Day One: Goalsetting and a Banquet Prank

6/14/14, 11:44 AM PDT

A big issue with last year's blog post is that other than several movie nights, I achieved absolutely none of my big summer goals. I made a ton of progress in a few of them, especially in making the short film, but I never finished, which is a shame.

So to combat that, starting today I'll be including an outline of what I want to achieve every day, updated weekly on Sundays. I'll just go ahead and start it off today because the first day of summer really shouldn't be productive at all.

It'll look something like this:

• Sunday, June 15: Go over basic cinematography info. See this video, but definitely look into other sources as well.
• Monday, June 16: Write anniversary story. Finish up to the murder.
• Tuesday, June 17: Write anniversary story. Finish exploration/clue collection.
• Wednesday, June 18: Write anniversary story. Start trial.
• Thursday, June 19: Write anniversary story. Finish trial, finish executions.
• Friday, June 20: Write anniversary story. Work on HTML elements.
• Saturday, June 21: Finish anniversary story. Post on Blogspot, set publish time to Wednesday.

If you couldn't tell, my priority right now is my freaking anniversary story which is SIX MONTHS OVERDUE. My bad on taking pretty much forever on this, but I promise that by next week Wednesday, this WILL BE DONE.

Oh, and if you guys are curious, here's my current priorities list, in order of when I want to accomplish them. I'll also update the summer bucket list to include this priorities list and the weekly outline.

1. Finish writing the anniversary story.
2. Finish editing last summer's short film.
3. Work on spoken word poem with Samantha.
4. Write a new, five minute screenplay.
5. Self study for the AP Computer Science A test.

Lot on my plate, huh? But with three months, I'll definitely have enough time to get most of these done.

In other non-self improvement, news, THE EFFING WORLD CUP. Japan vs. Ivory Coast is happening at around 6 PM today, can't WAIT. If you guys don't already know, I'm rooting for Japan simply because god damn it, they made their official mascot Pikachu. LOOK AT HOW ADORABLE IT IS.

I know they're probably gonna lose. But everyone loves an underdog story. Especially when this underdog story involves Pokémon.



Same day, 8:29 PM PDT

So yesterday, I promised to post pictures of the Seminar English class. And here they are, courtesy of Amanda Lee and her fancy, two-thousand dollar camera.

Notice Nick's position.

For this next picture, we told everyone to not smile. Look at Tina, Mrs. DJ, Toossi, and Emrys disrespectfully disobeying.

Mrs. Palumbo said that we looked "really scary."

And then we pointed at the most important person in the room.

I don't know why Emrys is pointing at Toossi, that's pretty much the
opposite of what we were going for.

And here's some bonus selfies that Alex took.

They're blurry because Nevin left the camera on manual focus.

But given how people in Seminar look, I think it was a good thing
that most of us were blurry.

On to the new stuff that happened today. The big thing was the Red Cross banquet, which was pretty okay. I'm still pretty much deaf in the left ear from swimming yesterday, so I could barely hear what was going on around me. But from what I picked up, I think there were infinite refills on lemonade and water. Or maybe my hearing's just crap because the lady that promised to refill lemonade never came back even though we waited hours for her to show up again.

What a disappointment.

Oh, and as part of our banquet, Eric (next year's club president) wanted us to prank Utkrisht (this year's club president) by singing happy birthday to him to attract the attention of the people around us. So Eric starts telling us to sing on his cue and to pass it on to the people around us and eventually, after seeing a bunch of people secretively whispering to each other, Utkrisht realized that something was about to go down. He started to ask people what they were talking about, so to cover the prank up while it spread across the table, I said that we could get free cake since Buca di Beppo gives free cake to groups with at least 20 people. Of course, it was a total lie, but it was convincing enough for him to shrug off the whispering happening around the table.

Then we all sang happy birthday in unison and Utkrisht was completely confused. When we finished, a girl (who was in our group and therefore knew about the prank) asked if it really was Utkrisht's birthday. And she was serious too, I could tell. So that little bit of confusion made me laugh hard.

And at the very end, you know what Utkrisht said after the entire prank passed?

"So are we seriously getting some free cake or what?"

I love Red Cross.


Afterwards, we hung out at Barnes and Noble. As soon as we got there, Angela suggested that we all compete to see who can find the funniest book in ten minutes. Everyone chose really funny stuff and you know what I brought to the table? A book of Wiccan spells that was in the nonfiction aisle.

Nobody laughed and I felt super embarrassed.


Oh, and Japan lost their first World Cup game. Aw man.

It's okay, Pikachu. Your team'll do better against Greece. Probably.

RFotD: Japan's highest placing in the World Cup was 9th place, achieved both in 2002 (when Japan and South Korea hosted the World Cup) and in 2010.

SGAT: Planned out my work for the week. Now whether or not I'll actually stick to it is a different story...

Day Zero: Farewell Seminar, Hello Summer

6/13/14, 10:35 PM PDT

Technically, my day started on midnight since at that time, I was still editing the DJ/Seminar tribute video. I didn't finish until 3 AM, and I had to wake up at 6 AM to get ready for school, so for the very last day of summer, I was running on three hours of sleep.

But it was worth it. Dear god, was it worth it.

Okay, so not counting sleep deprivation, the first thing that happened today was a great little potluck in English. Unfortunately, I didn't really bring anything since I was too preoccupied with editing to bring in jello cups like I always do, but it was okay since a lot of people brought stuff so I wasn't too missed. Someone brought those massive sandwiches from Vons pre-sliced, so whoever that was I love you because those sandwiches are my LIFEBLOOD. Seriously, I have them pretty much all the time for lunch and I never get sick of them.

After a few more English project presentations, my video finally premiered. Take a look.

Sappy paragraph incoming. Brace yourselves.

It's basically a mixture of all the videos we've done in Seminar English since 6th grade (with Alex and Nick's Spanish project thrown in there because it's so beautiful). And even though they look like stupid little amateur videos, I got pretty emotional when I finished editing the entire thing and I watched it over for the first time. It's less about the actual content of the videos and more the fact that it shows just how long we as a class have been together. I mean I've been with this same group of people for three years (six for a few of them), and the fact that today will probably be the last time we're all guaranteed to have the same class... it's a little saddening. But at the same time I'm so glad that I got to spend all this time with such a great group of people. If you know me in person, you'll know that I absolutely LOVE talking about Seminar English and it's because honestly, Seminar English is period I look most forward to, not just this year, but ever since middle school. I think Kevin Tran said it best when he said that this class really did bond, whether it was through the in-class discussions, the potlucks, or (and especially) through the all-nighters that we pulled from doing English. And he's right. In my entire academic career, I've never felt so close to an entire class before.

So yeah, when I showed it to the class, I kinda teared up. Just a little though. Shut up.

Oh and the first minute or so was a tribute to Mrs. DJ. If you look carefully, you can see that I swapped out her husband's face with Mr. Tompkins' face. And it's not because I wanted to be random. Just take a look at the original picture and tell me that Mr. DJ doesn't look like a cop from a 1980s TV show.

She didn't really notice it when it first popped up. I think the entire class laughing tipped her off that there was something up with that picture. But you could definitely tell when she figured it out, because when she did, she gasped and immediately covered her face with both hands, it was hilarious.

Oh, and we took a few class pictures too. Check back on tomorrow's entry because I have to wait until people send their pictures to me since I didn't take any unfortunately.

Afterwards, sort of slept through psych. Nothing really happene-OH WAIT. Brandon, Limbert, Toossi, and Xerxes pelted Biggs with water balloons. Limbert missed and accidentally hit the big TV in the middle of the room, so I think that thing is dead. Then after school I hit up IHOP. Obligatory food photos because I've made it a personal goal to put more pictures in this blog.

Some sort of... giant eggroll?

Yeah, we like french toast. Do do dodo, can't wait to get a mouthful.

See that savory crêpe at the top? Yeah, it had mushrooms, chicken, onions, and spinach in it. Kayla thought it would be good, so she ordered it and split it with me since her tiny atrophied stomach couldn't possibly finish both.

That was the worst mistake of my life. That crêpe was AWFUL. I was so nauseated by the end of it.

Oh, and my friends also made my blindly eat a pancake practically covered in salt. So if I get kidney stones about 20 days into summer, you'll know why.

Then went swimming with a bunch of track people. Kayla and Christina were there, but they didn't go in the water since they didn't have spare clothes. There was some guy that was apparently in charge of safety in the pool and he called me out EVERY SINGLE TIME I broke a pool rule and went into a 15 minute lecture about why we have that rule in place, complete with California law codes and death statistics. I mean, come on, I did one side flip into the pool, that did not warrant a verbal encyclopedia with works cited.

Got home at around 5:15 PM and just passed out from exhaustion. But today was a great start to summer. Great, great start.





RFotD: Nemo 33, the world's deepest swimming pool, has a depth of 33 meters (108 feet). It is designed for divers and has numerous artificial caves for exploration. It also has numerous facilities around the pool including a restaurant where diners can see the divers up close through poolside windows. Check this video out.

SGAT: None really.

2014: Orientation and Bonus Entry

6/11/14, 4:22 PM PDT

It begins again. Oh god, it begins again.

Alright, for those of you who weren't here last year, I'll give you a bit of an orientation. It's gonna sound a bit clumsy since I'm always bad at this sort of stuff, but just bear with me. So every summer, I write these journal entries about the stuff I do during vacation so that I can share the fun fun things that I experience with you poorer, less fortunate people who don't live as entertaining a summer as I do.

HAH. Kidding. Roughly 70-75% of my entries are probably gonna be boring, but I will try my best to make this blog as interesting of a read as possible without deviating too far from the truth. This blog will be updated daily and in the six years that I've written summer journals, I have been very timely with these entries. The only times I've been late on entries is when I don't have access to the Internet (usually when I'm traveling abroad) or when I do things past midnight, which is frequent. Every update will roll out at around 11:30 PM each day.

As I've mentioned, updates will come daily, and contrary to popular belief, I am not the most interesting person in the world (I'm in third place, behind Sean Connery and one of the baggers at Albertsons that used to be a POW and has war flashbacks when someone buys kettle corn). But since it's updated daily, my blog will pretty much reflect the current mood that I had during the time. So when I'm happy, my blog entries will be happy and when I'm sad, my blog entries will be slightly less happy (I'll try to avoid a repeat of last year where I got hit by a wave of depression midway through and a ton of my entries were just melancholic bullshit).

Two things to note. If you look to the very bottom of most entries, you'll see something that says "RFotD" and "SGAT." They stand for "Random Fact of the Day" and "Summer Goals Achieved Today," respectively. The random facts will be true facts that I include purely for the sake of educating the masses. And if you look to the top of the site, you'll see a page labeled "Summer Bucket List," which is a list of stuff I want to accomplish. Even though it's labeled as a "summer" bucket list, in reality it's just a list of stuff that I want to do before I die, so you'll occasionally see me add new things in there and cross stuff off even if it's not summer. SGAT basically notes if I tried to accomplish anything in my bucket list that day, just to keep me productive.

Oh, and one important thing that I feel people didn't use enough last year: tags. If you look to the right and scroll a bit, you'll see this big ol' column that says "Tags." Yeah, use that. With every update (unless I'm on my phone, where tagging is a bitch), I will include tags that usually give a gist of what the entry is about. They'll be fairly consistent, I don't typically add new tags unless I see myself writing about that subject more times in the future, so they act as a really reliable categorizer. And if I write an entry that I'm especially proud of or think is funny enough, I mark it with the tag "Favorite Entries." I'm fairly selective when it comes to tagging entries as my favorite (quality assurance, in essence), so if you want to skip all the crap and just read interesting things, definitely check that tag out.

Alright, recap. Summer blog, updated daily, 11:30 PM, RFotD, SGAT, tags exist, yeah, I think that about covers it. Hope you guys enjoy the blog! I'll see you in two days or so. Or hell, maybe I'll start tomorrow because I'm foreseeing tomorrow as being a pretty interesting day.

Bonus entry: New York Trip, written from 6/6/14 - 6/8/14