Calculus Class and my Near Death Experience

I was at school one day when I saw someone walk through the halls with a Hitler moustache. I gave him a wide berth and kept on walking to class. Now, it's not every day that you see people wearing Hitler moustaches around, so I decided to text my friend about it.

Me: I think I just saw a guy with a Hitler moustache at school....

He could've just been trying to pull off a Chaplin

She didn't respond right away so I went to class. The class was a Calculus 2 class; one of the best classes I've ever taken. The teacher was an elderly Russian man, who, through many anecdotes, had managed to relay his life story to us. He was a Jewish boy growing up in the Soviet Union. His father had been taken by the KGB for mentioning Democracy in a local pub and was sent to a gulag. Our teacher, let's call him Dr. X, had grown up with a deeply ingrained sense of hatred towards communism and the injustices it had dealt to his family. He received his education, then left for Israel, one of the only places accepting Jewish immigrants at that time. He eventually ended up in the US and taught at the school I go to. He was an extremely amiable and funny man, but behind every joyful Russian anecdote he would tell us, there would be a deeper, anti-communist meaning.

Unrelated picture of Kim Jung-il

So I walked into class that day, and everything started out well. We had to solve a problem on second order differential equations and he gave us a few minutes to do that. I solved it pretty quickly and checked my phone. One new text! My friend, who we'll call C (I don't want any lawsuits), had responded. This is (basically) what was said.

C: Yay! Hitler's my hero!!
Me: Me too! I feel like we would've been best friends if I had lived back then.
C: Yeah! We would've been a tremendous trio!
Me: We would've been tighter than the three musketeers!!
C: Oh, and it was a good thing he killed all the Jews.
(cue record scratch)
C: But everyone knows COMMUNISM is the real way to go!!
(cue another record scratch)

Now obviously, my friend was joking, but given the place I was in and my teacher's past experiences (of which my friend had no knowledge of), I felt like I was in a pretty precarious situation. I quickly flipped shut my phone and looked up. Big mistake.

As I looked up, my eyes met Dr. X's, and they locked for a brief moment. Quickly, I snapped them away. Too late. I felt him begin his approach to my desk. I knew I was in trouble. He didn't care if we texted, but I knew his anti-Semitism/pro-Communism alarm had gone off. Each step he took towards my small desk reverberated through the floor and into my already trembling heart. He would take my phone, then proceed to murder me on the spot. I knew it.

He walked up right next to my desk and looked at me for a second. I kept my eyes locked on the work in front of me. The phone began to vibrate in my pants. I felt like I was locked in a 21st century remake of "The Tell-Tale Heart". My moment of doom had arrived.

He began to speak, but I smiled blankly ahead, revisiting the happiest moments of my life. I had already resigned myself to my fate, but I refused to die with the images of an angry Russian burned into my retinas. I was brought out of my reverie by the word "integral". Integral? That didn't sound like something someone would say before feasting on the innards of their victim.

"Vat is ze integral you found?' repeated Dr. X. I looked at him. Never before had I realized how kind and how understanding his gaze was. Oh, how amazing it was to be spared by this great man! What had I done to deserve forgiveness? I would get the integral wrong and he would openly mock me in front of the classroom, but I was alive! I was alive!

It's a beautiful world we live in.

Invitation to a Beheading

I read Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov over the summer. I've got this habit of finding extremely famous authors and then reading the books that didn't make them famous. I learned this summer that that was a habit I needed to stop. It was one of the hardest reads of my life, and not because it was dense or overly wordy. It just didn't make sense.  It was probably the trippiest book I've ever read in my life, and that's saying a lot, seeing as how I've read ridiculous amounts of Kafka. It was like simultaneously injecting yourself with methamphetamine, mushrooms, and rainbows.

 

 

"We likes methamphetamine, yes we does, precious"

So if you're one of the 13 people in the world who've read it, I'm sorry, I feel your pain. If you  haven't read it, please don't, for your sake.

And the real reason I made this blog post was so that I could post a picture of Gollum saying something.

Pizza, Trust, and Runescape

So today, I was at Pizza Hut when my parents decided to call my sister and I out for not accepting them as friends on Facebook. I tried explaining to them that Facebook was basically a chronicle of my illegal and abhorrent activity and that I didn't want them to read about/see my adventures with methamphetamine, prostitutes, and Buffy.

Fine, she's hot..

They thought this was a joke, so my sister chirped in saying we needed some privacy in our lives. They smiled like they had just stolen Christmas. My dad said he was giving us privacy by giving us open access to the internet. He reminded me of the dictatorship days when he had secret monitoring programs on our computers, and would check up on the things we were doing and saying. Then he brought up one of the less proud moments of my childhood.

"LOL!! WUTZ PRIVACY??"

To all those who don't know what Runescape is, it's an MMORPG, an online game where people play in real time. A very addicting online game. I was probably in 5th or 6th grade and I played it A LOT. It was the summer and I wanted to pretend to be a wizard because it was a lot better than pretending to be a 6th grader. One day, I was walking around my fictional world doing fictional things when I crossed paths with another character. I saw hundreds of other characters every time I played Runescape, but this one gave me a funny look. My pixelated heart filled with rage.

"Hey, you cocksucking whore!" I yelled.
"Wut?" came his confused reply.
"You motherfucking bitch fucker!" screamed I, in a fury that wiped out my ability to form coherent sentences.
"Hey man, calm down," came his nervous reply.
I began typing up more furious profanities.




Just then, I got a call from my dad.
"Hey dad," I said.
"Son, what are you doing?"
"I'm just browsing stuff on the internet, dad," I said, putting on my most innocent voice.
"I've been watching you on the computer for 10 minutes. Why did you just use those words?" He asked.

I felt as if his voice penetrated into the deepest recesses of my soul. I shrunk from the telephone receiver in fear. My dad had installed a program into my computer which allowed him to monitor everything I was doing at any time from his computer. The game was over, and my dad had won. It was time to do damage control.

"Dad, I didn't know what those words were, I heard them on TV"

As an immigrant himself, he was likely to believe this story. I learned early on always to blame American culture for all my shortcomings. It didn't fail this time either. My dad told me never to use those words again, and my Runescape character went on to a long and prosperous life.


Now, inside this dark, hot, Pizza Hut, this moment was being revisited. Humiliated, I was about to show my dad what other words I had learned from TV, but the waitress came, and I had to laugh it off. But my heart was filled with rage. That is, until I got the pizza. Pizza solves all problems. In summary, I'm never adding my parents onto Facebook.

first post

I'm slightly embarrassed at having created a blog.

Blogging was one of those internet phenomena that I thought only weird people got into, like "liking" hundreds of things on Facebook or looking at random, subtitled pictures of cats.

Sadly, I've done both the latter, and my friend finally convinced me to get a blog. I'm not sure what I'm going to talk about in here, but I know that if I ever run out of ideas, memegenerator will save my ass.

Coming up with a name for the blog was the hardest part of getting started. I had some weird ones thought out, and I created one with the name "A Simple Little Idea" (after something Leonardo DiCaprio says in Inception), but that sounded pretty stupid 10 seconds later, so I deleted it.

Then this morning, I was talking to my sister as she was cleaning out her computer and found that she had an old Word document with possible book titles, should she ever decide to write a biography. At the top of the list was "Living Life to the Limit: How i Solved My Imaginary Problems". I told her I was going to steal the title, and promised her a dedication if I ever wrote a book.

When I typed it into blogspot, they told me it was too long, so after a quick cry, I decided to shorten it. And this was the result.

The "i" in the title isn't capitalized because it's supposed to be the imaginary number, hence the "imaginary problems" part of the title. This was amazing to me this morning, but anyone reading this probably thinks I'm insane...

Hopefully this blog will skyrocket me to fame and fortune, but if it doesn't, that's OK. As long as I don't end up arrested for revolutionary writing (which I don't plan to do much of), I'll be happy.