Too Big

I can't write anymore at quality. My life has become too blurry for me to be able to break out the lessons into the bite-size pieces that illustrate something.

Firefly comes to stay with me more and more often, and a lot of people ask if she's going to stay for good, including her. She's 15 now. Primary struggles of a 15-year-old seem to be wanting to be taken seriously as an adult while being terrified of the actual responsibility when it is given to her, and having excellent reasoning capacity with almost no common sense. She was terrified of the concept of going to the airport, but has randomly driven her friend's car with no training, experience, or permit. She's done way more dangerous stuff too, but I wouldn't care to embarrass her here.

Mostly, she seems overwhelmed by how big the world is sometimes, and she shuts down and acts stupidly.

***

"You left another job?" I can hear Circles judging me.

"I can't handle this, I need a break!"

"I hear you talking about a lot of bad shit happening, but I don't see you taking a lot of responsibility for it."

"Are you saying this is my fault?"

***

"You still need to go to school" I feel awful repeating myself, but at the same time I really want her to get this.

"I just want to go someplace else and start again," Firefly whines.

"Well, you can't. This is the hand you drew, and it's shitty, but that isn't going to excuse you if you play it poorly."

"I can't handle this, I need a break!"

Those words wouldn't bother me nearly so much if I didn't say them too.

***

Mamoritai got in trouble with his girlfriend for staying up late talking Firefly out of trying to take care of every troubled person she comes across. Lambda really pissed me off by going overboard yelling at Rosie for being persistently obnoxious and not taking a hint.

Truth is, the reason I get so mad at her is that it pains me to watch her make my mistakes. I've got no idea how to life my life and so I mess up and bad things happen sometimes. I'm alright with that, but it pains me to watch the same things happen to her when I love her so much. The world is so massive and complicated that I have no idea how to navigate it, let alone how to guide another.

She'll probably be ok though, since I guess nobody really knew how to lead me either.

Breakfast for Three

I learned to leave the lid on the pan. It never would get properly hot otherwise.

With some ideas you're never sure where they started. You could blame almost ten years of "being one of the guys" blurring the lines between friends and boyfriends, or whormones and opportunities, or what have you, but causes don't make stories in themselves, so I guess it doesn't matter.

Old eggs seem to have a membrane to them just under the shell, but these ones are fresh and crack cleanly.

It's weird when you're already a touch past "just friends" with a guy, and then fall for another one. It's weirder when they have a thing for each other too. I'm halfway unsure exactly what happened next even to explain it to myself, let alone to polite company.

I'm a bit too short for the counter, so it's hard to resist dicing onions without straining my wrist.

People are use to the concept of monogamy, and of cheating, and of single people sleeping around, but the concept of having multiple meaningful relationships at once is quite alien.

Saute the garlic, then the onions, then bell peppers...

I open the cupboard and stare at the plates. My housemates haven't figured out what is going on yet, and there are so many people constantly floating in and out that they are unlikely to unless I make it really obvious. Three plates seems risky, so I grab one large serving one put three forks in my pocket. Carefully balancing the plate I tiptoe down the hallway, back to my room.

"Hey guys," I whisper, "I made you breakfast."

Homecoming

The first thing I noticed was that everybody was heavier set than I remembered them. Many still wore the exact same clothes that I saw them wear in undergrad, and everybody still looked great, but I couldn't figure out why it seemed different.

It wasn't for almost a day that I remembered my new home's obsession with physical appearance: the year-round pool parties, how everybody talks about running or swimming or doing something. I remembered feeling pressure to eat and look differently, in a way I never had before I moved out there.

I noticed that one person's belt didn't match his pants. I can't remember ever thinking about that before.

"So when are you moving back?" Krill asked.

"Oh," I laughed, "not anytime soon, the toys are so good! I'm getting to do all the things I always wanted to do, really change the world you know?"

***

Vex's company has a whole lab now, and pays $100 a month for rent there including utilities. We'd pay about 2.5K for about the same space for the Torii. He's walking around showing me his new projects.

"I just can't come back here, I want to, but there are so many good toys in my new home, I'm really getting to change things..."

Vex looks up, puzzled, and I realize my comment was unsolicited.

"Who are you trying to convince?"

***

The restaurant two blocks from campus will serve you a mixed drink in a beach bucket to share among friends. I'd never done it because I was always broke in college. Turns out it cost $13. We did a loop through the other restaurants in the area getting their equivalent drinks and splitting them about 5 ways: one in a fancy glass, another in a fishbowl. None of them cost more than the bucket. I would have paid for all three but I thought it would be rude to show how different the standard of living was in my new home.

***

A huge technological revolution will happen here: the next silicon valley. The economy is heading for a crash, and these are the people who feel the pressure, and who will rise from the ashes first. I am so sure of these things that I would be comfortable betting everything on them.

"This new home is soft, I feel like that's been good for you."

Circles is right of course. Kalei has commented on it in her own way too, and Vex complimented me on how much easier I was to speak with.

"Yeah, stuff has changed"

"I dress like a grownup now"

"Yeah I wasn't going to comment on the almost-hipster coat..."

"It's not hipster!"

"Yeah, well the Pika I remember had a bright blue cap and..." he points at his pants, grasping for words

"Cargo pants?"

"Yeah, cargo pants, and a threadbare hoodie that was barely there..."

"Yeah, there was a fashion intervention."

***

"You worried about the hurricane?"

"No, if I had to be in a disaster anywhere I'd do it with these people, hands down. They are tough and prepared to face anything."

***

In the one place my skills to work with people are challenged because the world judges more harshly, and in the other my career would be pushed harder because better opportunities are there.

I suppose a rational person would choose better opportunities with more forgiving people.

"So when are you leaving?" Sid grins over his straw as he passes the beach bucket to me.

"Tuesday"

Follow-Ups

Often I tell a story to show a snapshot of an idea, but since these are all real people they have continued their lives. Here's what happened to a few of them:

My friend from Jump is in a happy relationship which has lasted over a year. He bought a house, and they happily live together in it.

The man from the fruit stand in Better People never even called me back to say he didn't want to hire me, but I did get a job with one of the better respected computer-related companies in the world. Go figure.

I did in fact almost fail my background check, but not because of all the moving, but because it was a little tough to prove I ever worked for the feds. Crash sorted me out, he's the man.

The bounty hunting team lost. We were carrying the robot live (long story) and the motherboard shorted literally as we placed it on the competition field. We lost the competition but wound up with lots of interested sponsors. Pippin and I lost track of the team after that, he's still being completely absurd and enjoying it.

I'm no longer homeless. My first housemate I lived with for a year. He has a little dog, but it's well trained and well mannered. Now I live in another crazy community, but thankfully I don't have to run it, so I never feel like I have to stop anything from happening.

Being barefoot at my new job is much better tolerated.

I did call Nexus once when I needed a hand. He hung up.

Scavenging never goes out of style, the Torii and my new home both have furniture from the adventures with the feds.

Joat had a baby.

Magpie and Gilby lived together for a whole year. Impressively, nobody wound up getting punched, though there were a few close calls.

Gadget is still the politician, and is happily doing grad research.

Mime got her life together and is now getting licensed to do real estate. She's still boy-crazy, but I feel her taste has improved significantly.

My new meds cause me to bruise all the time now. Hilarity ensues. Related: I did lose the weight again, but I never managed to get my little plant.

3Stack runs the program I ran with the feds now. He's grown a lot in some ways, but is still a little silly.

My grandmother from Rice is fairing poorly, and has trouble remembering a lot now. She's scared, and we're trying to be comforting. My other grandma is comfortable and as happy as she can be, given the circumstances.

I do less breaking and entering now, and mostly scheme about taking over the world with varied success.

The project from Up is put on hold more or less indefinitely but has been absurdly educational.

Drummer's geographical challenges haven't prevented him from getting an extraordinarily respectable series of software jobs.

My friend from Las Vegas and I realized the situation was a little impractical but we're both still good friends and remain in touch.

Vex runs his own company now, where he makes tools that suck less.

Arbor totally still is bitter about that damn burrito. He ran into PJ recently and brought it up.

Elephant in the Room

"I thought you were gone."

I feel like a ghost walking the halls of Umbrella. My department had moved buildings in the 8 months I was gone, so at first I considered pretending I had been on a training rotation and then moved back with the group when they changed buildings, but eventually, as usual, just telling the truth was easier.

"I was on medical leave."

Nobody ever really knows how to respond to that.

My body is covered in bruises. Nobody ever knows exactly how to respond to that either. At first I made an effort to wear long sleeves and hide them, but then I got questions about if I was being abused when they peaked from the hems of my jeans or the edges of my sleeves. That was fun to joke about for a while, but now I just wear them openly everywhere but Torii, where they never knew I went on leave at all.

Nobody at Umbrella dares to ask me any questions about my physical appearance. I had a few days where I tried to see what I could get away with, and eventually borrowed and wore a pair of bondage leg restraints under my jeans for a day just to prove to myself that my coworkers were genuinely just afraid to ask.

Slap. Slap. Slap. Slap. I feel like I run like a child, that I somehow never caught up with the grace of other adults in movements other than fighting. The striking noises of my bare feet on the pavement cause my coworkers to turn, "Are you sure you should be running outside with bare feet? You could make yourself sick again."

This is the crux of the issue: nobody wants to believe another person deserves this to happen to them, and at the same time, admitting that an otherwise healthy active 24-year-old was knocked on her ass for the better part of a year completely by chance is frightening because it reminds my coworkers, many of whom are closer to being 40 than 20, that it could happen to anybody, and that we don't have control over these things.

They color-code beef as unhealthy in the cafeteria, but I pile it on my plate with spinach. I can see my coworker looking at my plate. I feel like they watch me a lot.

"I'm suppose to eat iron."

"They prescribe you iron too?"

"Yeah, but I am also suppose to eat it."

"Ah."

"It's part of the deal about winning the genetic lottery."

"That's why you were out?"

"Yeah."

He seems comforted. I suppose now in his mind this can not be my fault, and yet also not scary or some grim reminder of human fragility.

"[That] Sucks."

"Yeah."

He and another coworker invite me to play pool that night, which they've never done before.

It's a few days before the topic comes up again.

"I won the genetic lottery too."

"Oh?"

He points to his glasses, "They say the odds of my eyes being like this is 1 in 10,000."

I nod.

Slowly we begin drawing the personal boundaries: how much I'm comfortable talking about and how much other people are comfortable hearing. As a rule people seem to either be completely uncomfortable with admitting I was gone or want to hear everything.

Slowly but surely the need to talk about this is less, because it isn't such a big deal anymore, and eventually it seems to not matter at all. I think people can get use to almost anything with time.

At the very least, it's a relief to not have to hide being sick anymore.

Breakfast in Bed

Everybody's got their pet peeves.

Jace's was crumbs in the bed. It didn't matter what it was, if I ate any food at all while sitting on the bed I'd catch hell for it. He had some sort of incredible crumb-finding radar which would cause him to always detect when such a transgression had taken place, and he was remarkably effective in voicing how much this annoyed him.

The relationship came and went, and like most relationships which end for reasons other than the fact the two people don't love each other anymore, the breakup was rocky. It was fraught with teary phone calls, wishing that caring deeply about another person was enough to make a relationship work.

I did still care about him, so I did take the phone calls.

"Hey,"

"Hey,"

There was a long pause, because neither of us had any idea what we were suppose to say.

"I just miss you," he said.

"It's OK."

Another pause. He's getting desperate to make some sort of conversation.

"What are you doing?"

"Sitting in bed, eating a sandwich."

He hung up.

I guess that sums it up.

Green

I felt grossly underdressed.

There were five people sitting at the desk in the front. I was unsure if I was their equal, but there was a sixth seat at the end which I knew would be eventually for me. Dimly in the background I can hear the announcer, "And our final panelist is Pika Chu, who will be joining shortly."

Ah good, so I wasn't suppose to go up there.

"Pika," the shout-whispering voice behind me sounds irritated, "Go sit down."

Crap.

I'm the youngest person at the desks by easily 15 years, and the moderator seemed to have somehow not noticed.

"So what's your comment on the state of the market compared to 10 years ago?"

"Sorry, I'm not old enough to have an appropriately informed opinion on that."

On the upside, they did leave us some pretty nice food to eat at the end.

"You did a pretty good job," Sparks smiled, "held your own with the big-shots."

"Thanks."

"I'd wear shoes next time though."

My panicked face caused him to try to backpedal and reassure me.

"No it's ok, your feet were so filthy I don't know if anybody not in the first two rows noticed..."

Attending

The door won't open. Romany shakes it and then fumbles with his wallet, but can't find his ID. I turn and look behind me.

Oh yeah, I think, I'm going to get busted.

The door next to it is open, and the two of us casually stride in. I'm forced to follow behind him because I have no idea where we're going. The campus is a huge sprawling maze that almost nobody walks across because of it's size, and the buildings are no simple matter either.

We're sitting in the back of an auditorium now, but the professor hasn't noticed us. He didn't notice the kid climbing the wall to get a better seat either, which is comforting.

By the end of the class I'm asking questions.

By mid-way through the next class I'm arguing with the professor.

I'm still wearing my sweatshirt from the wrong school the whole time. When I'd left the house this morning, I had had no idea where I was going.

"You don't go here," she said over the five-minute break. It was almost a question.

"Is that important?"

The scowl broke into a huge grin, and Romany introduced us. It was one of those instant friendships, "Say you're in my major, we audit classes all the time..."

"You're very interesting," a boy back in class said, "What do you study?"

I found myself unsure of what Essy's major actually did. "Computer Science."

"And what is your specialty?"

"I don't have one,"

There was a few seconds pause when I realized that all grad students have specialties, but that this kid was foreign and had no idea how the American school system worked.

"Ah," I finished, "Undergrad only, I work in robotics."

He seemed impressed.

***

"Did I tell you I'm going to Bimodal?"

"What? You must be incredibly proud... when did you apply?"

"No, I didn't get admitted, and I'm not a student, I'm just attending."

"Pika..."

***

Keys, wifi access, email address, course schedules, majors, advisors: the logistics of this are impressive. Since it is January, I'm suppose to already know my way about the campus.

***

I stood near the professor during the break while another girl came up and easily get permission to audit the course. Positive it was the best way to remain not found out, I walked up right after her.

"Um, I wanted to audit too."

The professor beamed, "Wonderful, well you heard my answer to her. I'm very pleased. When I was an undergrad I audited all sorts of classes, best part of my education."

I smiled.

"What's your name?"

I hesitate for a moment, considering giving him the name of a real student.

"Pika"

"Well, Pika, it's a pleasure to have you in class and its good to see you're taking your education into your own hands."

Sibling Lessons in Game Theory

The last slice of cake, the last slice of pie, the ice cream served in one bowl: at first, the ability to allocate my portions from theirs was part of their divine rights of parents, and I more or less accepted this. At five, my parents began permitting me to choose which dish was mine. The slices of cake were always disappointingly similarly sized, so this didn't change a lot, but I enjoyed the power.

I distinctly remember my dad sitting me down on the floor with a slice of cake and two plates. "Today's your turn to divide the cake, and I choose." I set a very small portion on one plate, and left 70% of the cake on another for myself. He began reaching, very slowly, for the larger plate, eyes locked on it, wordlessly explaining in no uncertain terms what was about to happen. I scowled, "Let me try again."

When Isaac was three and old enough to express his interest in cake, it was my duty as the six-year-old to divide the cake and let him select. Isaac was not the same sort of opponent as my parents. At first he could be tricked by putting the smaller portion near him, and after a few rounds of that he could be tricked by my pretending to hide the smaller portion from him and acting like it was somehow better. Just as they later did when the addition of Firefly lead to kickback and collusion dynamics, the divider was severely punished for such dishonest play. Rules emerged: plates had to be equally presented, divisions were final once the first person took a plate, choosers could only select a plate for themselves, and all games were discrete instances: debts incurred in one game couldn't be repaid in another.

It was a long while before Issac was ready to play as the divider, but one day my parents informed me he was. A long bar of brownies was placed on a plate, and my brother pulled off a small square from the end and put it on the second one. I grinned and reached for the larger one as my brothers face scrunched up in a scowl.

"That's not fair."

"It's the rules."

Isaac sighed, annoyed, "You're suppose to want the little one!"

Being Supportive

I went to one of those schools which, unbeknown to me, was where a lot of the gay kids went because it had a reputation of being respectful and accepting. I had a reasonable number of friends confide in me that they were gay during college, many of whom had not yet told their parents. No matter how many times I give this speech, I still feel like I never deliver it right in person, so I felt like maybe it was worth writing up, both for other people who don't know what to say and for me. Maybe the next time I give it I'll say it right.

Not being heterosexual isn't a big deal, and yet it is. It isn't a big deal because I don't care what your sexual orientation is, I just want you to be happy. I care deeply about my friends and want all of them to be as happy as possible. At the same time, half the time when people tell me this its through tears, or I can see how long and difficult a struggle this was to come to grips with. I can see the fear of rejection, and admire the bravery of acknowledging that not all people will accept you for who you are, but that you will be who you are anyway. That courage is rare and beautiful, and never something I would want to ignore in anybody.

The conversation always comes around to "how do I tell everybody?" and I always botch this by responding over-briefly with "you don't have to if you don't want to. I never felt the compulsion to tell the world I'm straight, and you don't need to run around explaining your sexual preferences to anybody just because they aren't the same as mine."

It's a true fact, but I'm not saying you should stay in the closet. What I'm actually trying to say is "You do not owe the world an explanation for who you are." You never have, and you never will. As long as you're not hurting anybody, you need to do whatever you need to do to live a happy life, and the rest of the world can go screw itself. You don't owe them anything.

When it comes down to it, I couldn't care less about your sexual orientation: you are my friend and that's what's important. Your sexual orientation is about the same to me as your chosen career, or what set of talents you were born with. It doesn't really change what I think of you. What makes this important to me is that it is important to you. I want to be supportive and help you find all the things in your life you need to be happy. I really truly want you to be happy.

So please, if you want a coming out party you'd better believe I'll be there. I'll do whatever you need: wear a cheesy shirt, run around in a pride parade, help you pick up dudes or chicks or whatever you want. I'll stand next to you if you tell people, or we can giggle as we walk home after parties because none of those incredibly dense people there realized that the guy you came with was your boyfriend. This is just like everything else: you tell me what you need, and I will be there. I just want you to be happy, because I love you.

Eye of the Beholder

(This post should be safe for work, but it probably isn't)

Surely a little late to the party, but I finally ran into Kate Perry's video of running around with Elmo on Sesame Street and the surrounding controversy about the appropriateness of her attire and the sexuality of the entire deal. In case you feel a need to examine Katy Perry's controversial cleavage personally, I've included the video.



Some people might argue that children will take this as overly sexual, and that it isn't appropriate for them. This is all I have to say


Depending on how your mind works, you will see either a couple holding one another or nine dolphins which are not all the same size. Take a moment, and find both in the image.

This piece is called "Message d'amour des dauphins" (A message of love from the dolphins in English) by Sandro Del-Prête. Born in 1937, this man is a fairly underrated artist who is still alive and kicking ass, but that's a rant for another day. The point is that he routinely makes illusion images with a second, more adult meaning in them, such as Life in the Rose (1990).

This one is far more direct in displaying both images.

Now, I'm sure you're all quite capable of finding pictures of naked people on the internet, so why is this relevant?

Large amounts of anecdotal evidence (I was pretty upset to spend an hour on the internet and not find a single legitimate study) say that when children look at these paintings (particularly the dolphin/couple one) they see only the dolphins.

This tendency of adults to make things horrible when kids don't care is a well explored phenomenon at such credible research institutes as 4chan. Lazytown is one of their favourite targets.



But, when it all boils down what we're basically looking at is a glorified version of a Rorscharach or ink-blot test. If you haven't ever looked through the 10 "traditional" cards on wikipedia its a good laugh, although I have no idea what a doctor would make of me finding Cthulhu, the sword in the stone, human vertebrae, jellyfish polyps, rabbits and the Eiffel Tower in there.

The point is, we see what we want to see, and if your 5 year old kid looks at these things and can't imagine anything but sex, maybe you should thank Sesame Street for alerting you to a problem and get your kid to a doctor.

Getting Lucky

Unshockingly, I wasn't exactly winning at high school. I was socially a disaster, didn't even try at sports, and regularly arguing with teachers to leave me in the advanced classes despite my poor performance and complete inability to turn homework in on time. The honors classes weren't even weighted, so I graduated with a stunning 2.9/4.0 GPA.

Reconnecting with my peers from high school through the internet has been a very sobering experience. I am decidedly in a more favorable bracket of career success compared to my peers than I was in high school. I realized, slowly, that all that really set me apart was an incredible string of good luck which has miraculously lasted about six years.

They tell me I must have had talent in me all along, and a few even claim to be able to have seen it in me when I was young, but they are wrong. I am not a genius.

People write to me from this blog, and tell me I must be the luckiest person in the world to have had all this happen to me in such a short time, but I do not believe in six-year lucky streaks.

I do believe in statistics.

***

Father Jerry wasn't the greatest college guidance counselor, but he did excel in looking pretty annoyed. "You can't apply to this many universities. It is a waste of your time. You should figure out what you want and apply to a more targeted selection of schools. You realize most students here apply to four schools at maximum."

"I'm paying the application fees all out of pocket."

"Do you realize how many recommendations you are asking your teachers to write?"

I rearranged the files in my hands, "Here, if I cut these, I can do all of them on the common app except for these three. That's the same amount of work for you as four, isn't it?"

He glared.

"I'll bring you stamped and addressed envelopes and everything."

Applying to 11 schools turned be a lot of work for me with all the supplemental essay questions to the common app. Nobody wanted to proofread that many essays, and I had trouble making enough time to finish them all. I spent over 700 dollars on application fees alone, money that comes slowly for a babysitting high-schooler.

That money remains the single greatest financial investment I have ever made in my life. College application systems are too complicated for somebody like me to really predict, especially at 18. I got accepted to what I thought were stretch schools with full rides and rejected from safety schools. I held acceptance letters in front of schools I could not afford, to try to get them to increase their financial aid offers. This safety kept me cool under pressure, even when a scholarship interviewer pulled out my university application and pointed out I had written "National Merit Commended Schollar" under the awards category.

PS: Hell yeah I won that scholarship anyway.

***

I'm curled up with a laptop on the floor, which must have not been mine because I couldn't afford one at the time. Batman is flipped upside down on the couch with his legs swinging against the back, his face just off the floor near Jace's.

"Ugh, I am tired of writing essays for the Feds."

"How many?"

"37"

"WHAT?"

"I'm applying for 14 internships at this center"

Jace gives me a look which expresses how little pity he has for somebody who set themselves up for this.

"What's this one on?" Batman asked.

"Why... why I want this internship opportunity..."

"Oh," Batman said, "Well... you want the opportunity to fucking learn shit, and what's more important, to learn how to learn some shit, which is a skill you'll need all your life..."

"You're brilliant."

"Nah, I'm drunk"

I removed all the expletives, cleaned up the grammar, and submitted his rant as an essay anyway.

And that was how I came to work for the feds.

***

My senior year of college I had an interview almost every Friday from January to March. Teachers thought I was just making it up to cut classes. When the school hosted a career fair I would take the afternoon off to walk up and down every single aisle and talk to every interested company, to see if I would be happy there, and to see if they would hire me.

The long and the short of it is that I am not more clever than anybody else: hell, most people can probably put together a better essay than a drunken friend's rant, or at least can spell the name of awards they win. I don't even think I'm luckier than anybody else.

My point is that I play absurd odds, but that I win because I play a lot of times. I was denied from 12 of the 14 internships from that program alone. Most of my peers did not even apply for 12 internships in total, let alone at one center. I was denied from more colleges than most of my high school classmates applied to.

Some people get an idea fixed in their heads, and they keep trying until they succeed. Kudos if it works for them, but I am never sure enough of anything to do it. I just reach out to every good opportunity I see, and see which ones respond back.

Some people keep a bizarre tally of wins and losses. I don't understand this. In five years nobody cares how many colleges you were denied from: they care which one you attended. Your resume doesn't include the jobs you never got, your transcript doesn't include the independent study proposals that got shot down, your checkbook doesn't reflect the scholarships you didn't win, and your boyfriend doesn't care how many boys turned you down for coffee before you met him.

The only person, in the vast majority of cases, who will ever know about your rejections is you. Your story will only be written of the opportunities you won, and what you did with them.

Affording to Eat

I have been pretty absurdly poor in my life, and I learned to eat cheaply. Enough people have asked me for how to do this that I decided to finally write it up. A lot of this is based on living in the United States, but a lot of it is globally applicable common sense.

There are a few major rules to eating cheaply:

• You need to cook. If that's a serious problem tell me and I guess I'll post fast easy recipes and instructions too.
  
• If food goes bad before you eat it, that is lost money
• You are descended from a lizard and if you see excess you will eat more
• Your freezer/refrigerator space is limited, your room temperature storage is less so
• Not all items have equal markups for buying in small quantities
  

So now lets apply this

1. Anything you buy frozen, are ok about freezing, or store at room temperature you should buy in bulk.
   
2. Anything frozen you buy in bulk but eat thawed should be rebagged. Bags should be equivalent to whatever you expect to eat between when you first thaw it and when it would go bad. If it is a raw ingredient bags should be the size you use to cook one meal. Err on the side of bags that are too small, you can always thaw another one early.
3. When you prepare food that doesn't mind being frozen, make extra and freeze it. It means you can be lazy another night.
   

Breaking up bulk

You must keep everything extremely clean when you break food up from bulk orders. Any germs you introduce at this stage will have a very serious impact on the shelf life of the product. All containers have to be very clean, and anything which touches the food has to be very clean. I would often turn the ziplock bags I was transferring food into inside out and use them like gloves when handling the food that was going into them.

If you do Tupperware tubs do things that stack, and get ones so cheap you don't mind throwing them out if one falls to the back of the fridge and gets really horrible. Get ziplock bags in bulk.

Did you forget that this stuff freezes?

• Cheese
• Meat (some people don't like it that way)
• Bread products (bread, tortillas, rolls, bagels, english muffins)
  

Substitutions:

• Bread: about 30 cents to make, about $1.25-$1.65 to buy. A bread machine costs 50 dollars and the work involves dumping the materials in, hitting a button, and coming back 3 hours later. Materials for bread are water, flour, oil, and yeast which do not go bad. Figure out if that saves money.
• Candy. You are not allowed any more candy. If that's really hard you can buy bulk candy at costco/etc, or better yet raw baking ingredients. Chocolate chips are about 30 dollars for a 30 pound bag, aka the same price as about 5 packs of chocolate bars. Never buy individual candy bars. Rebag and hide the bulk candy from yourself so your lizard brain doesn't let you pig out.
• Pancakes: making your own mix is no more work than a mix, honest. Don't get prefrozen pancakes: make a bunch on the weekend and bag them up for breakfast each morning.
• Bakery items: No. Make them yourself or do without.
  

Serious discounts in bulk and lives forever:

• Flour
  
• Sugar
• Brown sugar (rebag airtightly so it doesn't get weird)
• Rice
• Lentils (seriously, actually kinda tasty. Steal Indian recipes)
• Beans (warning, soaking these sucks, prepare in bulk and freeze)
• Pasta
• Alcohol. If you like it cold/have a bad lizard brain refill smaller bottles in the fridge.
• Coffee
• Laundry detergent
• Toilet paper
• Paper towels
  

Co-Op for shelf life

You're probably not the only person interested in saving money. There are some things which have huge bulk discounts but not an infinite shelf life, so break up bulk runs with friends. These friends are likely to be also good for splitting a costco membership with you. Don't go in on bulk orders for stuff you don't like.

• Potatoes
• Onions
• Cereal
• Yogurt
• Cheese (if you are running low on freezer space)
  
• Meat (if you don't like it frozen)
• Fresh fruit
• Fresh vegetables
  

Co-Op for interest

These things you may never finish if you get the super bulk quantity, split among friends

• Spices
• Peanut butter (advise against rebagging)
• Nuts
• Olive oil
• Other cooking oil

Quirks

Local grocery stores really price gouge on vegetarian substitutes, dietary requirements and foreign food. If you get any of the following things but don't get them in bulk, you should strongly reconsider.

• Soy milk
• Nutella

Up

My mom's dad dreamed of a better life. Born in Hell's Kitchen, he permanently damaged his heart swimming in the polluted rivers as a child. They sent him on a charity cruise for dying children to give him one nice experience before he kicked it, but he's the one child that lived.

My mother dreamed of a better life. She hates mint ice cream. Once her family ran out of money, and used the last five dollars to buy a gallon of it for dinner. She's never told me what happened after that. She chose a career at my age to support her dying father and lives a reasonable middle-class life now.

I lived a sheltered and comfortable life. My father was out of work intermittently, but I didn't know. My parents, two siblings, and I would split one can of spam and a pot of rice for dinner, but for a kid my age that combination of grease, overprocessed meat, and carbohydrates was one of the coolest meals around. It wasn't until my mother announced one day that dad had a job and we wouldn't be having spam anymore that I figured anything out. I went to college, graduated into a respectable cube farm career that paid more than my parents made combined some years, and settled down to wonder if there was anything better.

Enron always wears polo shirts, says it's just what happens to you when you go to prep school. I give him no end of shit about it. He too was the poor kid in his highschool, but mostly because his family didn't have a jet.

***

"You're almost at the end!" I hugged him.

Jace didn't look up from screen and his keyboard, "The end?"

"You're level 54 now, you'll be level 60 soon. That's the highest level."

"See, that's the difference. Some people think they're hot shit when the reach 30, or 50, or 60, but for each person who considers something a goal, there's a better player who shrugs it off as a simple prerequisite. Those girls you coach dream of getting into college. You consider it a simple rite of passage on your way to the next thing, and always assumed you'd go."

"It's... still an achievement?"

Click click click went the mouse. He sighed and rolled his eyes, "The game starts at 60."

***

I sat on the deck of the Torii with Enron.

"I'm thinking of running for the board."

"Why?"

"I dunno, seems like a thing to do. I'm not sure what to do with myself anymore. I achieved most of my major goals. There is obviously more out there than a cube farm and toys, but I haven't any idea what it is, let alone how to get it."

"There's lots more,"

"Your life isn't interesting to me. There has to be another path 'up' other than the useless socialites."

He shrugged.

***

Six months later we, the four cofounders, are standing in a mall on a Monday afternoon staring.

"Neutral colors, all the products are very brightly colored, so the backgrounds are all very neutral to let them pop."

"Floors have busy patterns."

"Mmm, casinos are like that too."

"Let's go in the bookstore. Pretty dense product display there..."

***

"This has the potential to make us all life-changingly rich"

"I was looking for life-changing-lulz, but I also accept cash."

"That puts each of us past the only phase change in real wealth: buying your freedom. Below that is all gradations of slavery, and above that is all gradations of rich."

***

In a white suit coat he looked strangely out of place in the party. When he took us outside to talk to him, suddenly I begrudged Bluebeery and Enron a lot less for constantly wearing those damn polo shirts. Now I was the one who looked out of place, and they both needed me to make a good impression on the Angel.

"You guys are working on something pretty exciting," he said.

***

We're in a pool at a, for lack of a better term, corporate mansion. The pool is full of eager biologists playing water volleyball, and the garage is filled probably over a million dollars in lab equipment.

Enron taps me on the shoulder and laughs, "This, this is 'up.'"

Tree Blood

You could get almost anything to eat in Hong Kong, provided that you didn't ever want to eat potatoes or cheese, and normally didn't want to eat wheat or dairy. The Mexican food I also advise against, and it is fair to warn you that they fry the french fries in McDonald's in fish oil for that uncanny "familiar and yet alien" taste you haven't been pining for.

Bread was made with wheat, sold in little 8 slice packs since it was such a novelty, and we found one grocery store that sold cheese, in the entirety of everywhere they looked. They had three kinds, and normally about two packages of each. With these we could make grilled cheese sandwiches on our single-burner heating plates in a wok. Milk came in individual glass jars.

Fresh fruit was an adventure. We made a game of bringing random fruit home and trying to guess how to eat it.



After several incidents of eating rinds, seeds, stems, things which weren't suppose to be eaten unless they are cooked, and various grossly unripe or overripe things, we more or less gave up and stuck to pineapples and pomelos. Most of the fruits we never learned the names of, but the red thing with the green spines is a Dragon Fruit, the one with the points is called Star Fruit, and the one opened on the newspaper is Jackfruit.

After getting tired of fruit, the Russian Roulette activities continued as a drinking game using random candy with no English on it whatsoever, which became nearly ubiquitous during New Year's celebrations.

Pizza Hut was, unbeknown to us, a very classy establishment. The first time we went we had already had a few beers before we piled in to order pitchers of beer and a few pies, which we ate barbarically with our hands, without noticing the black tile floor, the nicely dressed waiters, the pasta dishes and mocktails on the menu, or the violin music in the background. Half way through dinner I turned around to see a local man wearing a tie and looking rather forlorn. His girlfriend, in black dress, looked unhappy, and I was suddenly struck with the realization that we had ruined the very nice dinner he was trying to treat her to.

We found wheat flour and made pancakes at home sometimes, because they were familiar and easy. We searched high and low, but couldn't find maple syrup for them anywhere. Eventually we started asking coworkers about it.

"What does it look like?"

"It's thick brown sauce, and it is sweet"

"What's it made of?"

"You take sap from Maple trees"

There was a pause, and my coworker gave me a very blank face

"Liquid in the bark, it brings food to the rest of the tree..."

"Yeah yeah"

"Then you boil it down a lot,"

"Ok"

"And then it's ready!"

My coworkers looked at each other for a long moment. Then one smiled, and in his most polite and patiently culturally-understanding voice he explained, very delicately as to not offend us,

"We're sorry, but we don't drink tree blood in China."

Magpie's New 5 Ton Truck

Why Magpie has been wanting to buy a 2.5 ton truck ex-military vehicle since 2006 isn't a question I can answer. All I know is he wanted one. The holdup had always been how to get the giant vehicle in an unknown condition transported home. So he sat and he lurked on government liquidation websites and craigslist waiting for the idea to come.

The truck he found on craigslist was 5 tons instead of 2.5 tons. It gets a glorious 5 miles to the gallon. A gallon of what you ask? Pretty much anything, the engine plate reads "fuel spec - all petroleum distillates up to a maximum octane rating of 85m-95r." Magpie offered $2500 on a whim, expecting to be laughed out.

The offer was accepted but the owner remained skeptical it would run without towing. It had only been driven about 15 miles since being purchased, and Magpie would have to drive it 550 miles to get home. The owner offered to send more pictures of the truck that weekend so Magpie could think this over, but Magpie had already started packing.

Magpie, Lion and CoLo drove all through the night Friday and arrived at the owner's place at 7AM, where they discovered that people don't answer their cell phones at 7 in the morning on a Saturday. Around noon they found him. The owner thought they had bailed on the offer and that they were completely crazy, but also was delighted to see them.

In Magpie's words, the owner had "a large quantity of approved lawn art and fun toys," including a lifted Jeep Grand Cherokee with big tires, a few spare transmissions and engines, a jeep c10 pickup, a stack of tires, and a jeep cj on what must have been at least 38" tires. The owner himself rolled up in yet another jeep with 56" mud tires in the back. I can understand why the two of them liked each other so much.

A few quick repairs on the military truck later the thing is ready to roll, and Magpie realized he didn't know how to drive stick, so they found a parking lot and started practicing.

Mall security was highly distressed to find Magpie with all 10 wheels and 20,000 pounds of military grade near-tank learning to drive stick in the Macy's parking lot, but didn't really seem to know what to do about it. Never to be taken for not being in charge, they had Magpie to solemnly promise to not run over anything, and permitted him to continue.

On the road home the group split up at about 10PM. CoLo had some friends to see in another city, and Lion and Magpie wanted to take the truck off-roading. Lion trailed Magpie in his vehicle to make sure he didn't break down, and promptly lost him as everybody's cell phone simultaneously stopped working. Lion arrived at the campsite at midnight, but Magpie didn't get in until 5AM because he looped back to find Lion. The whole affair was rather miserable seeing as the truck had no roof and it was absolutely pouring.

3 hours of sleep in Lion's car later they wake up, still soaking wet, to find the rain hadn't let up. Determined to still go off-roading, they demolished some trees with their 20,000 pound military cargo truck, and empirically verified how bad their turn radius was. The mirrors seemed slightly in danger of coming off, but the rest of the truck didn't seem to mind the abuse in the slightest. The military made this thing rock-solid and no frills: no roof and no muffler. Magpie drives it with earplugs.

On the road home Lion was in fine spirits, driving loops around the truck since it topped out at about 55 mph. He saw a large number of chunks of what he assumed was one of Magpie's 10 tires blowing up, but when he saw Magpie continue driving, he assumed everything was ok and didn't say anything.

Turns out Magpie had lost the air compressor belt, which took the tachometer belt with it, which took the water pump and fan belts with it, which in short order caused the truck to have zero air pressure, the alternator to stop charging the battery, and the engine to heat up. He tried to pull over, but he had also lost mechanical assistance to the brakes, and wound up more or less standing on the pedal for half a mile on the shoulder before the truck finally ground to a halt 180 miles from home. Lion was terribly amused, and Magpie wasn't.

The inside of the hood was covered with bits of belts but both the phones and the data plans were working again. An auto store, a few belts, and four gallons of coolant to top the tank off at a nice even ten later all the important bits were spinning again, and the truck was drivable the whole rest of the way home.

Come Monday morning, Magpie decides his life isn't interesting enough, and so opted to drive his new vehicle to his very respectable cube-farm of an employer where he was forced to park it across three parking spaces to fit it, but politely left enough room for the neighboring Prius to back out. He was sorry for being late, and explained that his new truck needed 15 minutes to warm up, 5 to cool down, and topped out at 55mph. One question led to another and once his boss had confirmed that Magpie had somehow managed to fit this monstrosity in the parking lot, he started laughing.

"Bet that thing is a real chick magnet!"

It was meant as sarcastic, but two girls about Magpie's age overheard the conversation and were the first to go out and see his prize. When he drove it to work a second time on Friday apparently every girl in the department came out to see it.

And that is the story of how Magpie got four hours of sleep on a weekend, bought a battle wagon, learned to drive standard, and won the attention of all the ladies.

Disgustingly Happy

We met because his roommate was trying to hit on me at a conference. He was too tall for me, but you couldn't really tell when he was sitting. He had beautiful eyes which were one shade with contacts and another without. He hadn't the faintest idea about hardware, but in almost no time we wound up rearranging things to attend the same lectures. He had wild dreams about where computers could go in the next 40 years, a big interesting stack of books in his room, and we both liked beer.

"So, what's going on with you two?" his friend asked him.

He was also a pretty terrible liar.

We both knew the odds of seeing each other ever again were rather low, and in some senses it made the time we did have a lot more precious. Sometimes I was annoyed at him for always being nearby, but as soon as he did give me some space I found myself looking around, and that I missed him.

"So, how far do you want this to go?" he asked hesitantly.

I didn't really have a good answer for him.

He saw in me all the things I wished I was. He loved that I was both a professional at my career and a female, and that I could interact with him as either. He liked it when I smiled.

I dozed off sitting next to him on the last night of the conference several times, and each time I woke up he was still holding me, and looked down at me sadly. We had walked home from the bar through the main strip of Vegas more or less hand in hand. We laughed at the fake plaster everything in the hotels, watched the crowds stumble from bar to bar, and pitied the people swept up in the shopping, which dress was cute, and the tourist photo ops with their yard-long margaritas in hand.

"Pretty sure I don't even like this city normally."

We stopped and watched the fountain at the Bellagio from across the street play. Not a lot to see, but it was nice to be held. We found Optimus Prime and a stormtrooper street performer, and tried to convince them to fight.

"Pretty sure I'm never going to forget this."

We considered elaborate schemes to joyride the boats at The Venetian, and watched another street performer paint. We laughed at the astroturf park, and admired how many ways Las Vegas had figured out how to twist an escalator. We found a rippled plastic wall of a fountain, and stood there grinning, pressing our hands in the thin coat of water which ran over top of it, reaching up and letting the water run down our arms and onto our clothes. We did a million stupid, meaningless things, but mostly we did them together.

And we were disgustingly happy.

Choices

I'd like to tell you I spent a few years playing cards for money, but it isn't strictly true. Sometimes we got a little cash, but mostly the money fed the lifestyle: the gas, the tournament fees, and of course, the game itself.

I'd like to tell you we counted cards or played poker or blackjack in a big casino, where we saw fortunes made and lost while coolly sipping our drinks at the bar, waiting our turn, but mostly we sat in event centers at one of hundreds of fold-up tables, elbow to elbow with our neighbors, flicking the card sleeves as we nervously passed the cards from one hand to the other.

I'd like to tell you that I had been serious about playing competitively long before meeting my partner-in-crime and at-the-time boyfriend, Jace, but realistically I had only played casually at best in high school, and I picked up the game as a way to spend a little more time with him.

Mostly, I'd like to tell you we weren't playing Magic The Gathering.

For those of you not dorky enough to know what that is, it's a strategy card game with a base set of rules, and then a large number of cards. The rules of the game more or less continue to change according to what cards are in play. Another way to imagine it would be "what if you could play chess but players could choose to use 4 knights instead of 2 knights and 2 bishops" but with literally many thousands of such options.

Without getting too far into the game, there are three kinds of competitive decks: control, combo, and aggro. Aggro decks start strong but lose in the long game. Combo decks do almost nothing, but then via a carefully engineered combination of things, suddenly blow up and win, generally in the mid game. They're irreparably screwed if you remove enough chunks of the combinations which make them tick. Control decks win by interfering with the other two in the early and mid games, then cleaning up the late game.

Flick. Flick. Flick. Flick. Jace held his cards in the other hand now. Flick. Flick. Flick. Flick, they were in the first hand again, impatient as ever.

He sighed, "Would you pay attention?"

"Why do so many people around here play control?"

"Better players play control."

"No, you play control."

"Not at all of the bigger tournaments."

There was a pause.

"Control decks," he explained, "are full of choices of when to stop your opponent and when to permit their actions and save your energy for a bigger threat. Simpler decks have less choices. Every time you have a choice, you choose what to do and your opponent chooses how to respond. Each of you has many choices. The better player will make good choices more often than the dumber player. This means that if you believe you're the better player, you want to force as many choices into the equation as possible, and wait for the dumber player to mess up. It decreases how much you count on luck, and increases how much you count on skill."

Jace almost always played control. I almost never did. It meant that he almost always did better at the small tournaments, but that at the end of a lot of the big tournaments where we played tiring rounds for 6 hours straight against some really good players, that the final scores were often in my favor.

It took me a long time to realize this lesson applied outside of a card game, but basically it applies to almost any zero-sum game: contract negotiation, trading, haggling: the rules are the same. When I'm the more clever one we lay out huge lists of options, and generally at the end I come out with something that normally would have been rejected if suggested outright. When I'm not, I explain that my hands are tied, that this is all I have been permitted by my peers to offer, or in Hong Kong, I'd fall back on the language barrier and pretending to not understand complicated offers. It doesn't make you instantly win, but it makes you very hard to completely scam.

At the end of the day, you can't force people to make good or bad choices, but you can present them with the right number of choices to benefit you.

Living

"She doesn't like me because I argued against her proposal, and maybe wasn't kind about it."

Kalei walks a few feet behind me this time in her never-ending attempts to avoid my eyes when she's being confrontational. She's looking at the stack of grocery baskets instead.

"We talked about that, she's not mad."

"What then? She thinks I'm obnoxious?"

"You're a lot of personality to take at once, especially for long periods of time."

Mint. Limes. Club soda. Kalei likes testing the limits of how mean she can be.

"Do you have any idea what I'd give to be the kind of person that other people want to be around?"

***

"Oh, where is the train going?"

I lean against the window and hold the phone close to my ear in an attempt to not be that ass on the train that dominates the air with a phone conversation, "North, grandma, I'm going to see a friend."

"Oh, well that's wonderful."

I have fond memories of this grandma from when I was very young: building a birdhouse, and how proud I was the first time I could bat a ball the whole way over her house. There were kittens in the abandoned barn next door, a bay window where I use to sit, and an empty concrete slab in her back yard where I use to stand and look out over the field. She had a hummingbird feeder, but I lacked the patience to ever see many birds.

I remember jars of fireflies, and plastic mugs with zoo animals on them, and the excitement of spaghetti-o's in a glass dish that the microwave heated unevenly.

I remember watching her fight with my mother, and slowly realizing as I grew older that my attention was one of the prizes. I remember Christmas dinners where she would insist on something, and all of my aunts and uncles would get upset and fight. What they were arguing about and what they were talking about must have been different, because nothing they ever talked about seemed important enough to fight over.

I remember reaching the age where my questions about the world were more uncomfortable than adorable, and I remember grandma becoming more and more distant through this.

"You're getting all grown up you know!"

"I'm 11."

"You were so much fun when you were little!"

We didn't talk for years. There wasn't really anything to say. The question isn't so much if you love each other but if you can stand each other.

She's dying now, some sort of cancer. She's been thinking she's dying for decades, but now it is actually happening. I call her now, and we can talk about nothing, because we know this relationship isn't really going anywhere. We don't need to worry about how she'll never change, and how I'll never change, because it isn't going to matter.

The dying are so easy. The living are hard.

Turpentine

"Miss?"

"What?" It hadn't snowed for days but the wind ripped the crystals around off the streets and into your face, your hands, and your lungs where the cold tore at you.

"Miss?"

They always called me Miss, or Miss Pika. At 19 I didn't feel comfortable with anybody calling me Miss Chu, but they didn't feel comfortable calling me just Pika.

"Miss you have to hurry!"

"I'm coming as fast as I can, and it isn't time for practice yet. You're going to have to learn to be patient Trinh."

"No you have to hurry! There's gonna be a fight in the machine shop!"

I burst into the room to find the team in halves standing around the robot, sharpies on the floor, shouting at one another. I had told them they could decorate the robot any way they wanted, and apparently the girls had formed an argument which cleanly divided them by the high schools they attended.

I slammed the door so they turned and looked at me. "What the fuck is going on?"

There was a pause, then all the voices started at once. "You know what?" I bellowed, "I don't give a fuck, you're all going to clean every inch of this robot and take all the markings off it, and I'm going to have a little chat with each and every one of you." I nodded to my co-mentor, and she understood that she was going to oversee the cleaning. We were both terrified that a newspaper reporter was showing up in two hours to do a heartwarming story on how our team was bringing two sides of a bad city together and help high school girls get their lives back in line.

"We haven't named the robot yet, for the paperwork."

I brought a pile of rags from the corner of the machine shop and put it next to the bottle of cleaner. "Robot's name is turpentine," I said pointing to the bottle, "because this is the day you're all going to learn that this is one team, and you're all going to work hard alongside each other."

Dramatic moments normally don't make sense anyway after the fact.

When Mechi came up for her talk she hid the knuckles of her right hand from me, under her left. I asked her to show them to me, and they were swollen and red.

"What is this?"

"I punched a wall."

None of the other students looked like they had been involved in a fight, so I let it pass.

"Why?" I asked.

"I was angry."

Mechi was always boarderline too angry to work. She was the sweetest girl, but her emotions often tangled her up when she was frustrated, and then fell out as rage. It isn't hard to imagine how. I know she once left practice to pick up her brother from a gang fight and get him to a hospital, and I know that like so many little sisters she idolized her big brother. I knew that if she had been born to a different family that her teachers might have noticed her tendencies, and that there might be therapy and medication for her. Now they just saw another at-risk-kid slipping, and threw her in suspension.

"You need to work on dealing with your feelings," I said.

"And what? Count to 10? Does that actually work for anybody?"

I smiled, "Not for me. Just remember that in a few minutes you'll care less, that it isn't worth being upset about, and that you just need to hold on until then."

"I'll try."

"You're a good kid, and I know that. You always give me 110%. We're going to show everybody what a good kid you are inside."

She smiled.

The next girl who I had a talk with looked scared and upset. She was the best friend of the girl Mechi had most likely been about to punch when she took it out on a wall instead.

"What... did I do wrong?"

"Oh, I don't think you did anything wrong. I just said I was going to talk to all of you about your behaviors, and it is important that I be fair and do not appear to play favourites, but I think you're doing fine."

"Oh."

"We've got about 5 minutes to kill here, is there anything you want to talk about?"

"I don't like to see them disrespecting you."

"We're working on it."

"They don't realize how much you're giving us. You came from winning teams, you like winning, you deserve a winning team, and if we behaved, you could make us win."

"Yeah, well this is the team where I can make a bigger difference."

***

Mechi and Trinh were crying. "We can't write like that, all fancy like you talk, and like our teachers want us to."

"Then write it another way, and we'll translate it."

"We can't do it!"

"You can do it, you're going to give me 110%, and I'm going to give you 110%, always. I will sit here with you for as long as you will keep trying. Whatever group of people finish this essay will be the co-captains of the team."

The sentences came back garbled and rambling, with the word "with" substituted for "wid." The essay was about four pages, but after hours and hours, we had translated their intentions into a proper essay. The girls were beaming. They showed their essay to everybody they could find. I was so proud of them, and so terrified. At 14 this should be easy, and they had so much catching up to do if they were ever going to make it against the kids I went to high school with.

Mechi couldn't go to the competition because she was suspended, but we told her how we were doing each day. The robot did well though, right up into the semi-finals.

The city was thrilled. They threw us a dinner which all sorts of fancy people attended. A member of the school board who had sometimes attended our practices gave little speeches about of us and thanked us as he gave us awards, except for Mechi. When he came to her he poked fun at her and her disciplinary issues, and asked her to promise to do better next year.

I could feel the girl's eyes on me. I had always promised them that as long as they kept trying that I would fight for them. To stand by as this man humiliated Mechi would mean they would never trust me again, and it would be the end of my ability to help them. However, to do something now would mean our funding would never be renewed. We had two sponsors, and the regional director of the league at that dinner. The team was over, and the only remaining question was how I wanted it to end. I stood up, and I finished the school board member's speech for him, highlighting all the good Mechi had done, and thanking her for her contributions to the team.

I tried to keep in touch with Trinh, but it was difficult. She went into AP US History as a junior. I was thrilled. I got stacks of books from my high school AP US History teacher to tutor her through the exam online, but I never was able to make enough time to memorize everything to answer all her questions, and I couldn't get her to practice essays. Eventually, she said she didn't want to talk about the exam anymore, then she didn't want to talk at all.

I saw one of the girls bagging groceries near the school. I asked her how things were. She was doing great and had the part time job to help her family. She was applying for some pretty good colleges in the fall. I told her I was so proud of her, and she shrugged and looked at me and asked, "What, isn't that normal? You didn't think I could do it?"

Mechi was thrown out of the school before I had even finished the paperwork of the season. I remember the school board member showing me a photograph on his desk. He explained to me that it was of a student who he had tried to save, but who was in juvi now. I didn't recognize his kindness, and was rude to him a second time, insisting that I would never give up on Mechi, and that she was a good girl, and going to make it. In the coming months Mechi was thrown out of her second school, and out of the special disciplinary school. I continued to write to her, but eventually she said she was worried I was ashamed of her, and stopped writing back.

I've still got the newspaper article they wrote the day we cleaned the robot with turpentine. The reporter was thrilled with us, and really believed we were going to save these kids. It breaks my heart.