College is amazing. Here are the things I will do this year:

Join the Ultimate team (done)
Hike the tallest mountain in Maine (done)
Hike the tallest mountain in Maine in the winter
Go on a back-country ski trip
learn how to telemark
Do the puddle jump (jump into a hole in a frozen pond)
win a ski race
join the downhill ski racing club (this one should go before win a ski race)
find someone who will talk to me more than I talk to them
Get an "A" in a hard class
Have more than 2 beers. (Maybe not?)
go skydiving (a longshot-although there is a skydiving club)
sled with my friends
Travel with the ski club
Join Outdoor Track
Join a sports team that I have never played on before
pull an all-nighter (not that I want to...)
HAVE FUN
and....a lot more

So, basically, although I may miss High School, college is cool. A lot of work, but cool.

BATES COLLEGE
NO PARENTS

Three Days

I'm so sad to be leaving what I am leaving, yet I am so happy to be going where I am going. In three days, I will be in the wilderness of Maine. In three days, it all starts over. In three days, it all begins.

physics stuff

So, let's say it is possible to go the speed of light in a spaceship. And one of the laws of physics states that as you speed up toward the speed of light, time time slows down and is eventually zero when you actually get to the speed of light. So let's say we are in a space ship traveling from point A to point B. If no time elapses when the ship travels from A to B, then surely the space ship must be going infinitely fast.

Hmmm...but not really. Time does elapse outside of the space ship but it does not inside of it. So we will see the ship travel from A to B, but the ship itself (from its point of view) wouldn't be traveling from point A to B but instead "jumping" between the locations-without having any time elapse in between. In this way, (although laws of physics also state that you cannot get up to the speed of light) a rocket could travel from earth to another far, far away planet and the person inside of it would not even believe they went anywhere. The only problem is how would you stop the space craft? It is going at the speed of light so even if you set a timer to slow the rocket down in .nth of a second, that tiny amount of time would be infinite if time slowed down to a halt. The only way to stop it would be with some external force, I guess. Although accelerating to the speed of light without killing somebody with the force of acceleration would be a pretty difficult feat in itself.

I've spent an amazing amount of time biking and thinking and doing nothing. I wish people would include me more often. Maybe I need to include myself more often.

So I am in Spain. It is very cool and very hot and very...very interesting. Don´t know what else to say other than the fact that my parents dropped me off at this sketchy internet cafe thing and I am surrounded by people I should be able to understand (hence the 6 or so years of learning the language) but somehow I can´t. I am off to France in about a week or so and then off to Italy then Switzerland then I don´t even know where till July 2nd. It will be fun, but I miss so many people back at home like crazy. Like CRAZY. It is kinda like the whole point of going on trips is to look at cool new things, but I have just discovered some very cool new friendships back at home which I must leave for a month. Ok, so I have about....3 seconds left in my 15 minutes on this computer...

The Horizon Effect

Imagine a beach ball full of air. The air is trapped inside the beach ball and slightly pressurized. Is the beach ball is forming a sphere around the air inside it, separating that air from the rest of the universe, or is the beach ball wrapped around the rest of the universe, separating that from the air inside it?

d-d-do you remember

I will list off things that come to my mind

The Garden State soundtrack is very high quality

I miss the ski team

I miss cross country

I don't remember if I ever posted this picture
I don't remember ever taking that picture

Why do I have such bad luck?

Comatose

So I am obsessed with this song "Comatose" by Timmy Curran. It is like...woah, this has to do with so much stuff right now. Especially the whole going off to college thing. And like the whole global warming thing. Gotta "wake up soon."

If we don't wake up soon.
All we ever knew will be gone.

It's finally getting to be like summer again

So I may not get a varsity letter. So I may not improve like crazy. But like, I am so happy that I am improving at all. Sports are meant to make you happy, and obsessing about getting a varsity letter isn't really that much fun.

And basically, I miss some people on the ski team like a bunch. I want so much to have a group of people in my life like that right now. Luckily I have some people on the track team. Too bad the track team can't be co-ed like the ski team.

In conclusion, I love warm weather and CANNOT wait for summer. Well, actually maybe I can. I love the feeling of having something (and basically everything) to look forward to.

Finally.

And then there were two.

Bates and (I wanna say SLU just to rhyme, but that's the one I just took off my list) UVM. I'll know which one by next week. I'll know where I'm going to be for the next four (hopefully) years of my life in the next week.

Good times with my sister over the weekend. Dartmouth is a sweet school.
"Yeah, and he was basically just freaking out about life"
"I've never met any teenager who hasn't freaked out about life"

In other news, the track team is amazing. And so is Newton Faulkner, and so are the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and staying up late, and thunderstorms, and rain, and the spring, and school, and life. Just basically life is amazing.

Can anyone hear me?

Life is way too stressful right now.


And, wow, listening to the song "Waiting for my Real Life to Begin". Why am I so in love with depressing songs?

*gets out of stopped train*

"What's going on?"
"I don't know, I guess the train is lost"


"How can a train be lost, it's on rails?"

~The Darjeeling Limited


This is one of those comedies that makes you laugh so much but has so many things that make you think of such bigger issues. Maybe it's just me.

How much energy do the electrons in our body have?

KE=(1/2)(m)(v)^2 (although electrons don't have any net KE, because they are moving in circles, we won't take that into account here)

There are about 2.2320370181851 x 10^28 electrons in the human body

electrons can move up to the speed of light, but we'll say that they are about 90% there for this problem (270,000,000 m/s)

The mass of a proton is about 3.3x10^-27 Kg, and an electron is 1/1836 of this, so an electron weighs about 1.80x10^-30 Kg

So, total mass of electrons in your body is (2.232037018151x10^28)(1.8x10^-30)=.0402 Kg

So then KE=(.5)(.0402)(270,000,000)^2
So there are 1.465x10^15 Joules of energy in the atoms in your body.

To put that in perspective, lets say a 1 Kg ball was being thrown at you with this energy (square root of(1.465x10^15/.5)=54129474 m/s, which would be 54129 Km/hr and 33634.5 mph. That's quite fast.

How would you get all that energy out of the electrons in your body, though?

It feels like every time I convince myself that I in fact do have enough time to do something, I run out of time.

I want so desperately to stop and plan something with my time without having to spend time planning.

The other day, I started writing. Like, I was sitting down at a computer at the library and I just wrote...about my life...about what I was thinking about...about so much stuff. It ended up being about 7 or 8 pages, and it only took me about 20 minutes, and I was so satisfied afterward. I wasn't really sure what to do with it. I really had no use for it. So I just left it up, put in bold "Read this" at the top and left. I really hope someone read at least some of it.

So, yeah. Stressful week. Actually, stressful month. Got into college (my second) today, which is good. That makes everything better.

So apparently I am in the "identity searching" stage right now (according to Freudian psychology). I feel like I've been in that stage for the past 7 years.
I'm feeling pretty good about where I'm at right now.

Homework time.

Running on 2.5 hours of sleep.

Just came back from the ski trip, which was pretty much the best weekend that I have had so far this year. Late-night conversations with people I barely knew. Getting to know people I thought I already knew. Realizing that after they kicked me out of my bed (there were 4 of them-perfect amount for all the seniors), they are really stupid for the things they do sometimes at 3 AM? I'd rather feel my life, or at least my view of it.

But I still respect and love all of them so much even the freshmen/freshman.

"The fights you fight now will be the fights you fight for the rest of your life."

But we become desensitized to those fights over time.

Why do adults think they are so much different than teenagers?

Like, seriously. Maybe its that thing again that the artist cannot see the flaw in his own artwork. But I really don't see any differences.

Oh wow. I think I like someone. Lets hope they like me. Cause if they don't, then I'm going to have a boring Thursday night.

Everything is done. The smallest movements of all the world's possessions, if measured accurately, will tell us what will happen.

And I don't really know what I just said. I can't stop thinking about how my friends laughed at me the other day when I talked about how you're moving at the speed of light if you are moving around while time freezes. Then Ezra let me know that if the speed of light was not the maximum velocity that anything can travel - if something traveled faster - it would be everywhere at once.

That kid has a bright future.

I love track. And the world right now.

El Choque Cultural

Sometimes I feel like the artist who can't see his own flaws.

You perceive all of these things
I’d never have known.
Will you turn off the lights?
we’re already home.
-"The Artist" by "The Hush Sound"

so much metaphorical meaning.

And sometimes however much it seems evident of something else, I have absolutely no idea how I feel.

estoy perdido.

Negative thoughts.

Is it bad that I am beginning to pity myself?

I have been up way too late these past days. I went on a 7-day streak where I went to bed past 1 AM, and that didn't bode well for me.

It isn't like I am doing anything. I keep telling myself, "you have plenty of time, you don't have to finish this now, you have all night, you have all the time in the world." So not true.

But anyways, I ran for the first time in a while today with Luke. It was nice. We went up a bunch of hills, and I convinced myself several times that I needed to stop and stretch my calves, but I kept telling myself that it isn't too bad. And it wasn't.

And I don't think anything is really too bad right now. I just keep convincing myself that it is, and I don't know why.

That's all I can say for now.

Is our government protecting us or itself?

Ok, so I was going to do a full post on this, but then I realized that my thoughts right now are like really scattered, and I can't really articulate what I was going to say, so I'll let the title of this post speak for like what a whole post should be about.

But, yeah.

"There are no such things as bad days. Just good days and great days"
~Mr Price

Only the greatest Spanish teacher in the world, or one of them at least.

It is funny how we base how we are feeling here and now off of how we have always felt.

Does 18/2+7=14? Too bad.

I am friendly with way too many underclassmen. Or, rather, there are way too many underclassmen who are friendly with me. I guess I'm just that cool. But hanging out with freshmen sort of makes me less cool.

Excuse me, because I have an 8-page Spanish paper to write.

"I got a time of sub-zero!"

So I am loving the weather lately. It's not very nice for biking to school, but it's nice chilly, snowy, windy weather. Almost like a hurricane of snow.

I can't wait for track. I mean, I loved skiing, and I absolutely loved the people, and I love all the team dinners and I love all the driving people to the ski hill and the amazingness of the people who are just like me. Maybe more people are like me than I realize. I just have to get out there and meet them. But anyways, love the ski team and everything that they do and everything that they are.

I never remember ever really hating Valentine's day, but this year seems to be different. I guess it's because so many of my friends hate it too. The ski team has brought semi-mixed feelings for me on the romantic scale. I mean, I don't hate it, but I just want to punch the people who are all like "oooh, I love you" and then look over to you as if to say "isn't this an awesome day?". No, it isn't. At least not for me. Who ever said teenagers know what love is?

But anywayss...I'll stop being a negative person and start looking forward to track more. And life. And the amazingness that is the present. After all, according to the wise words of Shakespeare, "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so."

Please.

We need to stop fighting and start understanding why we don't need to fight. Wars are useless. If we didn't know the situations of others, and if we weren't so obsessed with things happening that we never see, then we wouldn't even have any motivation to fight.


On another note, I wonder how much money everyone would have if we divided the wealth of the whole world between every citizen of the world.

Not enough.