Ultimate

On Friday we had a double-header game, first playing NMH and then St. Johnsbury. In the NMH game, we both fielded two teams, and A and a B. On the A field, we won 11-4, but over on the B field, we were kicked 11-3. We beat St. Johnsbury though at 6-6 with next point wins, by which time it was completely dark.

Today we played Amherst College B. Technically they won, but by the end of the game it was a total farce anyway; we made a cup-o-saurus, which is pretty much the best move ever. It was very muddy, and we played Miniature Tanks afterwards, which was awesome. Basically what you do is everyone gets on their hands and forearms in a shoulder-to-shoulder circle. Then everyone starts crawling in towards the center, chanting “Miniature tanks, miniature tanks, miniature tanks…”. You have to keep going no matter what. Everyone ends up crawling all over everyone else. Then a friend and I layed out into some mud, which was also excellent. However, in the course of the ensuing chest-bump, my right big toe was cleated, and now my nail is coming off, which is extremely painful. So it goes.

I have no regrets.

MacHeist

I just purchased the MacHeist bundle. I am not using all of the apps in it, but just for the ones I am using, $39 is a fabulous price. As Wil Wheatonsaid, I really hope that BoinxTV gets unlocked. Anyone who has a Mac should by this package, save a bunch of money, help charity, and get awesome apps.

First game

We won our first game of the season! It was an awesome one, against Longmeadow B. It was pretty great that it was not a pushover; we were quite evenly matched and the game was intense. Also, I layed out for the first point of the season! I am extremely proud. And dirty. My glasses are pretty destroyed, having been stepped on and dirtified rather well.

Today I played an excellent game of Apples to Apples. I won. Here, then, is a list of my qualities, as expressed by the infallible and omnipotent logic of Apples to Apples:

1. Crazed
2. Masculine
3. Smooth
4. Influential
5. Misunderstood
6. Wild
7. Important
8. Offensive
9. Primitive
10. Hilarious
11. Nerdy
12. Frightening
13. Powerful

The Mock Trial team is entering an invitational tournament in New Jersey. We got the case today. It is negligence!

I am now able to moonwalk.

Brownian Calendar

Google Calendaris becoming really awesome. I just spent about forty-five minutes entering various data about Brown stuff, and it is going to be really useful. I have a calendar shared with my parents, and have entered all filing deadlines, special events, etc. Also, the discussion feature has thus far allowed me to take some notes on what I’m doing (like filling out paper forms and getting things to my college counselor), and as my parents start to reference the calendar more, we will all be able to keep track of our progress there.

College

I really hate the college application process and system. It is so detrimental to people’s self-confidence and perspective on education. It changes the focus from getting a good education to getting into a certain school. What you do where you end up is so much more important than where you end up. It is important to be somewhere that you like, but if everyone was applying to fewer schools, and everyone could get a free or affordable college education, this would no longer be an issue. Schools now have to pay close attention to where people come from, making it less likely that a bunch of people in the same area will all get in. They have to do this because there is an expectation of geographic spread.

This is one manifestation of what I think is a U.S.- and world-wide mis-focus. In terms of transportation, education, farming, and economics, history has shown that smaller localized economic and social communities function better than large-scale importing and exporting ones. This is not to say that international or intranational trade is not important, but communities need to be self-sustaining in terms of where they get their food and other staples, and where they educate themselves. If people need to travel far distances or have their food shipped them, they will consume valuable resources that the rest of the world has to take up rather than moving production closer to themselves. If a community can’t educate itself, or rather doesn’t have local options available to do this, it will lack the tools to keep up with others.

I guess this forms the core of the argument for local farming and distributing (CSAs) and an effective government-run public school system that guarantees a college education to everyone. Barack Obama is right when he says that we can’t solve today’s economic problems by thinking about today alone. Education is an investment in the future. If people, whether the government or students, underestimate themselves, they hurt not only their own chances in a society driven by jobs requiring education, but those of others who will suffer when the economy is unable to sustain itself any longer without people to fill those jobs.

Anyway, one reason I’m thinking about this is that a bunch of my friends who had applied were not accepted to Brown. I’m still excited to go there, but I really would have liked to go there with them, and I feel that it’s unfair that they weren’t admitted and I was. I am not more deserving than them. I am not smarter than them. But for whatever reason, Brown couldn’t see that these were people who any school should be envious of, people who have taken on their own education, and will benefit any community they’re in. That is their (Brown’s) and my loss. I am sure my friends will be happy wherever they end up, and some of them may try to transfer somewhere else later if they want to, but I am disappointed that we won’t get to go to school together any more.

Both ways

I have just discovered that if I edit my subscribed Google calendars in iCal, they sync to the server. This is awesome. The only issue is that iCal has to be open to sync stuff. So I can no longer just use my really awesome natural-language event-creating dashboard widget QuickCalon its own. I have to open iCal first. This is not really that big of a deal. In fact, putting things in perspective, it’s pretty cool that I can receive an email, press a button, type in “Meeting tomorrow from noon until 12:30 pm”, press enter, and have it appear in my Google calendar. All that QuickCal lacks is location support, but I am sure this will be implemented soon. Perhaps it will support attendees and invitations as well for the ultimate Google integration experience.

AAAAHHH

Okay, it turns out that the Google Calendar gadget on iGoogle has natural-language input support too! Also, it can do locations. This is just ridiculous. Everything is going to work so much better than it would have before.

It is a good thing that Google is not evil, because if they were they would control the world.

My new motto for all things technological:

If there is a product, service, or technology, Google makes a version that is better than the one you have, and it is free.

Upload

I am switching entirely to Google Calendar. I am in the process of uploading my iCal calendars. Then I may subscribe to them in iCal once they are uploaded, so I can still sync them to my iPod.

I still need to find a good solution for my contacts.

Cloudy

It worked! I have done it! My calendars are all online now, and I am subscribed to them with iCal, so they show up on my iPod. Any changes I make online show up on my iPod the next time I sync it. More importantly, I don’t have to be at home to update my calendar.

The future is now.

Home

We got home earlier than expected, at about four or so. I have been doing some yardwork, and am heading up to see Will at the farm. I will stay there tonight, and we will catch up on our math and physics work, on which we are extremely behind. I may also bring the LC(A) to show off. Will has told people about it, but I don’t think they’ve ever actually seen it in the flesh (plastic?).

Our first Frisbee game is on Thursday.

Waltz With Bashir

We are going to see Waltz With Bashir tonight! I am so excited! I have been waiting to see it for a while.

Waltz With Bashir Review

Waltz With Bashir was excellent. I am going to do my best to review it here, briefly summarizing the plot and what I thought of it. WARNING: plot details most definitely follow:

The movie is an animated documentary, focused around the recollections of the filmmaker, Ari Folman, about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He was in the IDF at the time, and has only dim recollections of certain events. It begins when a fellow soldier tells him of a nightmare he has been having, and Folman then begins to have his own vision of a massacre he knows occured, but knows little of. He seeks out other veterans, including one who he sees in this dream, and tries to learn more of what went on there. As he uncovers more and more details and personal stories, the film transitions between different animation styles as we travel through the memories of these people, and come to understand the whole story through these fragmented viewpoints. At the very end of the movie, it suddenly snaps to about forty-five seconds of live authentic archival footage, and then ends. This is extremely jarring, and I was at first a little ticked off at that they had abandoned what had until that point been a purely animated feature for the sake of dramatic impact, but I am coming to understand why they did this more. It was certainly effective in terms of impact, but the question is whether or not it serves the film’s interests. I think it ultimately does. It is almost as if the animation represents the fact that these memories are all fragmented, subjective, and limited to the perceptions the soldiers had at the time of the events’ occurring, and then at the end when Folman comes to understand what actually ocurred, and the role he had in it, we see the footage, reminding us that there are in fact concrete records of these sort of things, that it is a matter of contextualizing them.

One theme the film treats especially well is that of ignorance. Character struggle with the concept of blissful ignorance, and how certain people might have shut out certain stimuli to keep themselves happy or sane. This is served especially well in a scene with the psychiatrist.

There is also one particular veteran who routinely offers very interesting analyses to Folman (who is a character in the movie) of Folman’s own viewpoints. At one point, he says that perhaps the reason Folman is so interested in discovering the details of this massacre is that his own parents were in Auschwitz during the Holocaust, and this idea of massacre has been with him all of his life. Now he is seeking to understand the situation in which he unwittingly took the role of the Nazi (to a lesser degree, but a definite parallel).

That particular exploration reminded me of a part of Maus in which Art is talking to his psychiatrist, Pavel, who says “Does the world really need another Holocaust story? Maybe they need a bigger and better Holocaust.” It seems to me that a lot of the art that comes out of trauma and tragedy, like the Holocaust or this particular military conflict / genocide, is focused on the idea of awareness. When will humanity finally get to the point where an understanding of genocide or human suffering is not limited to retrospect? When will we no longer be afraid to call these things what they are? It seems that Arik Sharon knew about this particular massacare, at Sabra and Shatila, and let it occur anyway. When will the world understand these things well enough to at least grant them classification? From this will follow action, inevitably, but we must take that first step of recognition.

Overall, I really liked this movie, and found that it explored these themes very effectively. The artwork was beautiful. The first scene, which is a dream that a veteran is having, and subsequently describes, is particularly striking. It starts with a dog running, and then more join it, finally coming to a halt underneath a window, which they bark at, where a man stands. The veteran then tells Folman that there are twenty-six dogs in the dream, and that they are the twenty-six dogs he shot during the invasion. As his unit approached Lebanese villages, the dogs would bark and awaken everyone, so his commander had him snipe the dogs before they entered, because they knew he was too afraid to kill a person. For some reason, this veteran describing the fact that he remembered the faces and the wounds of every single one of those twenty-six dogs struck me as completely tragic, and I lost it. Even at the end of the film, faced with the gruesome archival footage, I wasn’t as deeply affected. That first scene really set the tone.

I highly recommend this movie to anyone in the mood for a though-provoking and contemplative theater-going experience. If you’re looking for easy entertainment or something you can just walk away from and not think about, look elsewhere. Waltz With Bashir is not to be taken lightly.

NYC

Shawarma is probably one of the best foods there is. I had a fabulous chickens shawarma sandwich. We are staying at my aunt and uncle’s apartment now. We walked around for a bit before coming here, as we had been in the car for about an hour from New Jersey.

This morning, before we left, we visited my great-grandmother at the nursing home she is in. It was very nice in some ways, and not nice at all in some other ways. It made me think a lot about how I want to be treated and live when I am that age, and how I want to cope as my parents get towards that age. I think that it is weird that in America we pay people to live with and take care of our old people, rather than just doing it ourselves. If everyone was in a better position to take care of their relatives as they aged, we wouldn’t need to spend so much money on those institutions. Ideally, the government would provide money to anyone who is taking care of relatives to help them cope, but until we are in a position to have that sort of health care infrastructure, we will have to deal with these not-so-friendly institutions. This particular one is rather nice, but it is still an institution, with all of the benefits and pitfalls that implies. It is a tricky situation.

I am glad that my relatives are being well taken care of, but I wish it was a little more personal, and I wish I saw them more often.

Mourn

I am in New Jersey right now at my grandmother’s house, having just come from Long Island from another family member’s house following the graveside service, which we were unable to get to, as it was at ten-thirty this morning. We didn’t want to catch all of the rush hour traffic, so we left at about ten and got in at one-thirty. We were there until about eight. There was a very nice evening service at about seven.

Throughout the afternoon and evening, I spent a lot of time with a lot of different people. Some of them I knew and had seen recently (in exemplum my grandfather [most recently sighted at my aunt’s wedding in L.A.]). Some of them I knew and had not seen for a long time (in exemplum my grandfather’s cousin, the widow of the deceased [most recently sighted at her apartment several years ago]). Some of them I had never met before in my life (in exemplum her sister). Anyway, I had a really good time, or as much of a good time as one should have at a post-funeral Shiva session.

Everyone has their own way of mourning. Some people cry a lot, some people are solid and stoic and then cry a lot in private, some are solid and stoic and never cry. Some are somewhere in between, defying categorization. It is weird. It is hard to predict how people will act. I try not to stop trying though, because I think that if you just sit back and accept the way people feel, it can be easy to get caught up in emotions and not understand what’s actually happening around you. It is important to be sympathetic and comforting while still trying to understand your feelings.

No

Well, we didn’t win our trial yesterday. Thus, we are out of the competition. So it goes.

I am more seriously considering opening a Facebook account.

Comics and competition

The Webcomics Weekend was a huge success, at least for the two hours I was there. I met a lot of awesome people, including Ryan North, David Malki, Joey Comeau, and Emily Horne. I bought two shirts, the first for me and the second for a friend who couldn’t come but is a die hard Dinosaur Comics fan. Also I got a gigantic pastrami sandwich on an onion bagel at the restaurant at Eastworks, which lasted me the rest of the day.

We didn’t do so well at Harmony Sweeps. We didn’t place or get Audience Favorite (we did both last year), but the groups that did were fabulous. I didn’t feel that disappointed, because I had a really great time, heard some really good music, and got a chance to perform with some really fun people.

Also, I had a singularly AWESOME experience after the show. A bunch of girls came up to the group, and asked for our AUTOGRAPHS! And they wanted pictures with us! It was SO COOL! I have NEVER given an autograph before, and I enjoyed it so much. They said that they were part of a high school choir as well, and they wanted us to come see their show, which we totally would have, except that it is on June 1st, which is 5-Alone‘s big show as well, and my birthday with all of its investment and skydiving-related opportunities and commitments. Speaking of my birthday, I was recently informed that Lucky’s, a tattoo and piercing parlor in Northampton, will give you a free piercing on your eighteenth birthday. This fits in perfectly with my planned theme for that whole day, so I am considering getting another piercing. It would definitely be an ear. I have to decide if I want to get my other (right) earlobe pierced, or if I want to go for one of those upper-ear-type things, and if so, if I want it to be on the left (already pierced) ear, or or the right. Decision, decisions.

Tomorrow I am sleeping, going to see my school’s production of Hair with a friend, and going to a Mock Trial meeting.

Comic

Tomorrow I am heading to the New England Webcomics Conventionbefore going to Boston to compete in the Boston RegionalHarmony Sweepstakes. It is going to be a busy day.

Other

The other semifinals trial on Monday will be between Sharon High School and Westford Academy. This one’s in Boston, at John Joseph Moakley Courthouse, which is a fabulous place. It looks out over the harbor, and that wall is made of entirely of large rectangular panes of glass, giving it an astounding view.

Our trial is at Worcester Superior Courthouse, which is also a pretty great building, although it doesn’t have a view.

We have no school tomorrow, but the Mock Trial team is meeting.

Maimonides…

has beaten Newton South in their quarterfinals trial. We will be playing them on Monday in the semifinals.

Home

I am pretty sick and did not go to school today. I spent the day at home recuperating, running some errands, and I had a rehearsal this evening.

Last night I had a conversation with my mom about transgender health care, and, after reading articles today about the Pope’s anti-condom remarks en route to Cameroon, I am pissed off. People need to realize that some things supersede religion or personal belief. Human life and health is always more important. Always. Whether or not you think people *should *be having sex-changing surgery, the fact is that they do, and if you are a health care provider of any kind, you have a duty to those people that supersedes your beliefs about the morality of what they are doing. The same holds for religious figures. If you want to preach abstinence, that’s fine, but the fact is that condoms save lives, and to tell people in Africa, the continent worst-hit by AIDS, that condoms are “part of the problem” (yes, he actually said that), is just plain lying. That is outside of the realm of belief. That is false, and it should not be tolerated.