Warning: late-night ramblings

No Veteran's Day Holiday for us, but there was a little announcement on the school notice-video-screen asking us to remember the soldiers of the 2 world wars. The big news here is that Sinterklaas(!) is arriving tomorrow on his steamboat from Spain. Forget the North Pole and reindeer - the Dutch December-gift-giver knows where to vacation. Tomorrow I am going down to the harbor to watch his arrival. Await further bulletins.

Ridley, about "autumnal lassitude" - I kind of disagree. My favorite literary quote about autumn is from The Great Gatsby, where it's July and Daisy's moaning about how hot it is and Jordan's trying to calm her down: "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall." It works here on so many levels. TASP was like an existence unto itself - on the day we went home, our old TASP-selves aged and died, and now life is starting over again as we try and reconcile the TASP experience with our normal lives. Or life is starting over as we shed the last trappings of high school and prepare to become college students by filling out applications. Or the Harry Potter movie (which is arriving next week!) will either expand our minds to such a level that we will no longer consider our older selves truly alive or it will so overwhelm us with special effects that our cerebra will be wiped spotless as those of newborn babes. Or Sinterklaas' arrival will so fill us with the desire to be good little children that we will abandon our wicked ways and be reborn, leading lives of goodness and charity. Only now do you begin to see Fitzgerald's genius . . . although somehow I doubt he had considered all this when he penned that line. It must have been his muse whispering to him . . . OK, it's late and I need to end this paragraph.

No British universities on my list, Jason, sorry. Although I will be in London, of course, for the MATH COMPETITION(!) in February. Oh, and I bet you get next Friday off because your teachers will be attending the ECIS (European Council of International Schools) conference, where I will be volunteering to scrounge up my last few CAS points.

Math class anecdote: We're studying limits, right? So the teacher writes "THE SQUEEZE THEOREM" on the board, and this kid asks "Who was Squeeze?" I think he was serious, too. You know, Poisson, Le Chatelier, De Moivre, Squeeze - just another one of those French guys.

I turned in my extended essay (that big physics project I've been griping about for the past two months) on Thursday. Yay! I am devouring Roger Zelazny science fiction novels published c. 1970 right now, perhaps as a kind of reward? Not literature at all, but lots of fun, and a great narrative voice.

1. Kodachrome - Paul Simon
2. Late in the Evening - Paul Simon
3. Scarlet Begonias - Sublime (yay TASP CD!)
4. My Sharona - the Knack (double-yay TASP CD!)
5. Jack Rabbit Slims Twist Contest - Chuck Berry (triple-yay!)

Oh, Emma, and I decided I really like your spelling of 41, "fourty-one" (see "car foibles"( rather than forty-one. I would guess it was not intentional, but a happy accident if not. Fourty just has so much more character than forty.

I am playing soccer at 7:30 AM tomorrow, and soccer waits for no man, TASPer or otherwise, so I better get to bed.

Groetjes,

Sam