The 2nd Party

     Well there I was up in Mill Creek Tennis Club. It was one party right after the other. I gotta admit that had its ups and downs.
     The awesome part was that obviously, two parties in one day is just sweet by itself. The second party's food added on to the first party's food. There were smoked ribs, sushi, rice, curry chicken, jello, yakisoba, mashed potatoes, caesar salad, brownies, and many others I'm forgetting because all I remember were the ribs on my plate. It was amazing to dine on so much good food in one day. I'm definitely thankful for it.
     So the reason I was up there was because I was part of a group that tracked the record and data of a 3.5 Adult Men's Tennis Team that went to the national championships. The 3.0 team was also there and they too headed to the National Championships.. They were named Homer Domer and Red Thunder, respectively. Celebrating the success of the two teams, a couple of other fellow data loggers were specially invited to the party.
    The word fantastic would downplay it all. It combined some of my favorite things in the world together and put them all in one room. Tennis, food, friends, and music (because it was blasting through the speakers while we were playing). I got to play against these 3.5 men and I gotta say it was a challenge. But it was just pure fun at the same time. Also, the food was fantastic, but now I'm just repeating myself.
     In that 4-5 hours, I really only had two "lows." One was that I had a ridiculous amount of food to eat, and my stomach didn't handle it well. Let's just say I had a really upset stomach. Second, I was annoyed by some talk, but I'm going to leave that vague. The only real disappointment I had was that I couldn't play with my coach :[. Oh well, it's not like I don't hit with him enough already haha :].
     Now, I'm going to be waking up at 5:30 in the morning tomorrow to get ready to play tennis. Game On.

Tennis

The Party

     Saturday, oh Saturday, what an terrific day. Two major things happened to me today. The first was Cindy's (from the previous post) birthday party and second was another awesome tennis party which I got invited to to celebrate an adult tennis team reaching the national championships.
     The first occasion was awesome. It's probably one of the birthday parties I've gone too. The food was great. There was chow mein, fried rice, sweet desserts, egg rolls, spring rolls, bread, curry, rice, you name it. There was so. much. asian. food. :D. Besides the food, it was awesome going to a party where the air was filled with Vietnamese, Chinese, and English, all from the same people! It's strange to say, but a trilingual party is pretty, and pretty fun to be at.
     In the beginning, Cindy broke out her photo album burned onto a DVD which was really cool. We got to see her from a wee baby until the present day in her dress. It was pretty awesome. The only out of place part in the day was after that.
     Going through the food line, there was this incessant Chinese voice behind me. It was so familiar, yet I completely ignored it because of the fantastic delights in front of me. After turning around though, I spotted my Chinese teacher at my high school! Wow it was awkward. Seeing your teacher in a grocery store is one thing. At a birthday party is another. Interestingly, she was invited by Cindy so she wasn't actually related to her. Unfortunately, she couldn't stay long. Despite the awkwardness, she's actually one of my favorite teachers, so I was disappointed when she had to leave.
     After that interesting episode, we settled down and ate. After we started up the Wii. It was pretty fun to watch the others play. At least 5-6 of the other kids there played tennis, so we of course started playing Wii Tennis. Being the captain, one of my teammates even challenged me because she thought she would beat me in virtual reality when she couldn't in real life. It was a fun idea hahah. Unfortunately, it didn't play out as well. On the side of being a tennis player, I also have played video games for most of my life Wii included. So you can imagine how that turned out. :D.
     After that, my varsity coach (different from my JV coach who I watched movies with), took me to head to Mill Creek Tennis Center for more awesomeness.

Sweet Sixteen

Harry Potter 7

     Well, I finally got out to watch the latest Harry Potter movie. Having read the series a couple years ago, it was pretty cool to get a refresher and a movie-version of the book at the same time. Overall, I thought it was a great time because of the experience and of the memory, (you know what I mean if you're in Hist&136)
     A couple days ago, I headed out with my friend Winnie and while we sipped bubble tea and ate calamari at Oasis, we pre-ordered the tickets to watch the movie at Southcenter Mall. The same day, we also went out gift-searching in downtown Seattle but were disappointed that we couldn't find anything worthwhile for our friend's birthday party coming up. Luckily, a few days ago, another friend of mine showed me an promotional ad that was selling a diamond key necklace for $20 when it was only $80 and the ad popped into my head at the last minute. So we decided to buy it on the day of the movie.
     It was well worth it.
     Having paid for my tickets, I owed Winnie about $10, so I bought the entire necklace and we both hoped that it would be an awesome gift. I'm crossing my fingers.
     Having gone totally on a tangent, I'll refocus myself on the movie now. It was pretty cool. I especially liked the scene where a bunch of the main characters had to use polyjuice potion to morph into Harry and an epic flight ensued to the Burrow. The saddest part was when Dobby died however. A couple of the girls I went with cried a bit. However, the best part was the very beginning. There's this build up of music and then the screen flashes to eyes, and predicting the obviousness of it, I scared my friend sitting next to me. Classic.
  

The Deathly Hallows

Hearth

Technology is an amazing thing. It allows mankind to achieve marvelous heights. It creates change, happiness, ingenuity, convenience, shortcuts. But amongst all of these wonders, you find that it also has the power to create separation.

A couple days ago, my house experienced a blackout that also hit Chinatown and parts of First Hill.
It hit me during a car ride home from tennis. At first I dismissed it as just being dark, but after hitting two dysfunctional streetlights in a row, fear crept under my skin. It was the fear that I would be helpless at home, stuck without electricity.
Arriving home, however; it was a different story. My mom and dad waited at the front door for me, expecting me to come home, a rarity in these days for just one of them, a near impossibility for two. As I had expected, my mom and dad had broken out the candles and flashlights. My mom gave me a flashlight on my way through the door.
It was the flashlight that wound up and while laborious, it provided a strange feeling of content when I wound that flashlight to make it work. It was something strangely out of place in a world of technology. In a world where windows rolled down at the push of a button, cranking out light by using sheer physical effort was something refreshingly new and almost... fun.
It was something completely different that inspired me to think back on that day though. It was the feeling of family; the feeling of closeness which could only be found during a blackout.

After walking through the doors and taking off my shoes, I started my "just-got-home" rituals to settle down. This time though, it was different .It was almost a strange feeling when my mom and dad started striking up conversations with me, with a worried tone but with a casual inflection. I rarely get to talk to my parents, and it's ironic that it was during this time of complete darkness and cold that I felt a warm feeling inside. It was nice being able to talk to my parents. Find out the who's and what's of each others lives. I felt like I could almost live in the darkness forever if I could just hold on to these feelings forever.
But with time came reality. The lights came back on within the hour and the T.V. turned on, the computer woke up, and the stove started humming. Technology was back, and so followed my feelings of conformed, expected loneliness.


To this day, I still think it's strange that even though I had no direction, I loved the journey I was going on.
And that even though the blind can't lead the blind, they can still hold each others' hands and inevitably

smile,
at the warmth.

Warmth

Learning Through Song

你好吗？我很好。谢谢。再见。
Translation = How are you? I'm fine. Thank You. Bye.

Time it took to learn that? About 3 minutes. Method through which I learned it? By song in my Chinese class.

How long it'll last?
Probably forever.

It's amazing what you can learn through music. It's an incredible mnemonic device. A couple hits of the play button and you've got an entire song memorized. The cool thing is, for years after, the melody of the song can be recalled at any moment after hearing even just the first 3 notes of the song. It's amazing how our brain works.

Not only is it an awesome way to memorize things, it provides a effective and fun way to teach. I'll be honest, I look forward to Chinese 9 days out of 10, more than I can say for other classes, and a large part of it is not only because I get to learn a new language, but it's because I get to learn it in a active and fun way. To be honest, kids in high school are really just that, kids, and I don't think that that should be forgotten and tossed aside like another obstacle to learning. We need to embrace it; we need to use it.

How else would we get students to sing outside their showers?

"I Love to Sing-a"

Telephone

So in Psychology class, we learned about this little tidbit about memory. It's called the forgetting curve, introduced by Ebbing Haus. It states that 80% of anything learned is forgotten after 1 day. After a week, 90% of it is forgotten. Crazy? I don't think so.
After learning about this little theory, our class decided to test it. We played the classic game of telephone.
We started out with 5 people outside the classroom and our teacher reading out this line to a person who was supposed to memorize it:

"All special forces recruits must be proficient with a rifle before they're assigned."

One right after the other, the 5 people outside came back in, each attempting to tell the person behind them what they had heard.

It ended up with "Uhm, something, something, and a gun."
After, our class had a couple laughs and our lesson kept going. Makes you realize things doesn't it?
Something like... Oh,
I should probably start going through those flashcards again shouldn't I...

"Forget" (ASL)

Flavor Craze

It seems these days that there are flavors for everything. If you ever wander into the junk food row in convenience stores, you'll notice more flavors of chips, soda, and ice cream than colors in the art section. It's kind of getting ridiculous. I mean what are they going to come up with next, bacon flavored soda?

Oh, too late. Looks like the idea was taken. A few weeks ago, bacon flavored soda was announced by the J&D Foods company, a company renowned for making bacon flavored food items.
Ridiculous? Awesome? Disgusting? I guess that's for you to determine.

In the time that you go out buying bacon flavored soda, I think I'll be trying out that relatively new hamburger flavored chip, or was it taco flavored...?

Decisions, Decisions...