So Saturday, I went on an expedition with Sterling's church (frightening as it may sound) to shoot guns at some middle-of-nowhere state park/shooting range. At least I think it was legal--the leader of the whole shooting activity, "Brother" Davison, casually picked up his kevlar-stocked AK-47 and unloaded 30 rounds full auto into a murky pond several times. I think he bribed the park ranger. In any case, I had sickening amounts of fun unloading 7.62mm cartridges into old computer monitors (entirely safe?), and shooting at grapefruit with a .45 caliber revolver. I've scanned a few pictures, but I'm too lazy to get a decent webhosting service (50megs sucks and won't let you upload anything over, like, a megabyte), so if you want to see them, just IM me (JohnH778). I've got a couple nice shots of myself and Sterling firing the AK, as well as some various handguns. Call me a hillbilly, but I Goddamned love firearms.

You know, I don't mind school. I enjoy the prospect of going (or even being forced to go) to school every day, where I'm taught things that will be crucial to my development as a human being. Even obscure subjects like history--a class where we study the reasons not to be a totalitarian dictator--have become enjoyable to me, because cool teachers like Mr.Turks reveal those little-known facts that the propagatorial U.S. History books leave out, like the massacre of 6,000 Canadians sent to probe European defenses in WWII.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. I go to KHS every day to learn how to calculate magnetic flux, the muzzle velocity of a cannon, and how far away you need to be to hear a 2,000W explosion at 50 dB. I march in every day to classes that focus completely on passing a standardized test (which I have to pay for, those AP assholes) that will never benefit me. I'm going to CULINARY SCHOOL, so what good is the AP English test going to do me? Especially when I have a bad habit of hating the "Classics" that I'll have to answer questions regarding? On the other hand, learning to produce some creative writing might be useful in the future, if I care to publish a memoir, but the greatest extent of my junior year's newly acquired skills so far is to analyze other peoples' work. And I don't do that very well, which is, granted, my fault, but that's because I don't care for it.

Sadly, all my ranting and raving about this whole system isn't really going to get me anywhere. Being a lofty idealist isn't usually terribly productive, and it hasn't been for me; my resentment of my education is just failing me classes, so I truly need to just bullshit my way through it all. It's fortunate that I've got Larkin here to help me understand spectral emissions and polynomials. But who knows, someday I may need to calculate yield for a veal stock using imaginary numbers. Or maybe I'll be doing prep work as a sous-chef one day, and I'll want to determine the chemical composition of a star 13,000,000 light years away from me. Perhaps I'll shout at a brick wall and wonder furiously at how long it will take for the sound waves to bounce off and hit my eardrums.