The Last Chapter in the Peach Saga and Other Stories

Josh:

A quick update on the Peach situation. After writing the post yesterday, I felt the urge to go back to AK Plaza and finally claim my Mario. Here's what happened:

We were planning to go to Costco on Monday 7/5/10. For some reason, the idea of going to Costco just sounded really really bad to me (I have no idea why). Since we already made plans with the boys from the local store, we couldn't really back out so we went to AK Plaza to buy our tickets. Keep in mind that the train ride is about 1 hour and 15 minutes, I don't even get off until 5PM and Costco closes at 10PM. We were in a little bit of a rush, needless to say. After we ate, we met up and went to buy our tickets. After we had paid for them, we looked down at the time and the train was going to leave at 7:45PM which would put us in Costco around 9PM. I was a little frustrated at this obviously. That was significantly later than I wanted to be out and I didn't really even want to go out.

We decided to go ahead anyway and wait for the train. We had an hour to kill before it left so we decided to grab drinks. Audrey went to the place where she usually gets her strawberry slushee thing and it turned out they were all out of the ingredients. That's the first time that ever happened. So after a second disappointment, we head over to Starbucks (crazy Americans). It turns out that they have trouble with the order and it takes an extra five minutes attempting communication with workers. Eventually it gets sorted out but by now I am feeling like the fates are aligned against us. I may have only listed one major and two minor problems but it really felt like the entire world was against us and everything that could go wrong, was going wrong. We decided to try to make the best of it and went upstairs to play in the arcade. We got some change and since I had written about Peach that day, the idea of Mario was fresh in my head. I said,

"You know what? What can possibly go wrong? The fates are already aligned against me but I already know I'll only get Peach so it's not like I'll be that disappointed. Take that world!"

I walked downstairs to the bookstore with a pocket full of change, ready to get more Peaches and maybe redeem the day with a Mario. I got to the quarter machines and looked for the devil spawn. I stopped. I thought it was on the right, but maybe I just forgot. I scanned all eight quarter machines. Wait, where could it be? I looked closely at each machine individually. Pokemon, Yu-gi-oh, Winnie the Pooh, toy guns, another Pokemon, some children's anime thing, yet another Pokemon and...some random cat machine...
I had a "KHHAAAAAAANNNNNNNN!" moment in the store.

Why did I have to test the fates? I said the fated words, "What could possibly go wrong?" What could possibly go wrong? They could take away my Mario quarter machine! I didn't even factor that possibility in. Now I'm ridden with guilt because what if I didn't decide to test my luck that day? What if I said, "No, I will go another day when my luck is better," like a responsible adult. Maybe my Mario machine would still be there. But for now, possibly forever, this is what I am stuck with:

I have to move on before I rage any more about this. By the way, ten cool points to anyone who understands that Mario is Missing reference (I'm proud of myself for that one, by the way).

So that following Tuesday after 5/15/10 (or before then, I really got lazy labeling with my notebook) there was some sort of gathering for teachers after school. I don't remember what it was for but a bunch of teachers gathered near our gymnasium to drink and eat. They brought all sorts of weird food. I talked to a few of the teachers (which was great) but the most interesting part about this story was how much weird food I ate. The first on the list was some sort of block of meat (literally). I tried a slice of it and it really wasn't all that good. Apparently it was made up of various parts of a pig such as nose, hooves, face, ear, etc. Basically everything you don't want to eat smashed up into a giant block of meat. Appetizing, right? I then had a "Korean sausage". That was rice stuffed into pig's bowels with blood as a sauce. Oddly enough, that actually tasted okay. I don't think I'll eat it again because the thought of what I am eating is utterly disgusting; but I'm proud of myself for trying it. The last odd thing I had wasn't exactly odd to eat but just the way they explained it: "fruit of oak tree". It's basically this strange brown jelly (not very tasty) that's made out of some substance from an oak tree. I just thought the idea of a "fruit oak tree" was really funny.

Since this blog has no real cohesion or overall topic, I'll talk about something amusing that happened during one of my classes. There is a ten minute transition period between classes where the kids go to the bathroom, head to the different rooms, etc. This is the time when my kids start to slowly pour into my room. One day this kid had brought in two metal sticks that were bent near one end (basically shaped like an "L"). He then started walking around the class and made them come together whenever he got near another student. I thought, "Wait, is this kid using dowsing rods?" at which point I thought, "How do I know that?" which led to the better question, "How does he know that?" I guess this student found bent metal rods and then decided to turn them into dowsing rods for some odd reason. Who in the world thinks of that? I know that if I found metal rods the last thing I think of is, "Hey I can use this as a fake dowsing rod," and then walk around crossing them when I got near students.

No transition can take me anywhere after this so with that, I end this entry.