bold colors. It embodied some of the things we were most proud of as a class and wanted to celebrate before we left.

Maybe that’s even better than spreading a rumor that syphillis was spreading rapidly as the Blacksburg High School Class of 2004 did. Although their idea was truly a prank that even had many parents sending their kids off to be examined, ours was sentimental.

Was it perfect? No, we could probably have done something a little more flamboyant, and I really do hope that the Class of 2008 pulls out all the stops (I am sure they will), but I also love balloons and loved filling the lounge with them.

(And our balloons were much better than the Class of 2006’s prank, which was … as far as I recall, nothing?)

— Dana Al-Qadi

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This summer I am going to have the opportunity to go to France for a couple of weeks with the French class, and as the school days are winding down I’m gradually becoming more and more excited about the trip. Although I have been busy doing homework and studying and have yet to even think about packing a suitcase, mentally I have been making various notes as to what I should be getting ready for.

This last week my host sister, Margaux, whom I will stay with for about a week during the trip, has been able to keep contact with me through e-mail. Me not being perfect at French, and she not being perfect at English (though thankfully enough she does speak English!), the e-mails obviously aren’t always fully gramatically correct, but nonetheless we have been able to keep a decent conversation going.

I was under the impression that being in France for the beginning of June I would be able to attend school with my temporary host sister, but as she is in high school, I was informed that she gets out of school the same time Uni does.

I was attempting to think about the different things I would want to do while I was in France, something that would give me a taste of the French culture. Something that I can’t get here in America.

But then I realized that no matter what, even if I do just go shopping (and obviously we can go shopping in America), being able to do something ordinary in another country is a new experience in itself.

For example, Madame Lopez informed us that when you are in France it is considered impolite, when walking in to a grocery store, to not say hello to everyone you come into eye contact with. Personally that seems a little strange, considering if I went to a store, and a bunch of people I didn’t know were saying hello to me, instead of feeling warm and welcomed I would more likely feel compelled to leave.

There will be many little things that I will have to get used to as well. For example, as it is throughout most of Europe, the electrical outlets are different. On top of that, not only will it be harder to use my many hair dryers, hair straighteners, hair curlers, etc., but since we will be constantly traveling from city to city, I was told not to pack any of those things if possible. “You will get there and be dead tired from lugging your heavy suitcase everywhere. The lighter the better.”

I would also imagine that I would want to buy quite a few authentic French items, but attempting to communicate with already stressed-out sales clerks will be more than a hassle.

Usually as summer progresses, I tend to gain weight if anything since I spend the majority of my time eating and participating in minimal physical activity. Contrary to what I’d thought, though, for the trip it was recommended that we bring belts in our suitcases since our pants will most likely be too big at the end of the trip.

I suppose this is because on top of all the walking around we will be doing (especially since we are not allowed to drive motorized vehicles — even scooters), our meals will be limited. This isn’t to say that we will be starved, but instead we will all be on budgets, and unlike sitting at home over summer in America, it’s not well accepted to just open up the refrigerator and grab a snack every hour or so. This will most definitely help me to learn (forcibly nonetheless) to resist my cravings!

In general, I’m really looking forward to the trip. It’ll be quite a new experience, and hopefully not too difficult!

— Lizzy Warner

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As clichéd as it feels, this is my last blog entry, so I feel obligated to discuss at some length my reflections on this school year.

The segue between freshman and sophomore year gave me the feeling similar to the one I got between watching “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions.” More modern example: the feeling between the second “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie and the third one (which, incidentally, looks awesome). In words that the other 90 percent of my audience will understand, there wasn’t much difference between the two years; one stopped abruptly, and things picked right up where they left off a good while later.

Case in point: Just like last year, this year I ate lunch in the same place at the same time; I had math in the morning in Room 206, and science in the morning on the third floor. I did the same sports in PE (with the tragic inclusion of pickleball) and had a similar English curriculum (read a book, talk about it, write about it, perhaps do a group presentation, repeat). In history class, despite prevailing lethargy (you try sitting in a warm, dark room right after lunch or fitness) I learned a lot of truly interesting material and got used to spending the better part of the night every two weeks steadily absorbing pages of flowcharts into my brain.

I had a lot of fun in Japanese, with an endless parade of inside jokes, including (in general order from least to most “inside”): the tribulations of filling out workbook pages by listening to the supplemental CD; the textbook’s jaw-dropping attempts to explain the derivations of kanji; the importance of okurigana; and the elusive definition of “ashita.”

I had eighth hour free, and oscillated between hanging around until the end of the day to finish homework in a more productivity-conducive environment and getting home to take my mind off schoolwork as fast as humanly possible.

The only really noteworthy difference was that I signed up for journalism. As I had more or less expected, it was one of the most demanding parts of my courseload, but there’s certainly a feeling of accomplishment now that I look back. Writing on this page once a week has been fun, and it was always kind of neat to see my work get published. I’d also like to think that I’ve partially overcome my fear of letting my opinions become visible to anyone with an Internet connection.

In any event, I expect next year will be rather different: I’ll have a new floor to call home, I’ll have several new teachers, and for the first time, I’ll be sitting alongside a pretty high proportion of non-Class-of-2009 people, what with the combined junior-senior PE and English classes and the two fine arts classes I’ve registered for. And I can’t wait for the monstrous load of junior-year homework that I’ve been promised.

Until then, I’m going to have myself a great summer. I’m going to be heretical by waking up early (sorry, I never really liked the feeling of stumbling out of bed at noon unless it meant I wasn’t going back to school for a few days). I’m going to whittle away many a happy hour on my XBox 360. I’m going to strive to get in at least five miles of running and/or biking every day that I’m not off on vacation. There are tons of movies coming out this year that have caught my eye, not to mention some new albums, especially the new offering from the White Stripes, which I’ll be earnestly and amateurishly playing along to after I’ve had a few listens and a few tab searches. I imagine I’ll also do a fair amount of reading.

One more item of business. As of late, as anyone who’s come within 10 feet of my locker recently will note, I’ve become borderline obsessed with xkcd. The first time I saw it was on the day that Ben Fu posted a link to the webcomic in his comment to an entry on this very blog about the merits of owning a cat. The last time I saw it was about 10 minutes before I started working on this blog. The author is surely one of the most clever, insightful and clear-minded people I could name, so I thought I’d conclude my illustrious Gargoyle blogging career with one of my favorite installments.

And that is the proverbial “it.” (“Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” plagiarism!)

P.S. Hey, all of you ersatz copyright police who noticed that comic above: Try not to get too excited. The author permits all kinds of not-for-profit redistribution and, indeed, many forms of for-profit redistribution. To console you, I offer this.

P.P.S. Yes! I’ve been trying to find a good place to use the word “ersatz” for months now.

P.P.P.S. If that strikes you as rather odd, this is my defense.

P.P.P.P.S. Yes, this is definitely one too many postscripts.

— Andrew Lovdahl

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have made it into the last week of regular school! That would normally make me really excited, and even give me a boost of energy as all the classes are winding down. This week should be enjoyable.

Unfortunately it is not.

Why, you ask? Because I’m sick.

I was able to survive a month-long barrage of illness, but in the last week of school my immune system fails, and I now have a cold.

This means I really don’t want to be in school. I am suffering with a stuffy head and congestion while I try to pay attention in my classes and succeed in my quest to find a room with a tissue box.

This means that classes, which usually feel really slow around this time of year, seem twice as long at least. This means that the awards ceremony, which is always very long, seems to go on forever. Sometimes it feels like the blue clock in Room 218 is accurately telling the time.

I would like nothing more than to go home, with a nice filled box of tissues, and rest until this stupid illness goes away. But I can’t do that until I trudge through three more days of classes.

At least I have a three-day weekend to look forward to, right?

— Deren Kudeki

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 6:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My sister once said that the three s’s are the least stressful years: subbie, sophomore, senior. But whether or not she’s right (and I definitely don’t think she’s right), I’m glad that the school year is coming to an end.

Besides my English paper revision due tomorrow, a history and a calc test on Friday and finals week, I’m basically home free. Afterwards I’ll finally be able to sleep in till 1 or 2 p.m. and eat breakfast during lunch. I’ll be able to bike/drive to my friends’ houses and make fun of them, and I’ll be able to not worry about work (besides studying for the SAT and summer reading).

However, I’ll also miss some things. 1) Seniors will be gone. 2) Some people going on vacation. Also, I don’t exactly enjoy the idea of becoming a junior next year. It makes me seem old and wrinkly.

Over the summer I’ll be going to some camps, improve my skills in everything, perhaps make a trip to China, and maybe find a job.

I’ll also go on countless adventures with my imagination. G’luck to everyone in surviving the last weeks. Enjoy the summer.

— Alan Liang

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, here it is, my last blog entry. For all (or any) of you loyal viewers out there, I’d like to take this opportunity give my thanks.

We’ve had our shares of fun. I write a 300-ish word entry on some topic that’s on my mind. You read it and occasionally write a comment. Not as exhilarating as telepathy, but we get our ideas across to one another. Plus telepathy sends brainwaves all over the place and takes a lot more effort.

With over a dozen blog entries written a week and three on Mondays alone, I really appreciate you all taking the time to take the time to look over mine, even if it’s just a brief glance. Hopefully you never feel that reading my entries has ever been a waste of time. Sure some of them don’t cover the most innovative and breakthrough topics out there, but on those days I usually pay a little more attention to my writing style.

In general, the blog entries have been pretty informative. I’ve learned a lot about current events, as well as about my fellow Gargoyle staff members.

That’s about it. Sadly, I won’t be regularly writing blogs next year since I’m off to college, but this past year has been great. It’s been four months since my first blog entry in late January, and I’ve enjoyed writing every single one of them.

Thanks again for a great last few months.

— Benjamin Fu

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 9:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Automatic things were created to make our lives easier. They were invented to keep us from exerting extra energy and to save precious seconds in the daily lives of modern people. However, some automatic facilities are even more troublesome than their traditional counterparts.

Take automatic sink faucets for example. Half the time they don’t even work properly. In the bathrooms at Grainger Engineering Library, I would often end up standing in front of a sink — waving at a motion detector — trying to get water to come out. It would be a lot easier if I could just turn a knob to wash my hands rather than waste time trying to get a sensor to detect my presence.

On the other hand, sometimes when I’m standing by a sink looking into the mirror, water would come pouring out from a faucet. It’s a waste of water, not to mention a bit creepy.

The same goes for automatic toilets. Good-quality ones usually work nicely, but the bad-quality ones often don’t flush when you want them to. That’s definitely not good, especially from a sanitary perspective.

Why do we even need automatic toilets? It’s really not that hard to flush a toilet. And then there are some automatic toilets that flush randomly even though it’s not being used. What a waste of resources.

Finally, there are automatic doors. Every time I walk by Follett’s Bookstore on Green Street, the automatic doors slide open. It’s actually quite annoying. Yet every once in a while when I try to enter a store, the sliding doors just won’t open. I’d have to walk around the front door a few times before it detects my presence.

Maybe automatic things and I just don’t get along. But I’m thinking that it’s more because they tend to malfunction. Yes, I admit, they can come in handy sometimes. For example, if you’re carrying heavy boxes, an automatic door would save a lot of trouble. However, many automatic things, such as automatic toilets, are quite useless.

— Elaine Gu

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 6:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I know, everyone will be writing about the big night this week, but that’s all I have to talk about, so here I go.

Prom. The infamous night when teenagers dress in ridiculously expensive dresses, eat fancy food, and then dance together for three straight hours. Everything about prom applies to Uni’s prom here, except my dress cost me 15 bucks.

Overall prom was fun for me. I got to hang out with my friends, and I didn’t spend a bunch of money. Plus the DJ played “Safety Dance.” It was pretty rockin’ on the dance floor at that point.

The lows of prom were picture taking beforehand, mostly because it was weird, and a certain someone was late and therefore I was the only person there who didn’t have a date who was also present, and therefore had to take a picture alone, looking stupid.

Also, there was a fairly awkward moment when I was named prom queen (only at Uni could I be prom queen). I think that the ritual of electing rulers for prom is silly in the first place, and having to perpetuate the ritual myself was kind of weird, but the weirdest thing was that everyone kept congratulating me like I had just done something really really cool, instead of just happening to be in a relationship that people think is cute.

Oh well, in the end I got a tiara to give to my 3-year-old brother (a naked little boy wearing a tiara is a good photo op), and I got to make some cool prom queen jokes. Also, in the future I could join a sorority!

— Bethany Hutchens

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

If Mims can sell a mil’ sayin’ nothin’ on the track, then this Nokia cell phone is destined for success.

Nokia braved the iPhone and Razr 2 craze to announce its “3109 classic.”

It’s the exact opposite of the type of phone that the tech-savvy type are eager to have, with no 3G, no camera, and basically no nothing. The thing’s basically a few ounces of pure phoneness. And, at least on paper, it looks like it’s pretty good at being a basic phone: good battery life and durability, and a Nokia interface that’s renowned for its intuitive structure and ease of use.

I applaud Nokia for announcing such a phone. I certainly wouldn’t want one, but that’s beside the point — this phone clearly appeals to those who prefer simplicity, and there are probably more people preferring simplicity than you’d think.

Just last summer when I was in a Cingular store looking for the most feature-packed free phone I could find, I heard some guy ask a sales rep what their most basic phone was. He said he wanted a phone just to make calls and nothing else.

Sometimes, simplicity can be good. Generally speaking, when a gadget tries to do too many different things, it can’t do any of them particularly well. (There’s even an expression for that.)

But really, when it comes to cell phones, some people (probably excluding most teenagers) just don’t need or want “fancy” features like a full-fledged music player, full Web browsing capabilities, or “even” a camera. From what I’ve heard, some businesses don’t even let employees bring in a camera phone, for security reasons. If anything, fewer features on a cell phone means fewer settings to accidentally screw up.

Good call, Nokia.

— Jason He

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are only two more weeks of school before summer officially begins. These two weeks are also the hardest to get past. The days are longer and hotter, your mind keeps drifting off to how you are going to sleep in during the summer, and you just don’t care anymore.

This is pretty much everyone’s mindset right now, but it is also the worst time to have this mindset.

There are final exams coming up that need to be studied for, but most of us simply can’t find the willpower to do so. In addition, all the teachers have somehow decided that the end of the year is a perfect time for a big paper to be due. Why can’t we just relax for the final two weeks?

We should get everything over with before the last two weeks. And what should we do the last two weeks? We can still have class and homework, but nothing painful. Everyone would appreciate the lack of big tests and 10-page papers.

Or maybe let us stay home and give us one project to work on during the last two weeks. The productivity of the students will probably be the same since tired, grumpy students don’t learn much anyway.

My point is that we deserve a break after a long year.

— Ranny Ma

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With so many of my friends taking APs when they’re only sophomores, I definitely feel I’m on the lazy side like Elaine Gu. Last week I watched them come to school every day looking tired and worn out. By the end of the week they looked like walking zombies.

Although part of me felt guilty that I was taking no APs, the other part felt that some of my friends were going too far. Right now I haven’t even thought about what college I plan on going to or considered starting to study for the SAT. One of my friends missed the PLAN test we took last semester because the SAT was on that same day.

Honestly, I don’t give college as much importance as some people do. I don’t feel my happiness depends on getting into an Ivy League school. Besides, you’re only young once, so why not enjoy your high school years instead of constantly preparing yourself for college? True, it’s good to plan a little, but sometimes it’s nice to live in the present.

I have to say that a week later I don’t feel quite so guilty about being a slacker. When I think about it, not only does the stress of taking APs seem pointless, some of the APs don’t matter that much either. I haven’t even heard of some of the subjects my friends are taking APs for because I never thought there would be a class for them.

And if taking four APs means you have to give up your sanity, then I think I’d much rather be called a slacker.

— Avanti Chajed

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As the end of the school year nears (finally), so does the track season. As such, I’m a little conflicted. While track is a fairly entertaining sport and it keeps me in shape longer so that cross country will be better next year, I’m not sure whether or not I should keep doing it after the year is over.

But why are you conflicted, Carl? Good question! The reasons I should keep doing track are important. First, there’s my nightmare of Doug killing me because he thinks I should stay on the team. Even though that’s not very likely due to my relative insignificance on the team, it’s a scary prospect.

Secondly, I enjoy running, especially in groups. When you’re in a group it’s harder to slack off because everyone will know about it and you’ll fall behind. When I’m just running by myself I don’t necessarily push myself as I might otherwise.

Thirdly, I love having two free periods during track season. Instead of going to PE like all the other juniors, I get to chill in the lounge and do whatever I feel like doing that period, until the start of fitness testing. Even though track takes up time after school, it feels like less of a big deal since I would normally have to wait about an hour after school to go home anyway, making the two-hour practice less of a big deal.

However, then there are the reasons I shouldn’t remain on the team. This is really only one reason, but I’ll put it into two parts. First, I don’t run any events that well. With my best time of 5:46 in the 1,600, I’m hardly anything special. And in other events, I’m just plain terrible.

Secondly, I have absolutely no chance whatsoever at lettering. Being part of a team is nice, but what do you show for it if you’re not on varsity? A little sheet that says I participated, I guess.

Anyway, I’ll think about it.

— Carl Zielinski

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My brother and I are best friends. We have been for a long time. We also plan to be best friends for a long time after now.

I think it has something to do with our personalities: You won’t find greater opposites than the two of us. While I like rich chocolate cake, Justin prefers a light fruit tart. If I’m in a group of people I don’t know, I’ll tense up and shy to the corner. Justin, on the other hand, will be best buds with them by the end of the evening. I guess what they say is true. Opposites do attract.

This year has been hard with my brother leaving for college in the far Northeast. He has only been home for Thanksgiving break and winter break. Justin’s absence has definitely discombobulated my life.

No more late night talks under the covers. No one to whine to after I failed the last quiz, or got turned down by that dreamy dude. No one to stick up for me. No one to run to after my mother has found out that, once again, I’ve scraped the bottom of the car due to my poor driving abilities. No one to approve my outfits for the Friday school dances.

However, the pains of separation haven’t been as great as I anticipated. I first have to thank the craziness of junior year taking my mind off the empty seat at the dinner table. But I also have to thank such wonderful communicating devices like Facebook.

Facebook is a great way to check up on how my brother is doing. Whether it’s viewing the latest photos his friends have posted of him sunbathing on the quad, or Javi, his hott bud kissing him on the cheek, or receiving a message or wall-post, I always feel as if the distance has, for a short moment, melted away.

I thought it would be hard not being able to see Justin’s face every day. But, in some sense, I do get to see his face every day. Thank you, Facebook!

— Andrea Park

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is Thursday, today. Meaning that there is really only a day and a half until Saturday. And Saturday is prom.

And I am sick.

This week, my head has consistently felt about five pounds heavier than it should be. My brain seems to have taken a vacation, and I forget things that I need to do very easily (Dear Mr. Sutton, I will definitely find out who Oliver North and April whatsherface are. Love, Michelle).

I break into coughing fits in class. I felt like I was dying a very slow death when I ran the mile in PE earlier this week.

And PROM is on Saturday.

I was talking to my fellow sick person Samantha Nguyen about this dilemma earlier today.

“My ears keep ringing, and I can’t hear right,” she told me glumly.

And we have both had a hand in getting Lucy Zhang sick. She walked into first-hour history this morning and glared at us both threateningly while motioning to her throat.

However, I completely refuse to let sickness ruin my prom. I will somehow force myself to get better even though I will probably get close to no sleep for the rest of this week.

I will combat my cold through sheer will power even though I am coughing up a storm even as I write. (It feels like there is a small furry animal that has taken up residence in my throat that feels the urge to puff itself up every few minutes.)

And this blog entry is probably very disjointed and incoherent. Oh well. I’m going to go and focus my energy on fighting my sniffles.

— Michelle Gao

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the girls state track finals looming on the horizon and fully taking over my brain, I think I’ll have to keep this entry short.

It’s that time of year, though, when teachers get crazy trying to finish their annual curriculum, and students feel angst because summer is so close. It’s times like these that force me to look back on the year and marvel at how quickly it went by and how so much occurred.

However much I want summer, though, I can’t help but want to length this last week. I am amazed at how chaotic it gets in the last two weeks. I am craving sleep now more than ever.

I desire free time like little kids desire ice cream. I need to relax like fish need water (you get the point). I have no idea where all my time is going, and I would really like to slow time just so that I can get all my work done and go to bed at a decent hour.

Summer is definitely the solution. I need to get to there in one piece though. My fingers are crossed.

— Shivani Khanna

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last weekend, I was at a city mall with my mother. As we were walking from one store to another, we passed one of those slightly annoying vendor carts where some man with an accent asks you ceaselessly whether he can straighten your hair. The vendor cart we passed was selling Crocs of all colors and had a pale blonde woman working there.

As we walked by, a commotion quickly broke out. Another woman ran toward the blonde woman yelling profanities at her screaming, “Try it again next time bitch! Best recognize who you’re messing with!” But the hateful words quickly escalated into physical violence with the cursing woman pulling the hair of the blonde. At this point my mother and I quickly ducked into the closest store.

Once the blonde had fallen onto the floor, the other woman proceeded to kick her over and over. She then removed her shoe and hit the blonde on her face.

By this point, people passing by had taken notice and were attempting to calm the violent woman down. One small and mousy looking man held his hands up and said, “Now, now, let’s all take a breather.”

Mall security soon arrived to clear up the mess, and as I exited the store where my mother and I had been waiting, I saw the blonde still sitting on the floor in a humiliated heap with a large bag of ice on her face that did not cover her cuts and her hair all out of place.

What struck me about this entire situation was not so much the violence, but my reaction to it. I’ve always prided myself on standing up for what’s right. Or at least I think I do. I don’t like when people say the word “retarded” as a synonym for something being bad. I like to apologize if I’ve messed up. And I can’t unleash the Dana-giggle at a terribly offensive joke.

But somehow, when I was faced with something, I just watched. In middle school we were always told, “To stand by and watch is to participate,” whenever a hallway scuffle broke out and student spectators gathered, and even English philosopher Edmund Burke has said, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

I can’t quite say what paralyzed me to do nothing. I don’t think it was a physical fear of being hurt if I attempted to interfere, but rather, a feeling that this was not my place and it was not my business. That sentiment is true and valid because I don’t have a place in a physical assault between people I don’t know and in a location I am not familiar with.

So when is it my place? When is it my duty to help someone out? I still don’t quite know the answer to that, but I do know that leaving that woman as I and others stood by as she was physically assaulted caused me intense feelings of guilt.

Even the witness statement I was asked to give to the police in order to properly charge the fighting female and the fact that I checked on the injured woman before walking again did not make me feel any better.

Maybe I learned a lesson. Maybe I’ll do better next time. But hopefully there is no next time.

— Dana Al-Qadi

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was walking up the stairs the other day, and I had the strange feeling that I had walked those stairs before. OK, so I have walked up Uni’s stairs several thousand times before (most of the time unhappily), but I had the sensation that I was walking in the exact same way with the exact same feet upon the exact same steps.

Trivial? That’s a possibility. But then you get those events that you think you have already dreamed of. Like in chemistry, I thought our class had already been through one of those experiments, and in calc it seemed as if I had already solved that problem.

I know the events, but I can’t remember the specifics. I know that I remembered having a repeated experience in chemistry and calc, but I don’t remember what experiment or what problem.

Deja vu, according to dictionary.com, is a noun meaning the illusion of having previously experienced something actually being encountered for the first time, but could it be that we actually are experiencing things for a second time? Could we be reliving life and catching glimpses of our previous life cycle?

I always had difficulty understanding the idea behind reincarnation. If you were to be reborn into another body … I think that it would be pretty easy to remember who you used to be. However, if your memory were erased, then the idea seems plausible. Maybe your previous self awakens when you sleep, which would explain sleep-walking and bizarre dreams.

Then I reached the top, entered the third floor hallway, and went to class.

— Alan Liang

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For my birthday, my aunt sent me a pin. It’s yellow and has a bespectacled girl who’s kind of nerdy, scandalously taking off her glasses. Underneath, it says reading is sexy.

Kind of like this.

I recently put this pin on my backpack and have been receiving a lot of comments about it. I thought it was really funny, and people seem to be agreeing with me.

However, this pin also holds a certain sentimental value.

When I was younger, I read. I read a lot. I would go through a book a week, sometimes more. There was never a time when I wasn’t in the middle of some sort of reading material. All types of genres and stories, fiction and nonfiction.

But, like all students at Uni, I ran out of time. Between school work, sports, etc., I no longer have time to read. I go through a book a year, if I am lucky. I have been “reading” Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” since November. I am still in the middle of “Memoirs of a Geisha,” and the first page of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce was enticing, but I have yet to get further.

Not to mention the huge list of books that I want to read. There are probably 20 books at any given point that I am “planning” to read. Right now there is “Catch 22,” anything by Kurt Vonnegut, “In Cold Blood,” “Everything Is Illuminated,” “Fight Club,” and “The Great Gatsby,” to name a few.

It’s really sad that no one has time to read anymore. Reading is really important. Not only is it “sexy,” like my pin says. But it develops vocabulary, teaches you valuable things, and it is just fun. It transports you to new worlds. It is a really cliché thing to say, but reading is an adventure. And it is an adventure that we are all missing out on.

— Sarah Pfander

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

… Or rather it was last night.

This totally threw me off, when I realized that the weatherman was right.

Yesterday, when driving to Uni the weatherman said that the day would start out sunny and clear. That wasn’t too hard to tell, because I was squinting into the sun as he said this. Then he said that in the afternoon there would be showers and thunderstorms. That I was very cynical about since I find predictions of this sort to be notoriously bad.

Oftentimes they say that there will be rain all week, and there isn’t a cloud in the sky the entire time. Sometimes it is just the opposite.

The only things that I find they are somewhat accurate about are the daily highs/lows, and predicting that a snowstorm is coming. So once winter is gone, I pretty much ignore whatever they have to say, because it is usually very, very wrong.

Because of this I ended up downloading a Doppler radar widget for my computer, so I can make my own weather predictions about if it will rain, snow, or be clear in the next few hours. With the help of that I usually find that I am just as good, if not better, at predicting the weather than the weatherman himself.

But yesterday I didn’t bother to take a look at my computer, so I was surprised to hear the first pitter-patter of rain falling on my house. I was so surprised that they actually made an accurate prediction, that I decided to dedicate my blog post to it!

— Deren Kudeki

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Recently I have been reading a fairly intriguing nonfiction book called “Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes,” by Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown.

Unlike other popular nonfiction books such as “Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities,” this book doesn’t really focus in on lives and doesn’t form a type of storyline but definitely focuses on the facts.

Written by two mothers, they bring up interesting points and point out various “marketing schemes” set out there to entice girls. Although they take a slightly feminist parent’s point of view at times, the information has gotten me to notice my surroundings.

For example, each chapter focuses on various age groups and tells of the mothers’ different explorations into teenagers’ favorite stores. During one trip they went out looking for a plain T-shirt. No slogans, not low-cut, no brand-name logos, etc. Just a plain T-shirt, and all they could find was one red shirt at a JC Penney.

So then I thought about it myself: There is no way. I see plenty of normal T-shirts when I go to the mall. First thing that came to mind was Abercrombie, which sells plain shirts … but they all have the Abercrombie moose or are low-cut or tight fitting.

That narrowed out Abercrombie, as well as Aeropostale, American Eagle, and Hollister. Then I thought that surely Wet Seal or Bergners carried plain T-shirts, but then thinking back to my previous experiences I realized that their T-shirt selections had various designs on the front such as little hearts or were decorated with rhinestones/glitter/etc. So … maybe there aren’t very many places that actually sell plan T-shirts after all.

But what girl wants to wear a plain T-shirt? I most certainly would prefer the nice fitting camisole vs. the boy shirt! Which was another point touched upon: Starting as little as Disney princesses in bikini tops (“Little Mermaid”) we are taught to “dress to impress.”

And despite this realization that we are taught to think this way, as expected by the authors, I don’t personally plan on doing a 180 and changing my wardrobe altogether. Because we are taught that the tomboy girls, the nongirly girls, are outsiders — and no one wants to be an outsider.

One passage, titled “From Romance to Porn,” describes the authors’ views on how we are tricked into thinking we have a wide range of options to see at the movies, when in reality the movie selection is very limited.

“A teen girl may think she has a myriad of choices at the movies when she is out with her friends. She can see a romance that is a step more sophisticated than the princess movies. She can see a romance/comedy that includes a bumbling, rude, but loveable male character (typically played by a comic actor such as Adam Sandler or Will Ferrell) that draws the boys into the movie too, similar to ‘50 First Dates’ and ‘Fever Pitch.’ She can see a horror film that may have a strong woman [who is] porn-star sexy (as she runs in the rain, for example, from her stalker, her blouse will get wet, and her nipples will show through). A teenage girl can see a ‘boy comedy’ where all the girls in the film will serve as types the boys can choose from; there is always a sexy girl and a good girl among them. Or she can go to an action movie where the woman looks like a blown-up sex doll that a boy puppeteer is controlling on the set, keeping her sexy during all her leaps, flips, and laser saber fights. She’ll be the kind of woman who appeals to boys — so strong that she’s over the top and so busty that she’s over the bra. She’s a fantasy woman, but she’s no girl’s fantasy.”

Basically, this book has definitely given me a slightly humorous insight into the various ideas and “schemes” advertisers use to manipulate us, using examples from our beloved Disney classics to “The OC,” and even managing to find support in shows such as “Dora the Explorer.”

Although I don’t think I will change my style or behavior as a result of this book, I think it’s a worthwhile read so as to get an idea of your everyday surroundings and how they are constantly affecting you.

— Lizzy Warner

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 7:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whenever a writer documents a high-achieving student’s pressure-ridden journey to getting into college, that student is invariably described as some combination of class president, talented writer, math whiz, and sports star. For many a current high school student, this is cause for some anxiety about one’s own qualifications.

On the flip side, it seems that modern college admissions theorists hold that applicants should show a single “passion” — something in which he or she has long been involved, preferably since in the womb.

What college-frenzied students read into either of these schools of thought, however, tends to be overdramatic and overblown. If you find it unreasonable to have singled out a passion so early in life, it is no more reasonable to have cursory involvement in a myriad of activities. Likewise, having only one pursuit is not the only alternative to spreading yourself thin.

The reality is that no matter how you approach the game of college admission, the admissions officers can only see the fragments of your life that fit into the various documents they look over. Were 50 hours of volunteer work a result of your parents’ forced labor, or did you organize and run your own project?

This suggests a natural alternative to planning one’s endeavors so as to maximize the degree to which they will impress the gatekeepers to top colleges. Instead of asking what colleges will think in one or two years, ask yourself: What will I think in one or two years?

If you can look back and say that the experience taught you something, then you have nothing to lose.

It is easy to rationalize spending meaningless hours for the sake of college, perhaps grinding out 20 or 30 extra SAT points. After all, from the perspective of the high school student, getting into the right college seems to leave you set for life. It is ironically reassuring, however, that there’s no conversion scale from what you do to college admission.

— Alex Zhai

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last weekend I spent Saturday and Sunday babysitting my two baby brothers, Brennan (3 years old) and Logan (1 year old), to give my mom a break for Mother’s Day.

Of course the task was stressful. Taking care of two boys under 4, both of whom are very strong-willed, wiggly, and generally whiney young men, is not my idea of a rockin’ weekend, even though I love the little guys.

The weekend was even more stressful because of the long list of potentially harmful substances that Logan ate.

He started off the weekend by taking a sizable bite out of a candle. This I quickly forgave because, after all, candles do smell good (I’ve considered eating one myself once or twice, especially the ones that smell like cinnamon rolls), and he did spit some of it out, but as the weekend progressed I became more and more concerned.

Later in the day I took the boys out on the deck to get some fresh air, and Logan started sucking the mud off a very dirty rock.

The next morning while I was getting dressed after my shower, I caught Logan shoveling my lotion into his mouth by the handfuls, and actually swallowing.

The nice lady at the grocery store we made a stop at to buy some chocolate milk gave my brothers two stickers each, and on the way home, Logan ate both of them.

Every baby does this at least once. Brennan was caught eating bird poop at the age of 1. But the worrying thing is that Logan seems to enjoy it; if he gets the chance he eats the same thing over again.

There is actually a psychological disorder for this, called “pica.” The disorder occurs during early childhood and is characterized by the repeated eating of “dirt and other nonnutritive substances,” according to the WebMD’s Psychology Today Web site.

Hopefully Logan does not have this disorder. He probably doesn’t, since it also includes loss of weight and lack of development, and Logan is the chubbiest baby I have ever seen. Hey, maybe he’s just hungry.

— Bethany Hutchens

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

During lunch today, I saw a crowd of people looking towards the direction of the first floor boy’s bathroom. A prank? Hopefully not, since they were looking pretty stoic. Maybe someone jumped through the opening at the top. Nope. It was the final exam schedule.

So I too joined to count how many finals I had. Three. And I expected all of them. Nonetheless, I wasn’t too thrilled. It was the same amount as last year, though I did have two large projects. For taking only six classes, including a college class that I’ve already finished, it seemed quite a bit.

Before I think about finals, I still have an AP to take on Wednesday, AP English Language & Composition. What annoys me most is the fact that only 5.4% of test takers receive a 5, an frighteningly low percentage for a “standardized” test. Just for comparison, AP Calc BC has 41.9% get 5’s. Better get studying.

I thought that after taking SATs and ACTs that I would be done with major testing for at least a few years. True I was the one who decided to take the APs, but College Board makes offers that look too good to pass. According to the UIUC AP Website, scoring a 4 or 5 on English Language will give me four hours of credit and exemption from Comp I, which for most colleges is a huge class that deals with such things as speech and rhetoric. Score a 4 or 5 on a language AP, and get more than a dozen hours of credit. It’s hard to pass on that.

Taking an APs here or there is a pretty good idea (especially if it’s calculus and your grade depends on it), but it has it’s downsides as well. Fellow Gargoyle staff member Alex Zhai wrote a column a little while ago on why he didn’t decide to take any APs this year.

On a more extreme note, I had read in a Newsweek article one or two years ago about a high school senior who graduated with more than a dozen passing AP tests, and could only get out of a few intro classes. Naturally, he had decided to attend a top-notch Ivy school.

Be sure you only take APs if you know the college(s) you are applying to will accept them. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting $85 and a couple hours of your time doing something you probably really hate.

Study hard! Only two weeks and finals left.

—Benjamin Fu

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s that time of the year again: the pre-final craze that has Uni students going out of their minds. Spring sports are wrapping up, semester papers are due, AP tests are going on, and finals are in two weeks. It’s an important time to pay (more) attention in class and to procrastinate as little as possible.

As a sophomore, I haven’t had to worry too much about standardized tests. However, I felt like a slacker after hearing that some of my classmates are already taking four AP exams. Considering that I’m already completely stressed out with the tests and papers for my classes, I find it astonishing that these people manage to squeeze time out of their busy schedules to study for extra exams.

Even though it’s almost finals week, everyone should still try to loosen up a little. I’m not suggesting people to slack off, but everyone should try to do something relaxing each day. Maybe go for a fifteen-minute walk around your neighborhood in the evening to clear your mind. Or if your brain hurts from studying too much, go to another room and listen to some music or read a magazine for a few minutes.

These mini-breaks will bring temporary relief from all the stress that’s been accumulating for the past eight months. As a Uni student, you’ve probably experienced times when you stare at a passage from your flowchart book only to realize afterwards that you didn’t understand anything that was written. By taking these breaks every hour or two, you’ll actually become more alert and productive when you go back to doing your homework.

—Elaine Gu

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 7:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

All right. Just a thought I thought of. Bear with me here.

So everyone is themselves. I’m me. You’re you. Everyone has a mind of their own and everyone can do things that they do.

But, as far as I know, I’ve never been you and you’ve never been me. Do you even exist?

Certainly, I cannot prove that you exist (and I cannot prove that I exist, but I am assuming that I do). Could it be that I am actually the center of the universe?

Perhaps everything is created just for me. This computer monitor, this carpet, this house, this street, this country, etc. Perhaps history was written for my amusement, words invented for me to think out loud, and calculus to kill me. Perhaps everything I have ever encountered was all a scam created by some greater power just for a laugh.

And really this philosophy cannot be wrong because whoever disagrees is technically a figment of the center-of-the-universe’s imagination.

Confusing? Maybe it was made that way just for you.

— Alan Liang

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 9:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Ahh, the 5K. The day when we Uni students get an awesome T-shirt, a bright yellow number, and orders to wake up on Saturday at 7:30 a.m. so we can run our guts out for 3.1 miles. Yay.

I arrived at Crystal Lake Park at 8:30 or so, and for a sleepy half hour I milled around the pavilion and lake house. At about 9:10 I joined the mini-exodus to the starting line. I wouldn’t be running until Deren Kudeki finished, so I stood off to the side and milled some more.

A guy with a megaphone called out for Uni students to come over to the opposite side for whatever reason, so I wandered around the back of the dense crowd of runners. Some organizers started counting down from 10; the crowd halfheartedly chimed in toward the end, beginning a very orderly stampede.

The front of the pack came running past again after what seemed like only five minutes while the organizers shouted off their numbers. Soon, a constant stream of red-faced, sweat-drenched runners was being channeled through the starting zone to sporadic waves of applause.

As I saw Deren approaching up the hill, I hurried down to the starting zone again, pushed through the unbroken line of people stretching the length of the road, grabbed the little popsicle-stick/tongue depressor/baton and sped off.

I was at least happy to be moving, and by the first turn I was in cruise control. I had to trust that my pace would be brisk enough, because I would have no frame of reference until the first-mile marker.

I was optimistic after passing a few people who had started before me, but when the course turned off the street and into the park, my spirits fell a bit. This part of the track was always longer than I remembered it.

I think it was shortly after this that I ran past an ambulance ominously traveling in the opposite direction. I remember laughing in class when Merf told us that emergency medical services were on hand, but suddenly it was a bit less amusing and a bit more frightening.

Soon, I found myself catching up to and overtaking Jeremy Kemball, who let me know what he thought of being passed by attacking me with his tongue depressor.

All right, a water station. I snatched a cup and tried to get some water down my throat, but quickly abandoned the idea and just doused my face with it. I thought it would shock me a bit and wake me up, but it wasn’t as cold as I thought it was, so now I was wet, tired and temporarily blind, a vast improvement on just being tired.

The track mercifully dipped downhill for a while, and I finally passed the one-mile mark. I was hoping for about seven minutes, so I was a bit surprised to learn my time was … about 35 minutes. Oh. Right. I didn’t think to listen for Deren’s time, so I had only the vaguest idea of how well I was doing.

Fast-forward through the exchange zone, down Park Street, up Broadway, and back into the park. Apparently, the finish line was right behind the trees and across the lake to my left, so I could hear the applause and cheering that I knew I was still a mile shy of.

All the usual suspects were active by now — ragged breathing, weak knees, and my personal favorite, the taste of my last few meals returning to my mouth. But suddenly, I rounded a corner and there was the fork in the road. I didn’t increase my pace just yet.

As I readied to kick it into fourth gear, I realized that I didn’t quite know which way to turn. The confusion arose from the fact that the partners who ran first had their tags removed to the right, by the starting line, but in the past, when I had done solo runs, I always finished to the left by the lake house. Uh-oh. I ultimately broke off to the left and began sprinting.

Only 528 feet … hmm. The 100-yard dash is 300 feet, and I can do that in about 14 seconds … but then, that typically isn’t after a 16,000-foot dash. Hey, I’m almost there.

Thoughts like this took my mind off things like, oh, say, the extreme pain that practically radiated from my joints and upper torso. As I bore into the home stretch, I looked down and saw a kid about half my height motoring along at exactly the same pace as me, despite the fact that my stride was about three times as long.

Finally I propelled myself past the big digital clock that read a nice, round 0:50:00, just behind this living incarnation of Roadrunner, and unsteadily came to a halt.

After emptying a bottle of water, vampirically draining the bitter juice from an orange segment, and convalescing in general, I learned that I had, in fact, improved over my old personal best by about a minute.

So, although it’s not something that I look forward to every year, I find that the 5K isn’t as hard as I tend to think it is in the days leading up to it. Besides, the weather was about as good as you could ask for, except for perhaps a freak wind current that followed the race course and let everyone ride along at 20 miles per hour.

— Andrew Lovdahl

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 6:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hot off the College Board servers, for those of you who haven’t blocked the test out of your minds until scores arrive: here’s a PDF of this year’s AP Calculus AB free-response questions, Form A.

And for those of you with the distinction of having taken the Calculus BC exam, your FRQs are also up. (If those questions don’t look familiar, try Form B, linked below.)

There is also a “Form B” (AB - BC) of the free-response questions. I took Form A.

My first thought when flipping through the AB Form B questions was, “these were exactly the kinds of problems I expected to see.” One good example is Question 5. We’ve been doing several previous years’ free-response questions in calculus class over the past few weeks, and very frequently each test included one problem requiring a slope field sketch and separation of variables as part of the answer. So naturally, I expected to have to sketch a slope field and separate variables on the actual test. If I was doing Form B, come Question 5 my expectations would be right. But I wasn’t doing Form B.

On second thought, my initial reaction to Form B may very well have been too naive. I thought that, for some reason or another, Form A was pretty difficult, but maybe I would think that Form B would be just as hard or even more so if I were taking it for real, under the pressure and the time control — even if the problems were more “predictable.” And if that were the case, the attendant multiple-choice questions could have been much more unpredictable and harder, to compensate.

UPDATE: Unofficial submissions of answers are popping up all over the place. AB and BC answers this guy (a teacher, maybe?) posted here seem somewhat familiar. Hey look, I remember putting something like that down for AB Question 3(b). Thumbs up for the Mean Value Theorem.

UPDATE 2: I don’t know:

• Whether or not there were more than two multiple-choice forms.
• Whether or not the two MC forms differed in content, or just the order in which the questions appeared (as someone told me shortly after the test).
• How Form A and Form B were used differently.
• The answers at the above link are for Form A, Form B, or both. (The poster specified “Iteration 1,” suggesting that it’s Form A and that Form B is essentially the make-up test.)

If you know, please post in the comments. Thanks in advance.

— Jason He

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 4:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

“Avuncular.” Do you have any idea what that means?

I wouldn’t either, but I took the SAT last week and that was a word that appeared on the test.

Because I wasn’t among the 1 percent of the population who knows what avuncular means, I guessed. Once I looked it up afterward, I was relieved to know that I had just added a whopping extra 10 points to my score (avuncular: adj. resembling an uncle in kindness or indulgence).

That got me thinking. After months of preparing, did I do well on my SAT?

The few weeks after I take my standardized tests are the hardest to deal with. I am filled with eager anticipation. Part of me wants the test scores back instantly, and part of me never wants to see the scores. And when my friends talk about their ACT and SAT scores, my mind drifts back to that SAT Saturday.

I wish I had studied harder so I could tell the difference between permutations and combinations. Why in the world couldn’t I possibly concentrate on an article about how some ancient people migrated to the United States? I wish I had more time for my essay.

And this thought process goes on and on and on and on some more.

As hard as I try to tell myself that it is only one little test, I get this feeling in the back of my mind that my future is just around the block: Parkland College.

And I haven’t really found a solution to my problem yet, so I guess I am just going to wait it out and see what my future holds. It’s true folks: the anticipation is the worst part.

But hey, at least I know I got the avuncular question right.

— Ranny Ma

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

wssspc: riding along
wssspc: pickup pulls up alongside
wssspc: driver swears at me
wssspc: i choose not to respond
wssspc: driver continues fowards a bit
wssspc: and apparently, goon in the back of the truck nails me in the head with a louisville slugger
wssspc: and i was too stunned to get a license plate
wssspc: cuz well … it’s surprising to feel your skull flattened
wssspc: and i had just been exhaling in relief that the driver hadn’t done anything
wssspc: guess he won.

That was cyclist Ethan Stone, by the way (You can click here to see a Gargoyle profile about him). He was on a training ride, and he got hit in the head with a baseball bat.

He and fellow cyclist Hannah Lake-Rayburn have been after me for ages to wear a helmet when I ride my bike.

Before a couple of minutes ago when I talked to Ethan, I didn’t see why. I only bike within my neighborhood, and I stay on the sidewalk. The worst thing that could happen would be crashing into a mailbox and falling over. The result would probably be a scraped knee or elbow.

I can deal with those.

But I think I’ll be wearing a helmet from now on, just in case.

In Ethan’s case, though, he was just biking along when someone smashed him in the head. I honestly can’t comprehend why; and while I know that this is far from a perfect world that we live in, I had no idea that people went around hitting perfectly innocent bikers in the head.

Carelessness I can understand, much as I dislike it. When Jennifer Stark ran into Uni alum Matt Wilhelm, she was downloading a ringtone to her cell phone when she hit him.

Carelessness doesn’t make it any less her fault, but there is a huge difference between Wilhelm’s situation and Ethan’s. Because the person who hit Ethan did it on purpose.

I am feeling entirely disillusioned and furious right now.

— Michelle Gao

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 8:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Imagine, if you will, a situation in which you are forced to hold your arms out, perpendicular to your body. At this point, a small amount of weight is placed on your outstretched arms, after which you are told that you must keep your arms perpendicular to your body, no matter how much weight is placed upon your arms.

At first, this doesn’t seem like that big a deal. The weight is light, and you can easily hold it up. Also, you can get plenty of sleep and still hold the weight.

After a few months of doing this, the weight begins to increase. While slow at first, the increase gets steadily larger. Although you have gotten stronger, the weight threatens to become unbearable. You get less and less sleep because of the strain, and still the weight increases.

The pain builds and builds until finally you feel your arms about to collapse under the strain and exhaustion. However, just as you are about to fail, the weight is lifted, almost magically.

Obviously, my little parable has to do with the end of school being within sight. Despite two-hour track practices and a somewhat large homework load, the small 12 days left of school keeps me going. Unfortunately, it also makes the weight that much heavier, knowing that it will be over very soon, but there’s nothing I can do to speed up the process.

I’m sure you know the feeling I’m talking about. The feeling that if these next 12 days take any longer to finish, you’re going to tear your hair out by the roots, or someone else’s hair by the roots, depending upon which you prefer.

Anyway, I get the feeling that I’ll be able to make it until the end. After all, I’ve made it this far. What can 12 days possibly do to me that the rest of the year hasn’t already?

— Carl Zielinski

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few days ago a friend of mine told me that orange juice has small amounts of cyanide in it.

Naturally I didn’t believe him. If orange juice does indeed have cyanide in it then I should be dead right now since my mother has made me drink it since I first started bringing a lunch to school.

If his comment hadn’t been so outlandish I would probably have panicked, being the gullible person that I am.

Lot’s of people tell us stories that they say are true but might be a tweaked a little. Sometimes they do it to put the story in a different light or simply to make it more exciting. I know I’ve done this plenty of times when I’m talking about something that isn’t particularly interesting.

But when people with power start to fabricate stories, it can become a major problem. We trust, or at least should be able to trust, what the government tells us is true.

But what if something happens that they aren’t too proud of? The example that comes to mind is the story of Pat Tillman. Shouldn’t the act of being in the Army be heroic enough for us? Why change the facts so more people will like the story?

Perhaps the story itself doesn’t bother me as much as it should, but it definitely makes me lose faith in the people with power.

— Avanti Chajed

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The campaign season has started at Uni. Candidate posters, which claim that (insert name) is, in fact, the best would-be president (or vice president or secretary/treasurer) out there, crowd the walls. You are bound to have at least one candidate badger you about whom you are voting for, and then list the reasons, like more fun class activities, for why you should vote for them.

While this is all fine and dandy, and relatively entertaining, I still think Student Council elections are tainted. Even at Uni, they are a popularity contest. If not that, a candidate wins because he was the only boy running against two girls, or vice-versa.

Furthermore, when the elected candidate becomes the president of the Class of 2008, he or she proceeds to do close to nothing. Trust me, I would know, I was on Student Council my subbie and freshmen year.

Especially in the lower grades, Student Council is merely a designated Thursday lunch meeting, coupled with the occasional planning for a dance, for three elected students, and nothing more.

Sure, junior and senior year, things get a little tougher with planning for prom (props to Micah Berman, Ranny Ma, and Shara Esbenshade — I know you’ve been working your tails off) and the senior trip, but still our class leaders make no real important decisions.

Sometimes it seems that “Let’s Plan a Dance Committee” would be a more accurate name for Student Council.

What decisions am I talking about? What changes?

Well, yesterday during Breakfast with the Principal, we all had to fill out fliers. One question was, “What would you change about Uni?”

That’s a great place to start. The new leaders of our school should ask Ms. Patton if they could take a peek at the filled-out questionnaires, or send out fliers on their own.

Some things that the student body wants to see change? Create a Spanish program that starts subbie year. Challenge SFAC about the “no grinding policy.” Offer Chinese (WITHOUT cutting Japanese). Include independent studies in the 300-minute requirement. Or, reexamine the proper enforcement of the 30-minute homework policy.

[Note: I got these responses by briefly chatting with students in the lounge.]

Right now, Student Council is really just a figurehead government. Their power is totally and completely unrealized.

So, before the next school year gets kicked off, I challenge all of the new leaders of University Laboratory High School to first ask their peers what they want to see changed, and then agitate to make those changes.

You have great potential, and you have some great executive leaders (Berman, Suran Yoo, and Esbenshade), to guide you. All of you Student Council members should remember that you are a part of a real government with real power.

— Andrea Park

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Today I took the Calculus AB AP test, and I must admit that even after spending a countless number of days in class reviewing for the exam by doing old APs for homework, I still thought that it was ridiculously hard.

I cannot say that I was fully confident walking into Room 1130 in Siebel this morning about my calculus prowess, but I can say that I thought I had a pretty fair idea of what sorts of questions would be on the test and the best way to approach them.

It turns out that I could not have been more wrong. The gruesome free response questions were tricky enough to more than make up for the fact that the multiple-choice went by without too much of a glitch.

After stumbling out of the exam a good four hours later I could not help but engage in a discussion about the AP with my classmates. The general consensus among us was that this year’s AP was much different and much harder than any of us previously anticipated, based on the nine APs (1993-2006), that teacher Elizabeth Jockusch had given us for homework over the past few weeks.

While doing those APs, none of us felt like the free response questions would be as tricky and painful as they were. Even though the answer sheet was right next to us while doing most of the practice AP problems, we still felt like on those APs where we did not have the answers we still performed admirably.

Today was entirely different, and it made me wonder if this is how people feel every year after emerging from that exam. I wondered if every year students wonder why their practice problems were so different and the actual exam so much harder than anticipated.

Looking back to when I did the 2006 Calculus AB AP for homework, I couldn’t help but feel that the problems were relatively simple and I got through them without feeling like I needed to gouge out my eyeballs. So will next year’s Calculus AB class look back on this AP and think that we were mentally incompetent because we found it as difficult as we did?

I hope not.

— Shivani Khanna

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I think everyone will agree that there are a lot of stupid videos on YouTube. I personally hate the ones that are just video montages from people’s favorite show or movie put to music.

But that isn’t the point of this blog entry. The point is, among all the low quality stuff that really isn’t interesting unelss you’re the person who made it, there are a few gems.

Sometimes you’ll have a funny series of shorts such as Chad Vader or Mr. Deity, or random cool videos of a dog skateboarding.

But I find that some of the best stuff can come from talented editing of professional movies to turn them into something … different.

What I am talking about is that genre of videos that takes clips from a movie, adds in music and edits clips from the movie together into a “preview” that shows the movie to be very different from what it actually is. A different storyline and a different genre.

Examples of these would be Shining and 10 Things I Hate About Commandments.

I feel these kinds of videos show a great sense of humor from the maker and a lot more originality than a silly little video montage.

— Deren Kudeki

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 10:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Warning: If you have the tendency to click on every link you see, or are easily caught up in Wikipedia, this is NOT the article for you.

Note: There’s no problem with Wikipedia, except as relates to the human sleep schedule, the number of hours in a day, and the sheer number of pages on Wikipedia. It was a catchy title that made you click the link though, eh?

Despite having an AP exam both this week and next week, I somehow find myself with far more free time than I had, say, a week ago. What does this mean? Why, more time to do reading, of course!

Even for a Uni student, I’d like to think I’m fairly atypical. To wit, I was reading a book about math. Admittedly it was a satire (I quote: “[a definition of] group theory — an exceedingly beautiful branch of pure mathematics used for showing how many different ways blocks of wood can be painted. Introduced in advanced calculus courses and often seen on ‘Sesame Street’”).

From the book, of course, it was a logical step to Wikipedia to learn a little bit more about the interesting math bits. What follows is a map of my browsing history.

Quaternions —> Seki Kówa —> James Joseph Sylvester —> Euler’s totient function —> Euler’s Theorem —> Laplace expansion —> Aitken’s delta-squared process.

For those of you more familiarly acquainted with Wikipedia, that list might even seem a bit short.

The truth is, that was hardly my first math-run to Wikipedia. I occasionally find myself there Saturday night around 11:30 (over the summer, guys, come on!), and I know I can despair of ever going to bed at a reasonable hour.

That’s probably because most of that math stuff seems to make the most sense around midnight (the witching hour — a coincidence? I think not). I knew that as I closed that last Wikipedia window on Aitken’s delta-squared process (what I could make sense of it was fairly interesting), I would be back. All roads lead to Wikipedia.

And lo and behold, I came crawling back. Here’s a little narration for the list of links below. Drudge Report is a web site linking to offbeat news and political news with a conservative slant (made famous for breaking the Monica Lewinsky scandal). I have no interest in Rosie O’Donnell, but for some reason, I clicked a link to a story on Salon about her and other current events.

Drudge Report —> A Salon.com story by Camille Paglia —> Camille Paglia (the first Wikipedia page — and here was my downfall) —> The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll —> Loving Female Authority (FOR ENGLISH CLASS, PEOPLE … we’re talking about feminism) —> Nihilism —> Rita Mae Brown (name sounded familiar) —> Phyllis Schlafly —> Rostker v. Goldberg —> Paleoconservative —> Thomas Friedman —> Richard Posner —> Learned Hand —> Bernard Lewis —> Fareed Zakaria —> Yusuf al-Qaradawi —> Larry Summers —> Robert Kagan —> Mohammad Khatami —> Obiter dicta —> Islamism —> Clash of Civilizations —> Gunnar Myrdal —> Drew Faust —> Samuel P. Huntington —> Social policy.

Despite my use of the —>, that’s not quite a linear list. Most of these I first opened up off of The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll page, but still. You can see how my precious hours are whittled away.

Today it looks like I was on a political science bent, but in the past, I’ve been on math, science, and history bents. The sad thing is, I enjoy every minute of it. It’s a great way to waste hours of time and convince yourself you’re doing important things so it’s all OK.

I’d be remiss in writing this entry if I didn’t link to the XKCD.com comic on Wikipedia.

Some of you might also be interested to know that I edited the social policy article to fix a formatting issue. I’ve corrected typos on at least 10 pages! Any Wikipedia stories you guys would like to share?

— Ben Hyman

Posted by bhyman at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It happens, almost inevitably. Everytime a standardized test comes around, people ask you how you did. Someone gets their ACT results and the next day at school chats people up, finds out what others got.

It is a stupid comparison. It is just a way for some students to size up the competition, for some students to determine how they are doing on the road to college. They want to know if their 32 ACT score is good enough.

The PSAT, the ACT, the SAT, the SAT Subject Tests, the APs — all tests fall victim to score comparison.

Everybody knows that test scores don’t mean that much. Test scores don’t determine intelligence, they don’t guarantee spots at top schools, and they don’t necessarily reduce options. But, competitive Uni students just have to know what everyone else is getting.

Sometimes, perhaps when I am in a state of delirium, I think that Uni isn’t so bad in terms of competitive, pointless comparisons. We are more open to different strengths, and we respect the math genius, the athlete, and the amazing writer equally, and without feeling the need to be better than them. But then, someone asks me if I got a perfect score on my SAT Math section like they did and my reverie is disrupted.

However, it is worse than just score comparisons. Students also feel the need to comment.

“What did you get on the SAT?”

“Oh, a 2150, but that is really bad. I’m taking it again. I am aiming for a 2300.”

When you comment on your own scores like that, it can really hurt someone. What if the person who asked only got a 1950. You are essentially telling them that their score is bad. What are you saying when you imply anything below a 2300 is unacceptable in your mind? If your 2150 merits a retake, what does that say about their 1950?

Also, don’t compare amount of preparation. Don’t brag about the fact that you didn’t study. Don’t tell people they don’t need to prepare unless they are aiming for a 36.

There are people who may prep and still not get as good a score as you, and that is something you need to be aware of and sensitive to. Don’t demean the preparation process. If you are already comparing test scores, you do not need to add the insult of claiming you did better without ever taking a practice test.

People just need to open their eyes. They need to understand how comparison can hurt people, how their comments can make others feel stupid. People need to act like the have some semblance of social tact.

“What did you get on the ACT?

“33”

“Wow, good job!”

“Thanks.”

That is all that is required.

Or, ideally, the original question is never asked in the first place.

— Sarah Pfander

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Summer seems to be just around the corner, and everyone is anticipating the end of their classes. But not only is the school year coming to an end, so are all the sports!

This Friday is both soccer girls sectionals as well as girls track sectionals. As this time of year approaches within sports I always start to get nervous!

After running to Urbana High School on Monday for practice, everyone on the track team circled up and began their stretching, all the girls anticipating easier workouts throughout the entire week. When we were done with stretching, the boys and girls split up to do our drills when our sprinter coaches, Karl Knox and Katrina Watry, decided to call a mini-meeting.

That was when Karl basically said, “All right, this is it.”

They told us that this week we would have easier workouts and to focus on our drills.

They told us to make sure we stretched a lot and got the most amount of sleep that we possibly could.

They told us to make sure that we were eating a lot of carbs throughout the week as well, and most definitely not to pull, sprain, twist, or in any way hurt any part of our body.

That’s when I promised myself that I would definitely get to sleep early every night. And that I would definitely eat very healthy foods all week night.

And unfortunately I broke my own promise that night when I didn’t get to sleep until fairly late, and yet again this afternoon when I decided to have ice cream for dinner. Which began to get me worried about sectionals and my performance in general.

I think it’s a natural thing, that when something big arises we all start to second-guess ourselves. What if I accidentally stay up too late to study for that chemistry test? What if I forget to replace those missing spikes? But there’s always those “what ifs.”

To get everyone excited, though, the track team has decided to start planning our “bombardment” of the coaches’ houses, and after practice today we all got beautiful pins with beautiful gargoyles on them.

Personally I should probably lighten up — hey, at least no matter what, I won’t have to run the 5k. And in reality I have confidence in everyone on our team (and in the soccer players, too, whom I’d like to wish good luck).

— Lizzy Warner

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 7:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There have been quite a few blog entries recently about the imminent end of the school year, and I’m here to join the bandwagon.

I was changing my locker assignment last week when it really struck me — in just three weeks, I’d be facing months on end of free time to do whatever I want to, namely, not going to school or doing homework.

There are so many things about summer that I love — forgetting what day of the week (or ideally, what month) it is, spending more time outside, and of course, sleep. Cumulatively, I must be behind in sleep by about a month; the dark circles under my eyes seem to be orchestrating a hostile takeover of my entire face.

However, it also struck me that although summer is great, the end of each school year is really enjoyable, too. There’s an omnipresent feeling of relaxation; at every turn something reminds me that the end is near, and concerns about homework and tests are much less pronounced.

I finished my last history research paper last Friday, turned in the last English paper of the year on Monday, and started work today on my last Japanese presentation. When a chem exam scheduled for Friday was announced today, I barely flinched — I would expect a different result if that news was related a few months ago.

Soon, I’ll be running the 5k, taking finals, cleaning out my locker, and gorging myself at disorientation — all of the usual closing ceremonies. While I’ll certainly be counting down the days, it’s not as if I can’t wait for June to come; these last few weeks are among the high points of the school year.

By the way, it also struck me that the usual stuff at the beginning of the school year, e.g. getting a new schedule, meeting new people and seeing who’s in your classes, are also rather fun. So, in summary: Life as a Uni student is pretty fun for me, except for a little 8-month rough patch every year.

— Andrew Lovdahl

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Every time I walk into the lounge, the first things I see are the sheets of paper stuck on the wall. What’s written on them? First is a huge number right in the middle that takes up most of the page. Then the day (i.e. May 7) is written on. Yep, it’s the countdown to the end of the school year.

Let’s face it, it’s the end of the year and we’re all burned out. It’s starting to reach summer-like temperatures outside and no one wants to stay cooped up in his or her room working on a big paper or doing hours of calc homework.

Unfortunately, as of today, there are still three weeks left till the end of the year. The end just doesn’t seem to be near enough.

At some schools, however, seniors are let out early or are allowed to work on “projects.” Senior year is quite arguably the most stressful year of high school. Taking time off to work on something slightly more interesting and invigorating is an excellent way to transition into a hectic summer preparing for college.

Here at Uni, seniors end their academic year the same as they have the past four, though perhaps with a little less passion. Nonetheless, we are still given great opportunities to bond with each other and relax.

This weekend, I received my invitation to the yearly Senior Supper on May 30, where we spend a few hours having dinner, watching the plays we made during subbie year for interrelated arts, and putting up our hand prints.

Of course, there’s also the traditional senior trip to Six Flags in St. Louis.

And once again thanks to Alex Cahill, we’ll be having our annual end-of-the-year get-together at his house.

After five long years at Uni, we’ll be sent off in style, finishing with graduation. I attended last year’s graduation, and it was quite the spectacle. I certainly look forward to ours.

— Benjamin Fu

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 9:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Do you ever miss your childhood? I know I do.

In second grade, I lived with my dad in an apartment in New Orleans. Each day after school, I would eat ice cream, watch “Pokemon,” and go swimming in the pool downstairs. Then I would eat dinner, go on a walk with my dad by the river, and watch “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” while my dad gave me a penny for every question I answered correctly.

During those days, my troubles consisted of getting my dad to buy me a robotic puppy and winning four-square during recess. Each week, I looked forward to eating McDonald’s and getting $5 to spend at Dollar Tree. In my memory, second grade was full of sunshine and laughter.

In third grade, I moved to Indiana. School got a bit harder (teachers actually started assigning homework), but life was still relaxed and fun. Classes were over at 2:30 p.m. each day, and the bus rides back home were always a great social experience.

Once I got home, I would run over to my best friend’s house. When it’s warm outside, the two of us would grab our water guns and go fight with the boys in our neighborhood.

I saw less and less of my parents because I spent all my time outside being a tomboy. My worries consisted of not getting ambushed by a water-gun attack and getting an A on my spelling quiz. When I think of third grade, I think of excitement and happiness.

Now that I’m a sophomore, school is very stressful. Even though many juniors told me that sophomore year is easier than freshman year, I’ve found it quite the contrary. This year, there is always homework to do, papers to write, and tests to worry about. The fact that I don’t have a free period just adds on to the stress.

Afternoons are no longer about water-gun battles and watching “Pokemon.” Now they’re taken up by two-hour-long sport practices followed by at least two to three hours of homework. My troubles during elementary school seem so insignificant now, even though at the time, they were very important to me.

Now I worry about getting straight A’s, qualifying for state in whatever sport I’m doing, and surviving my weekly violin lessons. Who know? Maybe in a few years, I’ll look back and think that these issues were insignificant.

So yes, I miss my childhood. Sometimes I wish I could relive those times again. Even though I couldn’t bike more than two miles away from my house and didn’t have much freedom, life was so much more fun and carefree back then.

— Elaine Gu

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 5:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

According to a recent article in The New York Times, a study has shown that there is a racial bias in calling fouls in NBA games. A University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell grad student conducted the study, and they recorded the foul-calling data from 1991 to 2003.

The study showed that white referees, who account for 68 percent of all total NBA referees, called fouls on black players more extensively — in fact, at a 4.5 percent higher rate.

They pulled the data from public box scores, which tallies up the fouls and the referees. In addition, the study took other details into consideration: players’ positions, fame, playing time, home games or away games, and other necessary data.

The study’s results have been met with mixed opinions. Mark Cuban, the vocal owner of the Dallas Mavericks, did not disagree with the study.

“We’re all human. We all have our own prejudice. That’s the point of doing statistical analysis. It bears it out in this application, as in a thousand others,” said Cuban.

However, two African-American veteran NBA players are totally indifferent to the situation.

“If that’s going on, then it’s something that needs to be dealt with,” Mike James said. “But I’ve never seen it.”

David Stern, NBA commissioner, dismissed the study based on the faulty public data.

“We think our cut at the data is more powerful, more robust, and demonstrates that there is no bias,” Mr. Stern said.

However, with a database of 600,000 foul calls, a 4.5 percent increase in foul calls for black players is pretty suspicious. For NBA teams, that is more than enough to determine who wins and who loses.

I think this study further supports something that we already know about our society whether we like it or not: Extensive amounts of racial biases exist.

“It’s not about basketball — it’s about what happens in the world,” said David Berri, a sports statistical analyst. “Given that your league is mostly African-American, maybe you should have more African-American referees — for the same reason that you don’t want mostly white police forces in primarily black neighborhoods.”

Either David Stern is the most naive person on earth or he is trying to sugarcoat the situation. Whatever the case, the least he can do is to admit to the problem and do something about it. Whether there is acutally something that can be done to change the situation is a totally different question.

As a commissioner, Stern’s job should be to fix apparent problems, not to deny that they exist.

— Ranny Ma

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It’s kind of hard to believe that I once had to walk in silent single file lines from class to class. That was elementary school, which seems so far away now that I am surprised to realize how much I still remember from more than five years ago.

It’s a cliché, but time flies. Everyone has probably had thoughts about this at some point, but I think that not only does time fly, but it flies faster and faster.

One of the graders at the Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program last year suggested to me that people age logarithmically, the mathematical way of saying that time seems to pass proportionally quickly to how long you have already lived.

Although this phenomenon could just be a product of biased memory (it’s easy to fool yourself about how you felt in the past), I think it is true that an hour used to last a lot longer. One experiences more in one hour at the age of 5 than at the age of 15. As we get older, we get used to the world, and it simply isn’t as exciting and surprising as before.

For one thing, a high school student has far more homework and structured time than a first grader. For me, school used to last from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., with only a minimal amount of homework. Now it lasts from 8 to 4, with homework to boot.

But furthermore, there is a definite stifling of curiosity as you grow older. As a third or fourth grader, I could become fascinated with the patterns of leaves and the behavior of ants. Now, that would be a waste of time (unless in the context of a formal project).

Thus, an hour is just not worth as much to a 15-year-old as it is to a five-year-old. Ironically, the closer we feel to mortality, the less we can enjoy life, because we are more concerned with not “wasting” time.

This all makes growing up a mixed blessing. The passage of time is inevitable, but sometimes it seems like I can no longer come up with the great ideas that I had before. Unfortunately, it seems that in gaining maturity, we have to sacrifice creativity.

— Alex Zhai

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Lately, Online Gargoyle articles have received a lot of outside attention. The OG’s big breakthrough, outside of the Uni community, was the Editorial Scandal (can I call it that?) that rocked our comments section in February until we had to shut it down.

Our next attention-getter was the National Scholastic Press Association’s Online Pacemaker award. Now, people from all over the country are reading our little online newspaper.

This is a great thing. It warms the cockles of my heart to know that a random Chinese middle-school student read my column on Venezuela, or even better, my film review on “Blades of Glory,” although I haven’t gotten any outside comments on that yet.

However, it has also opened up my writing to attacks from people I have never met, and who therefore don’t know how generally awesome I am. They just don’t treat me with the respect I deserve. For instance if a kindergarten teacher in Utah read this, she or he wouldn’t know that I was just being sarcastic. This is very frightening.

This does hold my writing to a higher standard, which I guess is a good thing. Just kidding — it’s a good thing. But it has also won me the hatred of a student from Smith and a student from Wellesley (see the most recent article in my “college journey” series).

This is very sad, especially since I’ve always wanted to be liked by everyone. Now I’m making enemies from all over America! I guess this just means that I’m becoming a real writer.

— Bethany Hutchens

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I took the SAT this Saturday, and the entire process, from getting to the testing center to actually taking the test, was quite an endeavor.

The night before I had a track meet in St. Joe, and luckily coach Doug Mynatt was willing to let me run only in the 4x800 relay and then go home. The race went well, and I think it helped to get all of my nervous energy out. I realize that the SAT is only a test, but I couldn’t help but fear it as an imposing and looming obstacle that I must overcome in order to enjoy the rest of my weekend.

While registering for the test there were only two testing facilities left to choose from, Centennial High School and Illinois Wesleyan in Bloomington. I opted for the choice in which I was guaranteed a large table and comfortable seats: Illinois Wesleyan.

As a result my dad and I decided to that to drive up in the morning would be a nuisance and would probably tire me out too much before the test. Instead, we drove up on Friday night and stayed in a hotel in Bloomington. Looking back it seems like a lot of hassle all for a simple standardized test, but at the time it seemed like the best thing to do.

The actual test itself was not nearly as painful as most people make it out to be, and the lady who proctored our test was probably too nice for her own good. In the end, despite that the process was complicated by all of the driving, it turned out to be a relatively pain-free process. This doesn’t mean that I’d be willing to do it again anytime soon, though.

— Shivani Khanna

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Note: If you couldn’t care less about what I spent my 2.5 hours after school doing, skip to the last two paragraphs. If you couldn’t care less about what I thought about those 2.5 hours, skip to the last two sentences.

Today marks the end of a reasonably busy week for me, with tests and papers and such. So, intrigued by the daily-updated countdown someone scribbled across my desk in chemistry (“3 2 DAYS!!”), I decided to purchase a ticket in advance Thursday night to see “Spider-Man 3” at 12:30 p.m. today — right after school. It was the first series of moving images I would view on the big screen since I last set foot in a Savoy 16 theater all the way back in September of last year.

It was also the first of the “Spider-Man” movies I’d see (in its entirety, at least).

Strangely enough, the first thing that came to my mind as I noticed that this particular theater room featured stadium seating was an incredibly nerdy word problem I came across a while ago in our calculus textbook: “Where to Sit at the Movies” (Warning: PDF link).

“Suppose you decide that the best place to sit is the row where the angle θ subtended by the screen at your eyes is a maximum,” the question asked. Further details given in the question (how much the seating area is inclined, how many rows there are, etc.) would allow one to solve the big question: “In which row should you sit?”

For a second I actually attempted to mathematically calculate the best seat, but then I realized that I didn’t know the dimensions of Savoy 16’s theaters (and probably wouldn’t be able to solve the problem anyway). So a couple minutes before the movie started, I just picked an unoccupied seat toward the front row, fired up my phone, set it to vibrate, and as only a geek would do, promptly Twittered (disregarding the fact that nobody would care):

And the next thing I knew, the lights dimmed.

Two and a half hours later, I walked out of the theater, trying to organize my thoughts about the movie as a whole. As critics had said, the quality of the storyline isn’t much to write home about compared to the serious awesomeness of the eye candy, but I still thought it was quite enjoyable.

“Spider-Man 3” is, in the “overall” department at least, far from the best movie I’ve ever seen. But given its extreme popularity, I’d say it’s worth seeing. Don’t take my word for it, though; check out Ben Hyman’s formal review of the film. (There may also be other reviews as well, so keep an eye out for them.)

— Jason He

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week I was having a troublesome time thinking about what I could write a blog entry about.

I could write about the desperate perils upper-middle class kids must face when entering the college admissions process, or I could rant about some political issue that I have very little knowledge about.

But then it struck me. Why don’t I use this valuable published space to talk about the upcoming UFU (United for Uganda) movie night that I am in charge of organizing?

So here are the basic facts:

— The movie night will be held in the North Attic on Saturday from 6:45 to 9:30 p.m.

— “Blood Diamond” is the movie that will be shown.

— Students under 18 must bring a parent-signed permission form, since the movie is rated R for “strong violence and language.”

Now I will give five relatively good reasons in an attempt to convince everyone that it is definitely worth their time to watch “Blood Diamond” on Saturday in the North Attic.

1) The money you bring to buy baked goods, popcorn, and drinks will all go to the Layibi Secondary School in Uganda. UFU is currently part of the Schools for Schools campaign where high schools and colleges countrywide are raising money to fund a sister school in Uganda.

Instead of spending money going to the movies this weekend, why not spend that same money at our movie night?

2) “Blood Diamond” is a really good movie!

It was nominated for five Oscars, including best actor and best supporting actor. While it didn’t win any awards (though I still think Leonardo DiCaprio was the actual “best actor,” but let’s not go there. Oh, and Djimon Hounsou clearly could take out Alan Arkin any day), it’s definitely, in my humble opinion, one of the best movies out this year.

You could rent “Blood Diamond” at Blockbuster for around $4 … or you could come watch it for free on Saturday night (granted that donations are much, much appreciated … see No. 1).

3) One of the side plots of “Blood Diamond” is the child soldier experience in Sierra Leone. This is not only a great opportunity to learn why UFU is committed to dealing with the issue of child soldiers in Africa, but also a great venue for you to get involved too!

Depending on how close-to-schedule we are running, we are setting aside about 10 minutes for a little presentation on child soldiers in Uganda.

4) Have you noticed how studly this cast is? I certianly have. Not only do we have the classic, sexy Leonardo DiCaprio (complete with a South African accent), we have the buff and yummy Djimon Hounsou (who was an über popular male model in Paris and London).

Oh, and let’s not forget the super hott and ever-so beautiful Jennifer Connelly, who plays a “Let’s Save the World” journalist, a character many Uni students can identify with.

5) I will be baking cookies and brownies. While my baked goods are not from scratch, they are pretty damn good. OK, so usually my cookies come out mishappen and my brownies are always undercooked, but if we can’t trust the Pillsbury Doughboy, who can we trust? At any rate, my cookies and brownies should be reason enough to come to the UFU movie night this Saturday.

So hopefully these five reasons are good enough to convince you to come to the UFU movie night in the North Attic, with $3 or more in hand (not for admission, though!), this Saturday from 6:45 to 9:30 p.m.

— Andrea Park

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 6:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

As I grow older my parents have stopped doing various odd jobs for me. They don’t watch what I eat after school anymore, and now I order my own food at restaurants. When I start applying for college I’ll have their support, but for the most part I’ll be on my own.

But I’ve read about parents who don’t ever seem to let their children go and become the adults they should be. They’ve been coined the term “helicopter parents.”

When I first heard about helicopter parents, I was pretty jealous. Wouldn’t it be great to have a mom who does your college essays for you? Or a father who virtually does all of your homework so it’s perfect?

But my jealousy didn’t last very long once I started thinking about the implications. Having your mom proofread your paper is one thing, but for her to write the whole thing? Absurd. How will you ever learn how to write? It’s not as if she’s going to be able to write all of your papers for the rest of your life.

And if my parents did my homework, then I would never learn anything and would probably end up failing college. Of course, there are helicopter parents who don’t stop after their child has graduated from high school. I read about a mother who attended her son’s job interview to make sure it went all right.

The children of such parents obviously never learn to become independent. And it isn’t really their fault. Parents really should be willing to let their children learn things the hard way, even if it involves a little bit of pain.

After all, pain is part of growing up.

— Avanti Chajed

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Much like a great deal of my other stories, this one starts with me trying to find a CD hidden somewhere in my room, among many other CDs. However, this one ends differently than usual (giving up and listening to something else).

I kept looking for the elusive disc (even though I had mostly forgotten what I was looking for and why I wanted to listen to it), to the point that I ended up spending most of an hour hunting around my room.

Eventually, I gave up and listened to The Misfits, instead of whatever it was I was looking for. But the exercise in futility I had participated in got me thinking. Why do we use CDs? Their relatively small size and easy portability makes them astoundingly easy to lose, and incredibly hard to find.

Even though I’m not what you might call “retro,” at least vinyl records are large, bulky objects that are difficult (if not impossible) to lose among piles of papers and books on my desk.

In fact, I think I’ll try finding a turntable and some records if for no other reason than I can’t lose albums that are as large as my head. Unless I end up losing my head as well, which is also always a possibility. However, short of that I should be able to enjoy my music without an hour of desperation trying to find said music.

(Note: I ended up finding the CD I was looking for, three days later under a pile of dirty laundry. Go figure.)

— Carl Zielinski

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I loved VHS. It proved very satisfying to stick a rectangular black piece of plastic and metal into a larger rectangular box to cause a magical reaction resulting in pictures on an even larger more cubical box referred to as a television.

Now part of ancient history, video tapes are hardly seen and are hardly sold. Everything is about DVDs, but personally I think VHS still has its merits.

DVDs definitely have better quality. DVDs are also a lot more shiny and pretty, but really, when it comes to practicality, VHS are much more easy to fast forward, rewind, and play.

You can’t scene skip and there aren’t any special features with the VHS, but when I want to watch a movie, I want the movie part. I have almost never gone to any special feature sections (the only cases are when I was extremely bored or too tired to turn off the DVD player).

Sometimes people overdo it — they put too much stuff into one thing. Yeah, in papers and stuff things look a lot more impressive if you have a billion pages, but that’s just it. Looks.

When I research something, I search for short articles — the ones that I will actually be able to read. I search for things that will actually help me. I search for the things that have substance, not the ones that only look pretty.

VHS is short and sweet. It’s not too little and not too much. Just right.

— Alan Liang

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

“I won’t grow up
I don’t wanna go to school
Just to learn to be a parrot
And recite a silly rule
If growing up means it would be
Beneath my dignity to climb a tree
I’ll never grow up
Never grow up
Never grow up
Not me!”

Ahh … Peter Pan. How right you are.

More than just not wanting to worry about college and grad school and a career, I don’t to be responsible for myself.

My parents have cared for me for 16 years now, and despite all of my teenage rebellion, it is actually a great thing. I know that I will have food, a house, an education. I know that my parents will care for me when I am sick, that they will pay for my expenses, protect me, and, well, be my parents.

So what happens when I have to grow up and do all that for myself?

Consider how organized you have to become. Working, budgeting, scheduling — all these things enter into the equation in a way they never have before. It is no longer a matter of deciding whether I want to take Anat/Phys or Bug Bio next year. Now I have to decide whether to take a full load of grad school courses, on top of a part-time job, and along with an unpaid internship which may result in a full job offer.

Choices carry more weight; there is more at stake and there is more to consider.

Another example: My family is moving to Evanston next year, and we just bought a house. The idea that I may have to one day buy a house is frightening — that I will have to worry about saving money, making a down payment, then paying a monthly mortgage.

Thoughts like that diminish college to a four-year-long summer camp. Even though you are living on your own, your parents are still paying for everything, they are still making sure that you are doing all right. The only new things for you to worry about are keeping up your grades without parental incentive/punishment, eating food (which they are still buying for you), and going to the campus health center when you are sick.

I know I think of college as the defining moment, the time when I move out of the house and become an adult. But, in truth, how much do you grow up?

Perhaps this is more of an ode to parents, rather than a true complaint about growing up. Am I actually scared of the time when I can fly to Australia on a whim? Absolutely not!

But I do think that all of the things adults have to deal with are diminished by us teenagers. I think we take our parents for granted. And, I think we barrel forward, always looking to the next birthday. We speak in terms of “I can’t wait until I am grown up.”

We don’t realize that one day, when we are old and decrepit, we are going to want all those years back. We don’t realize that these are some of the best years of our lives, that we really have no worries, and that the future simply brings taxes.

— Sarah Pfander

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 8:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Weather. It’s what people talk about when they don’t really have anything else to say, right? And I really can’t think of anything else to say right now. So here we go: weather.

But really, what’s been up with it lately, actually? Thunderstorms that last for maybe 10-15 minutes, humidity, and awful heat. My earlier blog entry about insomnia? Forget not having a reason. For the past two nights, I’ve been staring at the ceiling because it is simply too hot to fall asleep.

On the bright side, though, there has been an explosion of skirts, shorts, and flip-flops at school. There are more bright reds and pinks and oranges and light greens and blues. The colors and the weather combined make it feel like summer, which makes me happy …

But also quite upset. Because it is making me slightly stir-crazy. Having to sit inside a classroom and take notes while I could be outside lying in the grass and taking a nap in the sunshine is frustrating. Dutifully completing all my homework at night when I could be outside talking a walk is extremely sad.

I am ready for summer.

But I’m not ready for more heat.

What a dilemma.

— Michelle Gao

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So we are already a couple of weeks into fourth quarter, and I’m already missing third quarter. Not necessarily because I want the early morning track practices or piles of homework back, but more so I want Naho!

Naho Maeda is this year’s Japanese exchange student, and during third quarter I had the pleasure of living with her. And although I could list plenty of positive features about her, what I wanted to point out in this blog entry was particularly the fact that you don’t have to move to another country to learn about someone else’s culture!

About the first two days or so after Naho moved in with me, a little after winter break, I had decided to make nice warm chocolate chip cookies. But what’s better than chocolate chip cookies? The dough of course!

As I turned the oven on to preheat, I got myself out a small bowl to put a scoop of cookie dough in (to save for later), and then I called into the living room to ask Naho if she wanted some as well … and she seemed totally shocked.

She laughed at me and asked me if I was kidding, and when I had convinced her that I was totally serious, she told me it sounded so gross and there was no way she was going to eat it (“It’s dough Lizzy!”).

Apparently Naho had never even heard of people eating cookie dough! How absurd! So I explained to her that most people I know have tried cookie dough, love cookie-dough ice cream, and even buy those little cookie-dough bites at the movie theaters.

Although she remained a little hesitant, I managed to get her to try some, and not-so-shockingly she loved it!

One time Naho and I were hanging out in her room when she asked me if I wanted some of her chips her mom had just sent her from Japan. She told me that they were really spicy and that she couldn’t eat them.

Although I couldn’t understand the label, the bag was black and had a ball of fire with a “smiley face” in the fire figure. Being brave (and assuming they could be no worse than flaming hot Cheetos) I tried one. And they were very similar to flaming hot cheetos … at first.

Then my mouth felt like it was on fire, and I rushed downstairs to get water! I didn’t know they made potato chips so spicy! I only ate one, and convinced my brother to eat one too before we had to put the bag away.

After that incident Naho shared many of her interesting food stories with me. For example, who knew that they sold Kit-Kats in glass jars in Japan? And Naho told me they ate live fish. Actually all she told me at first was that “these fish are just swimming, swimming, swimming, then they pick one, and you eat it!,” which seemed very gross at first, but she later explained to me that the fish were very small and were only served at fancy restaurants (and she also added some details about how you could feel the fish squirming in your mouth, too).

Another time, not related to food for once, Naho and I decided to go on go-karts! What Naho failed to tell me was the fact that she had only been on one once when she was really young and her dad was driving! So since I’d had the experience of driving go-karts at various fairs and carnivals since I can remember, I didn’t think anything of it.

And actually, everything went very smoothly: The cars didn’t go all that fast, and there weren’t any other people there, and the track was very wide. It was just the ending, when the guy had us pull in to stop. I slowed down my car and then put on the brake … and next thing I know Naho comes speeding in and hits me, kablam!

Later I figured out that not only had Naho never really driven a go-kart, but on top of that she had never learned how to ride a bike! (And when she finally arranged for proper bike lessons she was continually coming home with bruised knees from all the harsh falls!)

There were also stories about her gigantic school and how they had archery programs available, and the different types of wild animals that come into the city (on occasion).

One thing is for sure: I definitely miss all the new experiences — everything from experiencing Naho’s first real go-kart extravaganza to learning about how it feels to have a live fish in your mouth.

— Lizzy Warner

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since I started having each of my classes taught by a different teacher in sixth grade I have noticed a problem: There are lots of weeks where there is a ton of work in several classes due in one week, or there are a ton of tests, or a combination of the two.

At times I suppose a build-up of tests and projects being due makes some sense, like before the end of the quarter when teachers would be trying to get a few more grades in before they have to send grades in.

It is also understandable right before a break, because teachers know that if you try to teach anything right before break, no one will remember it after, so it just makes more sense to start a new unit after break.

However, sometimes there are random weeks like this nowhere near a break or the end of the quarter. These confuse me. Unfortunate coincidence I guess. At least before I came to Uni I would have to blame it on an extreme lack of communication between different teachers. When complaints about the work would be brought up teachers would just have a look of confusion on their face, obviously not knowing anything about the other classes.

Here at Uni a nice effort is made to try and reduce this kind of ignorance to the students’ schedules by not allowing students to have more than three tests in a day, and having teachers record their test and the day on some sort of calender.

This method is pretty effective, although it doesn’t work when teachers forget to put their test down on the calender, but students will usually complain if they have four or five tests in one day.

However, this does not prevent a lot of papers or long-term projects being due all in a short period, so we still get weeks with tons of work like this due.

In fact, I am in the middle of one such week. There is a lot due this week, and a lot left to do. But despite this massive workload, I keep working, and looking forward to next week, with the knowledge that at least it won’t be this week.

— Deren Kudeki

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 9:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Way back on Jan. 30, I wrote a blog entry about the similarities between enduring the school year and running long distance, specifically the varying levels of energy and apathy over time.

At right is the graph that I made to show this, dating back to the beginning of third quarter. According to that graph, I should currently have a very positive attitude about school (check) but also be losing the will to do well on homework and tests. That, I’m glad to say, hasn’t happened.

Last weekend, I had a chemistry take-home exam to finish by Sunday night, a major English paper to finish by Monday night, and a research paper in history looming on the horizon. Additionally, I had to take care of some minor-yet-time-consuming short-term stuff for math, history, journalism, and Japanese.

Even though I focused almost unequivocally on homework on Friday night, Saturday morning, and Saturday afternoon, I was still banging my head against my desk at 10 on Sunday night trying to make sense of my chaotic pH calculations.

But was I apathetic or unmotivated? No, because the end of the year was so close, and I knew that putting in the extra effort now would make the end of the quarter less stressful.

While I wrote my English paper, I reminded myself that this was the last paper I would be writing for the rest of the year, besides history, which I already had a good start on. The chemistry exam was a monster, but the feeling of finally stapling it back together and putting it away resulted in a great feeling of relief (but I’ll let you know if I still feel that way when I get the graded exam back).

I feel quite a bit happier after fitness class than after sports class, because I feel like I’ve accomplished something, and gotten the hard stuff out of the way for at least two days. We did a two-and-a-third-mile run in the hot sun on Monday morning, and although I was seconds from becoming reacquainted with my breakfast afterward, I was still glad that I had put in the effort, because it would help me get in shape for the 5K. Similarly, I try to get good grades because it will hopefully help me get into the college I want to attend.

This, of course, begs the question of what’s so important about my longish-term goals. In accordance with my current state of non-apathy, I guess my answer would be that at this stage in my life, I can’t feasibly avoid the trials that have been put in place. (Example: “Hey Merf, I’m not going to run the 5K this year.” “OK, have fun running fitness every day until you graduate.”)

Once I get all the obligatory stuff out of the way, I’ll still have plenty of time to do what I really enjoy. Sorry I’m in such a ridiculously good mood. I’m starting to frighten myself a bit with it.

— Andrew Lovdahl

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was sitting in journalism today, when that prickly feeling started climbing up my back, making my arm hairs stand up and sending an all-too noticeable flush to my face. Once again, I had forgotten to do something for class. Namely, this blog.

This is surprising, since I was a model of efficiency last night. I thought I had finished everything; I even did some things that weren’t even due today. Which is rare for a senior (like me!).

However, despite my fourth-quarter senior status (which, in my book, makes me impervious to homework), I’m swamped. Instead of slacking off, my homework is picking up.

Apparently every teacher I have thinks that other teachers aren’t giving us homework (because we’re seniors I guess), so they feel they have the duty to fill those gaping empty times in our days with something.

Unfortunately, with soccer practice, games, socializing (very important for seniors), finalizing college decisions, Rotary meetings, and summer job-hunting, I don’t have any free time in the day.

Also, I no longer have the energy or the brainpower to do, or remember, my homework. I’m starting to sink. Luckily there are only four more weeks of school to suffer through before my brain goes kaput.

— Bethany Hutchens

Posted by Gargoyle Staff at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)