Blog Challenge Outro

Well, this month has been difficult and wonderful and horrible and fun all at once.

There's no way, really, to describe the dread I felt some nights at 11:00pm when I realized that I still had to write and post something within the next hour. There’s also no way to describe how much I surprised myself at what I could squeeze out of my busy schedule, day after day, when I probably could have been sleeping. I have written some pretty lame poems, but I’ve also written some that I actually really love, and I’m ecstatic that I managed to write on “Rainstorms” exactly as much as I wrote on “Cry of the Stars.”

I’m so grateful to Stevie for holding these Blog Challenges, because they’re a big spark in my world that sets the fire of inspiration burning for a long time, and this month was no different from the past challenges in that aspect. I had been feeling creatively kind of dead before February, but I’ve become mostly alive again—phrases and snippets of poems and stories are constantly floating around in my head again, and I couldn’t be happier to have them back.

Hopefully it lasts! Hopefully you will hear more about the wacky stuff that happens to me at college, and find out what happens to Lill’th (our poor reluctant protagonist) and her friends, and read more fairytale poetry if I can think of any more fairytales to retell. The prompt vault I constructed for this challenge is still about half-full of unused prompts, so stay tuned for Scripture reflections, magical pets, “Ode to Squirrels,” musings on life and living, and a possible story about the sun and the moon as children.

I suppose this is me promising to keep writing, no matter how awful it feels sometimes to keep doing it, but definitely more if you people are actually reading it all.
Keep reading, readers. I’ll keep writing.

How I Turned Nursery Songs Into Nightmares

This is a story I've already shared with some friends, but I think it’s worth commemorating in writing as well. It is best told in two movements.

I. Adagio, suspenseful
The background of this sad tale is as follows: in my Engineering 102 class, we’re building and programming small Lego robots that are tasked with searching an arena for yellow and blue canisters, capturing the canisters, and delivering them to separate landfills, one of which is marked by a strong light source. (If you've talked with me recently, you've probably heard about this robot thing, because it is somehow the most stressful project I've ever undertaken, even though from all accounts it’s very hard to get a bad grade in the course.) For the purpose of the preliminary competition, which is the focus of this story, we’ll ignore the yellow canisters and the landfill without the light source.

My group coded a search function that makes the robot run in an increasing spiral from the center of the field. This involved a lot of switches and loops-within-loops, which got seriously confusing, so we decided to take an upperclassman’s advice and put bits of sound into our code at important points, in order to know what the robot was running at any particular time.

What a great idea, I thought to myself at 11:43pm as I was adding the sounds. In fact, I’ll choose the musical notes to be recognizable songs at each part of the function, so I can immediately know what’s going on. How about the first four notes of “Mary Had A Little Lamb” at the end of each search loop? It’ll be cute, I thought.

It’ll be cute. Cute.

Try this out with me. Sing the first four notes of “Mary Had A Little Lamb”—just the first four. You’ll find yourself singing “Mary had a—” and stopping there. And this is precisely what chimed its charming way through our heads every single time the robot completed one square and prepared to enter another.

Mary had a—
Mary had a—
Mary had a—a what?
What did Mary have??

II. Vivace, enunciated
For the other sound bytes, I foolishly chose snippets of Brahm's Lullaby. In particular, the robot declared that it had found the direction of the light source—when the light sensor read 50 or above—with a loud, four-note ascending melody before it would drive towards the light. This was all right in practice, when we used a phone flashlight as our simulated “light source” and only heard the melody a few times before the robot reached a threshold where it released the canister, backed away, and turned around.

On the actual field, during our competition, it came to our attention that our wheel motors were out of sync, enough that our robot had a significant left-turn drag whenever it tried to go forward. This meant that every time it tried to drive towards the light, it would turn left after about two inches, lose the light, rotate again until it found it, play the melody again, and repeat the whole process.

At around the tenth repetition of the melody, I started to tremble and cover my ears. At around the twelfth repetition, the robot leaped forward into a dramatic left turn near ninety degrees, then stopped in utter confusion, as the light readings on that particular part of the field fluctuated constantly between 49 and 50.

The melody began to play endlessly.

I yelled in anguish, lunged to the other side of the arena, and scrabbled at the robot’s off-button until the whole program aborted.

“Shut UP SHUT UP SHUT UP,” I screamed.
Fellow students nearby backed away, some laughing nervously.

Throughout the rest of the day today, Brahm's Lullaby has kept needling its way into my brain and taunting me with its deceptively innocent tones, but the song is ruined for me, forever. I've had to keep myself from clawing at my own ears in the middle of the street.

Needless to say, the sound bytes are coming out of our code as soon as we don’t need them anymore.

for the preservation of possible victory

I am watching Death Comes To Pemberley with my family, so...this is my blog post for today.
We are taking an intermission break before the third episode as I write this post, and they're all eating a second dinner. It's great. I love my family.

The Interview (Or Not)

This morning as I walked to my first class, located in Disque, I noticed some papers taped to the glass doors: "Psychology Graduate Research Interviews →". Throughout the rest of the day, I walked past those papers several more times, and didn't spare more than a passing thought for them.

That is, until I headed for Physics 101 recitation in the adjoining building, Stratton, where I realized that the professionally-clad women climbing the stairs to the second floor with me were, in fact, heading to those specified interviews. They wore heels, blazers, pencil skirts, killer makeup, and classy beige messenger bags—the whole deal. I felt suddenly self-conscious in my bright green sneakers, bright red plaid sweater that really didn't match my grey-and-darker-red plaid scarf, giant coat, and yet-another-shade-of-red backpack. 

The women seemed confused by my presence, and I don't blame them. I'm still confused as to why my physics recitation is in a classroom on the same floor as the Psychology department. 

Well, I got to class, and they got to their interviews, and we closed the door to our classroom, and I forgot about them for somewhere close to an hour. My TA, a tall, slightly bearded ex-cop (SVU investigator in Tennessee, to be exact) and current Ph.D candidate in astrophysics, had just placed a large trashcan on top of his table to demonstrate some concept involving work when a tentative knock came at the door. 

He opened the door, and a short, well-dressed woman with a namecard on a lanyard looked in. 

I can only imagine what she saw: a looming man wearing sweatpants covered in chalk dust and nine weary engineering freshmen trying to take notes, not to mention the kind of gross trashcan sitting on a table like nobody's business. 

"Oh," she squeaked, "I must have come to the wrong place."

"That depends," said the TA. "You could hop in and learn some physics if you want!"

The classroom door had begun to swing itself closed at this point, so I could no longer see the woman's face. I only heard the palpable horror in her retreating voice as she said, "Ohh...God," and fled. 

The TA turned back to us as the door shut itself behind the woman, and shrugged. 

"Darn," he said. "I was hoping she'd actually stay and learn physics."

Miscellaneous 2-11-15

It's come to this. I have 3-5 much better post ideas knocking around in the back of my head, but the necessity of writing for English and studying for the Physics quiz on Friday, along with the desire for actual sleep tonight, means that I'm just going to tell you all about my day.

• My friend Tatijana feels deeply about the neck structure of the apatosaurus, not to mention the tragedy of the species' unavoidable demise. I wish I could empathize well enough to write a poem for her, but I barely know what an apatosaurus is. It's all right, though, Tatijana: I'm like 97% sure that there will be dinosaurs in heaven. 
• I learned about Laplace transforms today. Our professor talks as if we've forgotten how to do algebra, and in my case, he's actually right. I tried to solve something like 3 = 2 + 4B and really thought that B = 1/2, or some stupid mistake like that. Oh well. Practice makes perfect! Someday I'll look back at this post and think with a sentimental sniffle, I was so young, I had only just learned what Laplace transforms were.
• Currently trying to teach myself the NXC coding language (a C-based programming language specifically for LEGO NXT, for those of you who don't know) so that we can actually program our Lego robot, hopefully in time for the preliminary competition next week. Things are a little complicated by the fact that my computer refuses to connect to the robot, but my groupmate's computer connects just fine, so we're trying to work out this strange emailing-code and snapchatting-test-results arrangement, which is not too bad. 
• Songs of the week: True North - Jillette Johnson, Send Me The Moon - Sara Bareilles, Queen Of A Sad Land - A Silent Film, Jupiter - Sleeping At Last, Blood I Bled - The Staves, Someone - Future of Forestry. 

That's it for now! You may expect a killer haiku tomorrow night when I take a study break. 

War, Warm Food, and Kale Smoothies

1.
It came to my memory today that when we were bored, Jeremy and I used to play war, also known as the most inane card game in existence. For those of you who aren't familiar, the game entails splitting a deck of cards equally, one half for each player, and holding the cards face-down. Gameplay involves dramatically drawing your top cards and throwing them down into the space between you. Whoever has the higher value card takes both. If the cards are the same value, you have war or something, and whoever wins gets six cards? I barely remember. I had to look it up.
Anyway, the game continues until someone has won all the cards. There is absolutely no strategy.
I'm fairly sure we used to play this for hours.

2.
If you know Nathan, you know that he's occasionally prone to be very emotional about very specific things.
One of these things is warm food.
Nathan could cry if you gave him warm food after a long day.

3.
Not too long ago, Dan made a smoothie with a lot of stuff that sounds like it will make a gross smoothie: broccoli, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, and garlic, among other ingredients. It was healthy, I think, and didn't taste as awful as one might expect, but it was healthy.
Last night, Dan asked me if I'd like a smoothie.
I said, "That depends. Is it a regular smoothie, or THAT kind of smoothie?"
He said slowly, "I...could put kale in it, if you want?"

Now, what Dan actually meant was that if I wanted a healthier smoothie, he could add kale to a sweetened fruit smoothie. But I thought he was offering to add kale to his healthy smoothie, deigning to make it somehow more palatable for me, which would have been hysterically pretentious.

4.
That's it, if you were wondering. That's our family in a nutshell.
JuST KIDDING, it's not.
If you'd like more of a glimpse, you should have been around for the dance party that just happened in the kitchen to "What Makes You Beautiful," which was mostly my parents.

Oh look, a poem. What?

the definition of stress

I am upset with Dan.
He says, “try something new
using the 'new constraints'
that this environment is giving you”
which means,
“i don’t care about you
enough to shut up when you’re
trying to write”
oh NO
NATHAN IS HERE TOO
I’M DONE
DONE

Week 5 at Drexel University, Winter Term

Alternatively titled, "How Is Davina Surviving? She Doesn't Know."

Also alternatively titled, "Apologies From The Author, Who Is Writing A Lot Less Fiction Than She Wanted To This Month."

Or, "Why This Is A Blog Post And Not A Story."

The first reason that this is a blog post and not a story is that I write fiction about ten times slower than I write poetry, because it's a form I don't practice very much but retain all my perfectionism about, and also because by nature it has to be longer than most poems. There are a couple things in the works, but it will be a while longer before they're coherent and long enough to post.

The second reason is that I am inches away from drowning in schoolwork. In addition to my regular coursework, which is challenging enough to juggle, I have not one, not two, but three tests next week, including a midterm in my hardest class. Monday and Tuesday are especially daunting, with tests on both mornings, two (fairly long) online homework assignments due, a lab report due, an in-class presentation scheduled, and another lab to complete. Not to mention the fact that I need to come up with a class schedule and register for next term on Monday as well!

I'm finding that this term is much more difficult for me than last term, because of all the new material I'm learning about chemistry, physics, differential equations, programming, and a little mechanical stuff for the robot I'm trying to build. Some of the new information is getting digested, but the rest is just hanging out in my throat, waiting for me to throw up or something.

I'm also in like, three group projects at once, which is pretty frustrating. On the plus side of this, though, I am making new friends, which is super exciting after a gap year in which I met new people at an approximate rate of 1 per every 3 months.

I hope this doesn't come across as complaining. I am very happy where I am, and I'm confident in God's ability to carry me through this, and I'm not even despairing about my grades yet.
However, this is definitely an excuse for any poor writing or ridiculously short posts over the next week and a half, as I crack down on my time management. I've already spent 23 minutes on this piece that I should probably have used studying for Chemistry.

Back to chemical kinetics, y'all.

Blog Challenge, February 2015

Today I had meant to write something that didn't mention Stevie's 2015 Blog Challenge. I thought I'd begin by writing and posting original content right away, and just let my readers take whatever I threw their way.
I am, unfortunately, a very distracted person sometimes, and I spent most of the evening sleeping and playing guitar instead, so...I'm going to talk about the Blog Challenge. Fortunately for me, it seems like an introduction to this month's posts would be a good thing to write anyway.
The Blog Challenge is a very simple matter, if you haven't yet heard of it: with Stevie Parris as our organizer, a bunch of participants attempt to write and publish at least one blog post every day for a full month. It's a fun way to get yourself into a discipline of writing, ignoring the pesky, elusive ideal of "inspiration," and the past one or two challenges I've participated in have been rewarding times of growth for me as a writer. I've previously focused on one of my two blogs at a time, but for this challenge, I'm hoping to post on both of my blogs about equally: Rainstorms, this one, and Cry of the Stars, where I post my poetry.
Because I'm smack-dab in the middle of one of Drexel's notoriously fast-paced terms, I didn't think it was a good idea to give myself a theme or limit myself to any one kind of writing, so if all goes well, you'll see a variety of posts on this blog. This should include journal-type entries, opinion pieces (or maybe some late-night rambling, who knows), and a short story here and there, along with one or two longer stories I hope to begin writing in episodic format.
If you are someone who has my contact information, and you care, please do your best to make sure I don't lose the challenge for something as silly as forgetting to post. Also, if you have ideas or prompts you'd like to see me try out, I will gladly take all the inspirational material I can get.
I hope it isn't some ominous precedent to be posting at night on the first day of the month. Here's to writing until we drool blood and cry sweat—best wishes to all my fellow participants, and may the odds volunteer you as the tributes in my favor, or whatever it takes to get me a better sense of humor.
Here we go.