As I was walking home from CVS today, I saw The Phantom Ice Cream Truck — there is an ice cream truck that has been making rounds in my neighborhood, playing the same music-box song, for as long as I can remember and I had never actually seen this truck until this evening.

Now it was just like any old ice cream truck; it was white, rectangular, and had steel bars in the windows. The driver was bald and had on his face a sinister-looking grimace. An inscription above the truck’s windshield read: “CAUTION CHILDREN”

I found this to be very curious. Was this an imperative? Surely it was missing some punctuation. I pondered the possibilities:

CAUTION CHILDREN! Warn them about the ill-effects of ice cream on health!

CAUTION-CHILDREN: $1.50 each.

CAUTION, CHILDREN. Driver may be dangerous.

CAUTION: CHILDREN They are quite vicious!

However, since punctuation limits the meaning of “CAUTION CHILDREN” to only a fraction of the possibilities, it seems that leaving the inscription with a certain degree of vagueness is to the interests of both the truck driver and the children.

So… maybe I could’ve been doing something better with my time today, but here’s our new, bright, whimsical look! I also cleaned up my code a great deal, though, after having not seen it for over a year, I’d forgotten what I’d named all of the variables. Oops. There are probably bugs lurking around in here somewhere, which I will fix when I find them. (..or when you find them and tell me about them!)

So yesterday (or was it the day before?) we all received our “permanent” mailboxes, which will be ours until June 2010. While this affords a great deal of convenience — never having to change magazine subscriptions, bank statements, etc. again for the foreseeable future, the fact of the matter is that the alphabetically-assigned “3730 Frist Center” really does not have the ring of “405 Witherspoon Hall,” or “44 Holder Hall.” The new addresses are metallic and glassy, and to me they seem to lack the Victorian scent of warm stone, collegiate Gothicism, or for that matter, waffle ceilings.

Of course, the postal workers will be spared the ordeal of having to deal with addresses that look like “102 1937 Hall” and “1937 Hall 102,” but the new Frist mailboxes are in the end probably more convenient for the students who actually live near Frist. Never again will I find big FedEx or UPS packages deposited neatly before my door — I’ll have to lug them up from down-campus. I’d rather get my mail on the way back from breakfast in Rocky/Mathey than trek down to Frist; in fact it would have been actually somewhat less convenient if I had not resigned myself to some crazy 10:00 to 5:30 schedule 2 days a week in which I have no choice but to get late lunch in my 10-minute break between classes. And for sure, the Forbesians would probably rather have their mail in Forbes, rather than at Frist. We can’t even tease them anymore for having addresses in a different zip code.

There’s an interesting new sound in the house today. It goes something like,

*chirpchirpchirpchirpchirpchirpchirpchirpchirpchirp* SLAM

*chirpchirpchirpchirpchirpchirpchirpchirpchirpchirp* SLAM

*chirpchirpchirpchirpchirpchirpchirpchirpchirpchirp* SLAM

Please don’t call ASPCA on us, however. There are no small animals being brutally slaughtered here. It’s simply that my aunt’s hooked up a noisemaker to her door that sounds like birds and is supposed to drive insects away. It chirps every time she opens her door, and then she slams it and it stops.

At least that’s what I think it is. I haven’t really checked, and I don’t really want to. Supposedly if we hear strange noises coming from the animal housing quarters at work, we can ask and have the sounds explained. The veterinary expert here at LABiomed even had a Powerpoint for us on animal experimentation last Friday, through which his goal was to… uh… eradicate some common misconceptions.

His first histogram showed that 90% of all research is done on rodents, and progressively fewer experiments are being done on other animals. “We want to use as few animals as possible,” he told us. “We do our best not to waste them.”

Then, another histogram showed that only 60% of the tests are “painful,” while 38% were done under pain relief. After telling us all about the government regulations surrounding animal research and showing us lots of cute pictures of mice and such, he shut down his laptop to ask for questions.

Michelle asked, “What happens to the animals after you’ve experimented on them?” Silence.

And the guy says, “Oh, we k-…euthanize them. Because the research needs to be taken to the cellular level to be completed.” And he went on for a while longer about why the animals need to be keuthanized. Despite his efforts, however, the atmosphere of complacency brought about by the pictures of cute animals had vanished.

(Disclaimer: I don’t really have any qualms about animal testing, so long as I’m not performing the keuthanasia or drawing blood from the eyes of mice — which is apparently what is done. It’s a necessary evil at this point — computer models aren’t that sophisticated yet, Dr. Singer.)

Why don’t I post more often? At one point I believed the answer could be found in the simple laws of procrastination — the more concrete work I have to do, the more I blog. This is evidently untrue, as I am blogging on the evening following my high school graduation.

No. Here is what I now believe is the actual reason — or excuse, if that’s how you would like to think of it: I blog when my thoughts on the subject of the entry are clear. So many of the past month and a half’s events have left me bewildered that I was unable to formulate coherent enough thoughts to make them into a blog entry. Like news stories, blog entries must be timely, and so by the time I had decided what to think of a particular occurrence, said occurrence was already too dated to blog.

So… as I’ve just graduated, I think this is a good point for me to bring in anything I’ve overlooked — there’s a lot of stuff to catch up on, and I suspect it’ll take quite a few posts. Starting with the more current events:

Graduation: A high school graduation is a high school graduation — you’ve been to yours and you know what they’re all like. There were points that I wanted to stop listening so that I wouldn’t tear up too much, but forced myself to do it, because I would otherwise regret not even knowing what was said. The pictures and the hugs are actually a goodbye to all the people who have meant anything to me in high school as classmates — now we will all be tested. Without a common location, without classes with one another, without the same other people to talk about, which of us will remain just as close?

Baccalaureate: I don’t know what anyone else was thinking during the slideshow — in which every slide captured what were some of our best memories and nearly blinded us with one bright smile after another — but I was wondering, ten years from now, what colors the nostalgia would be tinted (other than green, of course). How would my then days compare to these? Will I remember these past four years as being better than what I will have and have had by then? No, certainly the best is yet to come — and if so, will that detract from the bests of high school? Perhaps it won’t, if I don’t allow it to? I’ve spoken with some of the people I used to be close with when I was an underclassman — now sophomores or juniors in college, and I’ve found that we’ve grown to be so different that we don’t really communicate on the same level any longer. That was only two years — what will I think in ten?

Coming up: Coverage on
Senior issue
Prom
Summer work
Naginata-related things
My rapidly changing list of summer and college resolutions
Other things that haven’t come to mind yet because they happened so long ago.