Here We Go Again *Edit* Nifty Eh?---------------->

Well it's that time of year again. MIT decisions come out next Saturday. (Missing Pi day by 24 hours, tsk tsk.) Now originally I thought I'd write up some long post wringing my hands about how nervous I am (I am), or how excited I am (I am), or how I can't believe it's here already (I can't). But what's really more interesting for me is the journey I've gone on to get where I am just right now. I've met some amazing people along the way, and had an amazing time this year, so since noone has asked, here's my senior year in review:

July- Thanks to reading my Popular Science article about jobs in science, I decided that was my career goal. Prior to this it was a struggle between art and science, two absolutes of my personality. Popular science sealed it for me though, and so I began looking at science and engineering colleges.

August- Registered for High School. Made a list of science colleges to look at, among them : Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Caltech, MIT, and Boston University. Yale and Princeton seem too "stagnant" for me, and Caltech seems boring based off of my friend Kasra who goes there. The Boston Area looks promising and I take a look at MIT. First thing I find out: THEY MADE MINDSTORMS, MY FAVORITE TOY EVER!. Major kudo's. Then I read the mission statement about making a difference in the world through science. MIT becomes top choice for me. I look at what admission requirements are. Heart sinks a little bit. This school is damn hard to get into, but I can do it! Immediately I register for SAT and SAT II (Math II and Physics).

September- SAT rolls around, first time taking it. Bought Princeton Review (I swear by them). Skipped school Friday before so I could study. Wake up Saturday and head to Kelly's Country Kitchen for a hearty breakfast. Sit through four hours of SAT. Scores come back, I did good. Chris is pleased. Mom and I go to MIT seminar in Houston. After essentially being slack-jawed for the entirety of the seminar we both leave really excited that such a place exists. I buy Princeton Review for Physics and Math (The physics one is a terrifying beast) and immediately start studying. Interview for MIT is set up, and I decide I'm applying early action.

October- I'm working almost everyday at American Eagle, and Friday and Saturday nights for Upstage (a construction company, MIT and heavy lifting?) . This continues basically every week for October. Interview with a guy named Alfonso. He works for NASA as a thermoshielding engineer. We talk a lot about MIT. I leave forgetting that I just went to an interview for that school. I thank my theatre experience for making speaking less nerve-wracking.

November- I take the subject tests, and have finished my application. I realize that if I'd known where I was going to apply earlier, I'd have been able to take and retake my SAT's if I was unhappy with the score. Oh well we'll see how we did. Thanksgiving rocks, I eat 10,000 calories in one day (thanks in no small part to eggnog). My friends and I go camping in Brazos Bend:

Beautiful. I make it my mission to catch an alligator. They don't like the cold though, so they are nowhere to be found. I burn my hand on a hot rock and exclaim: "&*%! Jeezy Creezy! How dense is that rock? It's been away from the fire for like 30 minutes!" My friends point out how ridiculously nerdy that is for me to exclaim.

December- My best friend wants to go to Emerson, and if we both went to school in Boston, our schools would be the same distance apart as our houses are now, Crazy! Did well on my subject tests too, the anxiety about it being my only shot fades. Decisions draw near. Decision morning I had completely forgot about them. I had been up since early in the morning working in a warehouse moving things around. I was sweaty and covered in dirt when I sat down for dinner and remembered. "Oh dang!" ran into the room and saw I was deferred, incredibly happy I wasn't rejected. Make a list of things to bolster my application with, among them is to make a video. My friend Sally (Wharton '12 GO SALLY!) tells me her friend Wendi from MIT (and Pearland Alumni) wants to talk to me about colleges. Wendi and I sit down and talk about everything, and she tells me she really hopes I get in, that I seem like a great fit, and that she's surprised I was deferred. This makes me feel good. Talking with her inspires me to push the envelope of what I'm interested in. I make a phone call to the US Department of Energy:

"Hello my name is Chris Mills, I'm an applicant to MIT and passionate about the field of Alternative Fuels. If you have the time I have a few questions I'd love for you to answer for me. Thanks, have a good day"

Can't hurt right?

Two days later I get a phone call:

"Hi may I speak to Chris Mills?"

"Speaking"

"How are you doing Chris? My name is Neil Kirschner, Director of the US Department of Energy, are there a few questions I can answer for you?"

Oh.My.God.

January- Finish my video. My birthday comes around! I get the flu. January is bittersweet.

February- AMC comes around. I finish bartending school and am a licensed bartender. (That's how I'm paying for college). I start reading the blogs of Snively. Find him pretty funny. Post on his blog, instantly meet a billion other cool people like Justin, Shruthi, Viva, and others. MIT applicants are pretty cool folk.

March- Decisions come out soon, senior year is wrapping up, I feel happy to be alive and to have been a part of this whole experience.

Hooray Farmers!

This looks terrible.

That picture was the first thing that came up when I googled the blog title. Gross. Good thing it's unrelated, what I'm really happy about is Farmer's Insurance. If you scroll a few blogs down you'll see that the Sarge and I were involved in an accident which has left him wounded. Today the claims adjuster came out to assess damages and give me a check. I did some preliminary research for how much it will cost me to fix my car. You ready?

$100

yup that's all it costs for a new fuel tank, the sad pieces of metal that serve as a bumper can just be hammered back straight and nothing else is broken, just scuffed. So the claims adjuster comes by and after his assesment he gives me the check:

$1002.33

HOLY SMOKES! That guy felt the need to replace EVERYTHING that was in any way scratched, bumper, exhaust, EVERYTHING. Plus the estimated labor (which I'll be doing myself). So in the end, I made $902.33 for being in a wreck.

Not too bad.

The Big Bang Theory

It's a show on CBS, and it's freaking hilarious! I watched an episode on DVR tonight, I'll try and find some YouTube clips or something later, but first, Vector Calc!

How I Nearly Died

No joke. I seriously nearly died yesterday. The cause? As much as I wish it were venomous pythons, terrorist organizations, explosions, fast cars, dangerous women, or one of the other awesome archetypes found in movies the culprit was:

That's right. Dum-Dums. Specifically the blue little bugger 2nd on the right. That's right. Infamous Blue Raspberry.
Anyway, as you may have experienced, occasionally the candy part becomes dislodged from the the stick part. No big deal right? most cases yes. Today:

No.

So aforementioned candy comes off stick, someone with my group tells a joke or says something funny and I laugh. Then I get that uncomfortable feeling you get when you sometimes inhale M&M's or bits of ice whole, you know that cold "whoosh" sort of feeling? well I opened my mouth to say "OhMaGah I can't believe I just swallowed that whole dum-dum!" but what came out was "........" Then I felt it in my throat, blocking off my air and making my eyes water. Then the horrific realization that I was:

Ok, if you've ever choked on like water, where you cough for a little bit and stuff, it's NOTHING like that. You can't breath, you can't talk, and then there's the realization that you could DIE. Meanwhile, my friends (we'll call them Janet and Eliza, not everyone likes their name on the internet) quickly realize I'm not fooling around, and that something is seriously wrong.

"Are you Ok?"

*head shake*

"OhMaGAWD HE'S CHOKING!"

*head nod*

"Do you want me to do the Heimlich?"

*head nod*

[Eliza assumes heimlich position]

"Get the nurse!"

[Janet runs like her last name is Rodriguez and "La Migra" have just pulled up to her taco stand]

So on about the fourth or fifth Heimlich, I can feel the little ball of death higher up in my throat, and finally it gives out with a "POP!" like a potato out a potato cannon. I wipe my eyes, take a few deep breaths and thank Eliza for saving my life. Shortly thereafter Nurse Redundancy proceeds to not listen to us tell her that Eliza successfully performed the Heimlich she learned from lifeguard training and says "well ok, I'm gonna show you something in case it ever happens again." To everyone's shock, the Heimlich! Thankfully at the end of the day, a sore throat was the only casualty.

X-Men in the White House

=

Q.E.D

Ron Paul is Magneto

Math Problem of The Week

Alright, so as you may or may not know, I tutor kids in math on monday afternoons. (this week, on tuesday, and thursday afternoons as well....oy). The particular boys I tutor today always have a "Problem of the Week" which is almost always some very simple or very tedious math problem. They are interesting though, and I usually try and find complex algebraic ways to solve them as opposed to "just countin'" (suck on that Keep-it-simple!). So todays problem looked like this:

How many squares are there?

So there are more than 64, and at first I just thought it would be multiples of 8 i.e. 1, 2, 4, 8. But then I looked at it and realized there could be 3x3 squares. or 5x5.

This was harder than I thought.

So here comes the whole point, the way I ended up thinking was that basically there are 8 types of squares. 1x1. 2x2. 3x3. 4x4. 5x5. 6x6. 7x7. 8x8. And I know there are 64 1x1 squares and there can only be 1 8x8. "That's funny 64 is 8² and 1 is 1², it's like the opposite."

*cartoonish lightbulb* "Maybe it's the sum of squares up to 8?"

1x1=8²=64 squares + 2x2=7²=49 squares + 3x3=6²=36 squares + 4x4=5²=25 squares + 5x5=4²=16 squares + 6x6=3²=9 squares + 7x7=2²=4 squares + 8x8=1²=1 squares

___________________________________

204 Squares

That's what I figured, and it sounded good to me, can anyone confirm if that is right? Else I'm gonna have to go back over there and pretend that's what he wanted to do and that I wanted to just count them.

The Sarge

EDIT: ^The Sarge, for the uninformed.



Well Sarge has seen better days. Up and running for about 3 days following a faulty Distro cap and then:



SQEEEE! SMASH! BOOM! HISS! and other onomonapeia!



Rear-ended. (I found out the text message I sent to people "I just got hit by a car." was unintentionally misleading, and probably disappointing for a few.)



Lucky for me, here in the Lone Star State, if you ever hit the back of someone, ever, for ANY reason, it's automatically your fault. So I got the phone call, and yup his insurance is taking full responsibility. Plus, the settlement check is more than it cost to fix my car, so in the end, I guess it's not too bad. So Sarge should be up for another tour of duty by spring break.



Speaking of Spring Break, what am I going to do? No UIL means a week off for the first time in years, so I'm really at a loss for what I'll be using all this free time for. Also I hope I'll hear back from MIT about my admission decision.



Speaking of admission ("speaking of" is the only segway I know), I was reflecting about how hard I've worked on my application* and in general how much I look forward to going, and I constantly waver between feeling complacent with my application, and being a nervous wreck about it. Like the graph of y= 100Sin(t)/t as
t->0 the amount of variation increases exponentially, until finally, when that moment gets here (in 19 days according Snively-damus) it's undefinable.



Will it be joy? will it be disappointment? we don't know. (L'Hopital says it will be 100 but that doesn't really help us here...) Anyway, enough math jokes for one day. I'm off to work out and go to bed.

*supplement video included for your entertainment