The two weeks in which plants vanished, Pt. 3

So I end up in Vegas.  To be honest, I wish the memories here were still fresh, because a lot of the time there was a lot of conflicting thoughts on the subject.  I'm opposed to the city on principle, seeing as how they've pretty much annihilated the aquifer underneath the city in the span of a few years, and yet they continue to waste tremendous amounts of water.  Pretty soon they'll need to completely truck all their water in, or they'll build a massive pipeline and get all their water from some poor other state.  The city of Las Vegas is just a giant waste.  I guess that's why they call it Sin City.  Oh well.  I know some cool people from here, so I guess it's not all that bad. 

Anyway, my first observation of the place, as unbelievable as it seems, is that it's hot.  Very hot.  Being outside was pretty difficult task.  Also, a less noted observation is that it smells really bad.  The city smells awful.  Outside it literally smells like garbage and semen.  Inside any given casino there is a ton of cigarette smoke poorly masked by even more perfume.  Also, I'm sorry if I'm coming across as bitter about the trip, because I'm not.  It's just the casinos that I have a beef with.  You see, I can't gamble, because I'm not 21.  I begrudgingly accepted this long before coming.  However, I also discovered that you can't even stand around in a casino if you aren't 21.  You literally have to keep walking around.  I couldn't even watch my parents gamble.  Which meant that I got to spend some quality time in... malls.  And sometimes the hotel room.  Not fun.  Another complaint: everybody on the Strip is really creepy.  From the dudes advertising their peep shows or whatever-things that dealt with boobs flicking their cards at you, to 6'7" black men walking around dressed up as Wonder Woman, Vegas is... uncomfortable.

That pretty much covers it for the shit stuff.  I saw two shows, one of which was Cirque du Soleil - essentially a bunch of gymnasts on crack, which was spectacular - and the other Penn & Teller, a duo of comedy magicians.  Who were crazy and a little demented, but also spectacular.  One of their tricks involved revealing how the sawing-a-woman-in-half trick worked, only to accidentally send the blade through the exposed midsection and send blood and guts flying everywhere.  I think that pretty much sums it up.

Also, I visited Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, Zion National Park, and, of course, the Grand Canyon.  Describing these won't do them any justice, so I'll upload some pictures of each later.  Each was spectacular, although I think the best from a spectator's perspective was Zion National Park.  The Grand Canyon is actually not all that pretty (the Colorado River was running completely muddy brown at the time, for example) although it is perhaps the scariest thing you'll ever see in your life standing at the top. 

The two weeks in which plants vanished, Pt. 2

The journey continued with my Summer Orientation at the University of Michigan.  An early morning drive from Portage to Ann Arbor lead me to a sub-par continental breakfast in the most maze-like residence hall I've encountered.  The thing that was most impressive about the Orientation program was that it was almost completely student-run, aside from a few presentations by campus police where safety was concerned and various professors/spokespersons when we discussed academics.

The first day included a presentation on campus safety and transportation (basically preparing you to go around campus immediately before you did), a short and pretty worthless tour of Central Campus, and some placement exams.  I had taken the math exam online earlier - here I took Chemistry and French.  I got credit for Chemistry, and managed to get two semesters of French credit (since language isn't a requirement for Engineering students).  Anyway, one interesting part of the tour was the beginning of the all-important graduation tradition which involves walking through a fountain in the middle of campus away from the fancy graduate library just so that we can walk through it again upon graduating in the opposite direction - toward the graduate library - to symbolize the fact that we're graduating.  Get it?  Any U-M students reading this (doubtful), forgive me for being a freshman and finding this interesting.

Later on, we broke up into groups and basically did icebreaker-type things with other freshmen at Orientation.  And it was all related to questions we had about college.  Which wasn't very interesting at all.
This was followed by a performance by an educational theater troupe on campus that managed to be both entertaining and informative.  Bravo, guys!  I think I liked it most because it touched only lightly upon the interpersonal issues that get too much attention and focused much more on issues that one may encounter with oneself - that is, discovering what you and I want to study, how to find some sense of purpose in the giant system that is college, and how to use what you learn to find success in life.  All thought-provoking shit.  Which is exactly what I need to think about.  After that they gave us free movie tickets to see either the critical/indie darling Winter's Bone or the cringe-comedy Cyrus, starring Jonah Hill and John C. Reilly.  Even though I was more interested in Winter's Bone based on the reviews I'd read, everybody wanted to go see the comedy, so I went to see Cyrus.  It was fucking hilarious.  But nobody else thought so!  The point of the movie was to find humor in situations that are just uncomfortable as fuck rather than the ridiculous dialogue/slapstick that one would expect from a movie with John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill, which I guess a lot of people didn't get.  I was seriously busting a gut throughout.  My only complaint would be that the ending got way too serious, but I think that that was only because the tension between the two main characters that was the source of all the humor in the movie inevitably had to be resolved.  Oh well.  Other notable happenings on this day involved a brief walk around campus with my friend who I shall call Obamakid, in which I felt bad after failing to pay a homeless man but giving some kid $2 for bus fare.  In my defense, though, the homeless guy was panhandling in a tunnel.  That's a place where you don't give people money for fear of getting jumped, regardless of who asks you.  Also, that night, I realized that the dorms are holy-shit hot in the summer.

Day 2 was definitely a bit more interesting for me just because it separated the groups based on the school they were attending within the university, which meant I got to learn about Engineering.  The day began in the same fashion as the first, with a presentation that covered the very basics of finding academic success.  Basically, an hour and a half of "don't cheat on tests" and "get good sleep".  Then, we traveled to the Undergraduate Library and learned about the University's library system, computer services (a presentation which, to my surprise/chagrin, didn't deal with the horrifyingly complex "Wolverine Access", but only with things like wi-fi (which I believe is an unalienable right to all students regardless of location), computer repair, illegal downloading, etc.), and how to get involved with the University's many different student organizations.  It would have been more useful if it had helped me learn which ones I ought to join, but alas, it didn't.

The pace of things picked up when we traveled to North Campus for Academic Advising, which thankfully focused on Engineering students.  After learning all about engineering on campus (and I'm officially intimidated), I met individually with an academic adviser and learned specifically which courses I'd need to take to meet graduation requirements.  The trip involved eating at the dorm which supposedly serves the best food on campus - which I think only owns its title because of the fact that it serves by far the largest amount/variety of food.  Qualitatively it's not outstanding. 

After this the night was basically my own.  Other students involved with Learning Communities got there own private meeting while I reviewed some of the many materials given to me and finished a survey that was essentially just a detailed university census.  Then, we went into the basement of the labyrinth-dorm and constructed our schedules.  This is what it looks like:

It's a pretty good schedule, I think, save for two things:

1. The Chem 210 discussion section on Monday should be Thursday from noon to one.  This is an available section but it was booked at the time.  I'll be attending this session anyway, so that I can get three afternoons in a row where I'm completely free after 1.
2. I wanted to tack on a first-year seminar just for fun, but since my Orientation was so late in the summer, they were all booked.  Which sucked.  There was a philosophy course called "The Paradoxes of Time Travel" that was basically meant for me.  Alas...

The question still remains as to whether or not I am taking the right math course.  Math 116 is Calc II, which anybody who does well on the AP Calculus AB should be placed in.  I did well on it, except in my junior year.  This past year I took Statistics as my math credit, and as a result, don't remember how to do Calculus in the slightest.  Well maybe a little.  But not much.  If this ends up being balls-hard I'm going to be fucked.

After I finished with this, I started showcasing some of the funny videos on my Tumblr feed (which is a joke, by the way, don't even go looking for it) and managed to come up with the winning name for our Orientation group of engineers: "Euclids on the Block".  Not even an original name, but awesome.  It came from this comic:

After this, I had a conversation with three awesome Asian kids about everything from rock bands to lucid dreaming to literature for several hours.  Then I hung out in some kids dorm with a bunch of other kids where we discussed politics, of all things.  I thought my mostly-left political views would be embraced on the most liberal non-liberal-arts campus in the state, but I don't really think that that was the case here.  Shit, I'm a Commie.  Awkward...

Day 3 was literally just waking up, traveling to North Campus, getting my schedule approved, and then going home.  Construction was terrible on the way back and I ended up in a massive traffic jam that was caused both by the construction, and people rubbernecking a car crash.  Pretty dumb.

Anyway, the University of Michigan contains less trees than the middle of the woods in backwater-town USA from part one.  The number of trees is really the only thing linking my various excursions over these two weeks, which is my explanation for the title.  Anyway, my last stop in this three-part post is Las Vegas, Nevada, of all places.  I'll finish this later.

Like, Inception... and stuff

Massive spoilers.  If you haven't seen it yet, you should.

On the most unrelated note you can possibly think of, I had a stroke of genius moments ago that allowed me to be the only person to understand the point of the Christopher Nolan movie Inception.  Yes, I've seen it.  Yes, I've seen it twice.  It's the event movie of the summer, after all, and I'm an event movie kind of guy.  I saw Avatar twice in theaters after my original review.  Anyway, the movie ends on a note - spoiler alert, btw - that the reality of the characters is not completely certain.  Like in the beginning of dream sequences in the movie, the viewer is left questioning whether or not the vision on screen is a character's dream - and how long the character has been experiencing that dream.  Arguments about what actually occurs in the movie from this point onward, are irrelevant.  The point of the movie, as is the case with the characters in the film, is to instill an idea that questions the firmness of the reality that we know for the characters, although we're smart enough to know that what we experience is all real.  But the idea, as is stated in the film, takes root (mostly because it's a good movie) and leaves you thinking about it just for a little while.  And by taking root as it does, it enters your subconscious.  I just woke up from a nap involving a dream that basically occurred in the exact same fashion as the movie Inception.  I know that dreams tend to be much more absurd than the events of inception, so as the movie entered my subconscious my dreams became more rationalized and once things started getting freaky (my grandmother getting run over by a canoe) I realized that I was dreaming and that I had woken up.  It's only after you wake up that you begin to realize the strangeness of the dream... right?  Basically what I'm getting at is that the movie gives you a certain way of thinking that causes you to dream as the dreamers in the movie do, which is the most fucking genius marketing campaign I've ever seen, which is how it's remained on top of the box office for so long and for all of its repeat viewings.  And when you look at the different analyses of the movie on IMDb forums and the like, you realize that Chris Nolan has created one of the most multilayered movies in... possibly ever.  I underestimated this already fantastic movie.  By now it's got to be facing the "it's popular so it must suck" backlash already that plagued Avatar and even Twilight (the first movie wasn't half bad, actually, aside from some pacing/dialogue problems and the fact that the source material lacks a plot until the last seventy pages or so), but even with that I proclaim that it'll be a crime if this movie isn't nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award (especially with ten nominees)... and it will win Best Original Screenplay.  And it has a good shot at Best Director.  I don't know about Sound Editing (Tires squealing in a rainstorm?  I don't think so) but it'll definitely win Sound Mixing.  It will get nominated for VF/X but not win.  I will stick with this for now (but it doesn't look like there'll be a bigger action movie to usurp its position for any of the sound or visual categories so I'm confident with these.  I don't see any acting nods though.  Whatever.  This is mostly just food for thought.  Upon having reflected upon many of the subtle details introduced into the plot with short bits of dialogue such as the "leap of faith" thing (which Cobb makes at the end when he finally sees his kids and accepts them as real), among others, I can safely say that this movie has escaped the event horizon of "fake smart" movies (Butterfly Effect, fuck you).  This is a ingenious and incredibly well-put-together movie and it's a crime if you don't see it.   And I'm sorry it's so incoherent.  I needed to write this down fast.

The two weeks in which plants vanished, Pt. 1

It began, you know, two weeks ago, when me and my sister travelled up North to my grandparent's "cottage" along the bank of the Pere Marquette river.  By cottage, I mean permanent trailer-home in the middle of nowhere.  But it makes me sound more wealthy to call it a cottage.  Second home?  Oh well. 

This brief weekend excursion involved the following notable items and activities:

• A old green leather chair belonging to my grandfather which used to be kept inside but had deteriorated with age.  It now sits outside, exposed to the weather.  Being as sturdy as it is, it hasn't managed to fall apart completely in the past year - however, the back leather panel has peeled away and revealed rotting wooden frame while mold grows on the leather flap.  The footrest has fallen off and has been replaced with a moldy hunk of thick plywood.  In many places the leather has torn and yellow stuffing is being squeezed out along the seams (and in one case a hold I poked with a letter opener when I was nine). There may possibly be a bee's nest inside of the chair.  It is the comfiest chair in the entire house.  And my grandfather still sits in it.  
• I finally knocked the movie "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" off my list in the earlier post, "The Movies".  I am kicking ass at this list and I'm seeing a lot of very good movies.  Other unrelated examples of great films I've seen recently are "The Truman Show" and "Life as a House".  
• Floated down the river in an inflatable tube.  At the end of the last leg I was hit in the ass with something.  Hard.  I thought it was a fish, and a bunch of other stuff kept popping up in the water.  It took me a full 10 seconds of being pelted with these things to realize that I was being attacked by water balloons by incredibly stealthy neighbors.  It was a little sad.
• Explored the woods.  Climbed up to the top of a small ridge with my sister who was very angry at me for doing so spontaneously without proper climbing shoes.  
• Tried to light a fire using incredibly wet wood.  It worked, somewhat.  But I let it die after realizing that I'd spent an hour trying to move past the "large stick" phase.  That sucked.  However, to my own scouting credit, I did only use one match and no lighter fluid or other fuel of any kind besides the grease left over in an old pizza box.  And one benefit of the slow-burning effect of the wet wood was that it created a small area of extremely hot coals that made the most optimal marshmallow roasting conditions you'll ever see in your life.  I got it about as brown as possible without the thing falling off or catching on fire.  Seriously.  I brag about this because you will never see it done better.
• Ate the pizza in that pizza box.  It was delicious.
• Experienced riding in the backseat while my sister drove on a public - sparsely populated, but still populated, mind you - road.  She's a year away from taking driver's training and this was her first time driving.  Jesus Hernandez Christ.  I've never been more terrified in my life.  Driving on the wrong side of the road zooming at 35 mph around tight corners on a dirt road is now something I can say I've experienced, and folks, it is not fun.  It is downright terrifying.  However, I can say that on this drive I saw at least 30 deer.
• Began reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five
• Began reading and finished a book called So You Want to Write, for obvious reasons.  I want to write.  And I told myself that I was going to do it and I started to do it.  But progress is something I'm not great at making when it comes to these things.  So I said that I'd attempt to get into a first-year writing seminar at U of M when I got my built my schedule at orientation, which happened the day after I got back home from this little adventure.  More on that later...