{ Shad Me In }

July 8th: My love she throws me back a rubber ball...

Tue, 10 Aug 2004 13:33:50 GMT

...but she won't catch me or break my fall.

July 8th

Muffins for breakfast. Breakfast is so slow, not that there's a line or anything; it's just sluggish. Steph and I always got to the dining hall early and we'd see Ed pacing in front of the kitchen door. Everyday by that time, he'd already been awake for three plus hours. That man is a venerable maniac.

At E2, the Shads gathered for a maths session, the first in a long set of tortures that Ed would inflict upon us over the next four weeks. Initially, I was excited, but he's too smart! He moves too fast! I swear, if this is what university will be like I will die. The topic of the talk was "Maths in the Process of Design." We went through the whole bit about how to quantify a real-world problem and set up a mathematical model for it, moving into decision functions. Ed got exasperated because it took us so long to figure out that a one row/column matrix was a vector. Then, by some weird thing, we digressed into the Golden Ratio. Oh yes--that was proposed by Jimmy: "Where can we find the Golden Ratio in nature?" I think that guy is more obsessed with maths than I am! So we set up a recursive difference equation to figure out why the Golden Ratio equals [1 + sqrt(5)]/2.r Right then and there, I made a pact to save all the maths lectures for figuring out when I went to the airport on the last day. Either that, or insomnia relief.

Following that was...dumdumdum...what became the "dreaded" Project Time. The Yellow team convened outside of the Yellow Design room. Garrett proposed that we all sign our names on the piece of yellow bristol board taped to out door. I didn't have a pen, so I didn't sign, but later I found a mysterious addition: SWAN written in sprawling block capitals. Hmm, thanks guys. Inside the room, we had to get started on the problem definition for our big design project. Jen became our logbook keeper and we began throwing around ideas: fire, flood, chemical explosions... Then we found problems for each of them, some of which made no sense at all. They ended falling into the "lack of" pattern--lack of food, lack of water, lack of organization, lack of light; in fact, lack of stuff might have been what we finally put down. We weren't really getting anywhere, so we went around the circle contributing ideas and voting off bad ones. This became the beginning of the end, but I didn't know that then. We ended the meeting with the false sense of security thinking we were on track, and maybe we were, but then the other teams commented that they were close to getting or had their problems.

As for the design team itself, I liked everyone in it because we came from so many different backgrounds (haha, only half of were are Chinese...) and had a wide variety of skills. This also meant we were going to fight...a lot.

Lunch consisted of perogies. "What the hell is a perogie?" was my reaction. It turned out to be a kind of fried-up potato thing that was really good.

The bulk of the afternoon was spent on recreation. Wow, when I saw the huge two-hour time slot in the schedule, I nearly had a conniption. "Please, PLEASE, let that NOT be Ultimate Frisbee for two hours." I can only take so much of curved discs hitting me in the face. Luckily, we went on a field trip to a place much less sweaty, a skating arena where we were going to do speed skating! I like figure skating and hockey so much more, but the uniforms are worth the effort of watching speed skating. Dinky helmets on the short track, hehe.

The bus ride was uneventful. I spent my time looking out the window, since I'm not much of a bus converstionist. It's funny, we passed so much countryside. I kind of understand now why a guy I know who goes to Waterloo told me academics was good at UW, but living in Waterloo is like hell. It's a university town--outside of the university, it's just like everywhere else. I also realized then that it's not the Shad program or the activities that make Shad so amazing--we don't leave campus or do anything too special--it's having such brilliant and awesome people at close proximity everyday. The more recreation we did, the more I found that it was so randomly jabbed into the schedule, more of as an afterthought. But the people were always there, and it was really nice. At home, ninety-nine percent of my high school are "skeets," who don't give a shit about their futures. It is stimulating to be with individuals who care about something.

At the arena, we filed off the bus and then split into two groups. One would go speed skating first while the other played soccer. I was in the second group and we ran off to the adjacent field. I adore watching soccer, but that 'aint synonymous with being able to play it! I just jogged around the whole time, watching Chad rip up the grass with every step. I found myself considering the concept of lawn insurance... After half an hour, it was our turn to skate, but there was more waiting in store. We had to get fitted for our skates, which took forever. I didn't even know my shoe size because my mom always bought me whatever she thought was okay, which was usually from China and in some weird measurement. I eventually got to step out on the ice, which looked amazing. I want to a drive a zamboni someday...

With my first step, I felt like falling. It's so different from figure skating. The blades are long and sharp, but I've always had a tendency to drift to my inside edge, which is a nightmare on speedskates. The blade is supposed to be flat on the ice. I pretended that I was moonwalking like Michael Jackson, but it didn't really help. I ended up just ignoring the advice and skating like figure skates...it looked awful, but I didn't fall. Later, the staff at the arena gave us lessons on how to start a race like in the Olympics. I got away alright, but trying to do a slide stop in those skates was asking to trip. As well, my ankles felt brutal. I looked up and saw Jimmy who was bundled up in a winter jacket exactly like my dad's (I would tell him repeatedly in the subsequent weeks that he reminded me of my dad). He was very tentatively going around the outside...it was kind of comical. Actually, everyone was having a bit of trouble, but it was funny and felt really relaxing. I'm not sure why Steph didn't skate. I saw her in the seats high up, reading Great Expectations.

It soon was time for us to leave. Unfortunately, I left the ice just as people gathered for a group photo. I regret not getting into many photos at Shad, since I forgot my camera at home. <<---DUMBASS! Grebel was waiting and so was that fabulous food...er, after the Cyprus Lake session anyway.

On the weekend, we were going camping at Cyprus Lake (thus the setting up of the tents on the first day), so we needed to be briefed on conduct and preparation. The staff told us to bring a backpack of stuff, including clothes (always a good idea), toiletries (yes, there would be a working toilet too!), bug spray (VERY important), sunscreen, hiking shoes, sleeping bag (I ended up sleeping the whole month in my sleeping bag so it wasn't a big change). I wanted to add to the list "design team frustration," since I had a feeling we needed to take a look at some ideas before we started getting slapped with deadlines. Everyone at home knows me as the Anti-Procrastinator. Procrastination is evil.

Dinner was breaded perch, yum. I think I've had that before! A MIRACLE!

Okay, after dinner was monumental: we went to a building that was not E2! We had a guest speaker, Sally Melville, who was going to talk about creativity. Creativity is such a trite expression, but she made interesting. We went through the fact that power-thinking is okay, but people need time to incubate ideas. The best way to do that was to take some time everyday to do an activity that is physically repetitive and not intellectually taxing, such as walking, washing dishes...or knitting! It turned out that Sally was a best-selling author of knitting books, and she actually brought us each a ball of yarn and our own knitting needles to try our hands at it. I was so excited, but then we began learning, and I just messed my yarn up completely, hehe. Knots are the bane of my existence. People were getting started on scarves, and I was still trying to figure out where the end of my yarn was. I'm such a slow learner.

Somewhere in the talk, Sally also rambled on about sleeping. Of course, we had to look meaningfully at the Shad staff. "What's sleep again?!" Apparently, the body needs only three or four hours of sleep to be fully rested, and the rest is more for psychological fulfillment. And dreams are important--you can find answers to engineering problems in them! Well, that just ruins dreams for me for the next twenty years...

We returned to Grebel to finish up the tiles for House Four:

Tracy is obsessed with anime and she likes Chinese music. Yes, I would find out a lot about Jay Chou in the coming weeks...
Cecilia is crazy good at piano and also likes anime
Sam...um...likes skiing... Hehe.
Loheetha plays Indian violin and likes maths.
Nicole loves Usher, dancing, and The Simple Life.
Chandrahas is from PWC in St. John's! Woot! Keep on representin'!
Jonathan likes cars. He doesn't have the one on his tile, but has one like it.
Frank is so Brit-ish! I'm obsessed with Britain, so this was very interesting to me. WANKER!
Michael is from London (Ontario) and quite tall as well.. (Grumble).
Jimmy...is, well, Jimmy. He loves maths and loves his science camps and told us about them and I mean ALL about them...he was going to tell us all about his best camp...but then Steph Schmitke had to get him off the platform...
Basilia drove to Shad from Montreal. She goes to a girls school and is very involved in sports.
Emry is a super-talented dancer. She does all types and really well, as we saw on Music Night.

An empty bed betrays you...
You lie awake and wonder what went wrong.

(You know, I pronounced Pilate--"pi-la-tee" for a long time. I think it sounds cooler... I mean, if I had to name myself after an exercise program or a Roman authority...)

I wore my headphones to bed every night. It's the only thing that guarantees I go to sleep. I busted the batteries because I left them going everyday for seven hours, but they were rechargeable so it wasn't a big deal. I have to say that Radiohead is beautiful at night... Oh yeah, I found out that Sam is really into Radiohead (you know, when he's not skiing)--wicked. His favorite album is Pablo Honey followed by OK Computer. That's cool; everyone else I know hates Pablo Honey. Music became really important for me at Shad. Sometimes, I felt weird or crazy or sad and it was really nice to have a way out.

I could say to myself: ceci n'est pas un mal lit.

July 7th: I don't know why I keep on thinking that something's bound to go wrong...

Mon, 09 Aug 2004 04:55:45 GMT

Don't worry baby
Everything will be alright...

...[because] We don't need no education.

July 7th

By Wedneday, I was doing maths in the mornings as well, after the alarm clock did its thing. I think I drove Steph crazy. We certainly made an interesting pair: the precocious, operatic, fourteen-year-old, and the girl who gets no sleep because maths is all she does...

Breakfast was French toast. Mmm. I should elucidate now that my life has always been very traditionally Chinese, so besides my encounters with rice and the potpourri of possible ways to fry an eggplant, I am not exactly a food connoisseur. I had never, ever had French toast before. It had remained in my mind only as what people in books like Sweet Valley Twins had for breakfast. Me, I'd had ten years of cornflakes (the bane of my existence and unfortunately, the one my mom keeps purchasing) and xi fan (watery rice, is the literal translation). I worshipped the food at Grebel.

The first presentation of the day at E2 was on the ABCs of group work. It's funny; despite constantly throwing it in our faces, modern education rarely promotes how it should be done. I was enlightened that we were able to identify some common problems, such as excessive ardour, loudness, passive group members, and lack of documentation. It also kind of sent us on a guilt trip, since the hysterics that had permeated the activities of the previous day were adduced by each house's P.A.

The next session was conducted by a guest speaker--"User-Friendly Design" was its appellation. The main idea was that designers are not users and users are not designers, so lack of research and feedback spells big trouble and in some cases, hilarity. We performed an exercise to demonstrate the importance of affordances: each house had five minutes to concieve a design using our bodies that one of the staff would have to figure out how to work. I was being stunned (as usual) so I didn't figure out we were doing a massage machine until we were on our knees positioned like we were a twelve-piece drum band. This was twice as funny because one of the houses had already independently come up with the same thing... Later, we were also treated to a look at some examples of good and bad designs:

good: Urinals with a tiny picture of a fly etched in a strategic postion...to reduce spillage.
bad: The mop sink in an establishment that all the patrons mistook for an avant-garde urinal.

Yes, we had urinals on the brain that day.

Lunch was chicken nuggets and rice. It was good, but tasted like instant rice...like Uncle Ben's. Chinese rice is way cooler.

After lunch, it was Mini Project time at Grebel. We were given the task of designing something to improve travel experiences, building a prototype, and then presenting formally our design process to the staff--"Half fun, Will Travel." I had gotten to know the rest of the Yellow design team--Garrett, Jen, Basilia, Ted, Beth, Teddy, and Sam--while exchanging curses during Helium Stick at the ice-breakers, but this was our first real project together. I was interested to see how it would gel, and whether or not emergency medical assistance and/or censors would need to be on hand for the next four weeks.

In our design room, we brainstormed. Almost everyone had arrived at Shad by air, so we liked something in that direction. Problem ideas, anyone? "Well, my back hurt." Okay, let's do an oversized comfy chair... "It should have everything." Okay, let's add a cupholder. "More. It's gotta be the best damn chair ever." Okay, a fan...lamp, shade, etc. if need be. "Wicked. Let's build it." Okay, where the hell are we going to get a chair?!

So we spent the next two hours trying to build the chair...because never mind the fixings; we had no chair! It was suggested that we could just take one of the feeble wooden chairs in our design room, but we decided the prototype had to be true to life. "I mean, what are we going to say? 'Here's a chair. Now just imagine that it's really comfy, okay?'" Hence, we went the way of the burglar, filching four cushions from the common room couches and masking taping them to a file cabinet (donated by our trusty design room). It fell apart, so we wrapped string all over it too. "It looks ugly. Like a hairball." So we threw the blanket from Beth's bed over it... "Um...the back fell off." So the boys wired a mysterious contraption together from the white memo trays in our room and slapped it on the back of the file cabinet. "Whoa, that looks like shit... Well, we'll just make sure nobody sits on it."

But we figured that we'd have to demonstrate, so we picked Basilia to sit on it, since she looked the lightest.

All the while, I was sitting on a chair that actually looked safe, doing up documentation. Beth was constructing a cupholder for the chair, padding half of an ice cream container with a piece of a plastic poncho and affixing two steel rods (stolen from the tables in our room) to the sides. "That is an awesome cupholder," I pronounced, when she was finished. "Well, whatever happens with um...that...we've got the cupholder!" she said cheerily. We somehow managed to jab it into one of the armrests of our "chair." On the other armrest, we jammed in another foam-blade fan that was taped to an umbrella.

When it was time for presentations... "Crap, does it fit through the door?!" So we took the chair apart and carried it in pieces downstairs, where it was hurriedly reassembled. I think I was panicking by then, since the staff looked extremely grim in the front row. I watched another group bring in a chair too, but it was decked out with so many different things...looked so wicked. "Ours sucks," was the general consensus within our group.

However, when the presentations started, things took a different turn. The other five design teams either did skits advertising their product or solved too many problems with one design. They got slammed by the staff. I also learned the term "K-Tel" from Ed, meaning "this sucks. you're solving one problem!" All the while, I was poring over Basilia's notes and the documentation I did up, crossing out and fixing things so that we could pretend we did not ever have all that fancy stuff on our chair. I whispered to Garrett when we went up to take the damn fan off, but nobody heard. Luckily for us, all the other fixings were removed and the monochromatic look of Beth's blanket made the chair look very simple. We did a very stiff, straightforward, reading-off-the-page presentation, and I made sure that the cupholder became the main idea. I had changed the problem so it was now that during a flight, cupholders are on the folding trays, which are bulky and restrict movement. The others then said stuff about comfort and features, but I interjected that "most importantly, we have the cupholder..." It was amusing; all the staff were perfectly aware that we had gone K-Tel (and pointed out the fan artifact), but commended us on learning from the mistakes of the other groups in a span of about twenty minutes. Score one for the Yellow team.

Beth remarked ironically, "What did I tell ya? We've got the cupholder!"

"From now on, that cupholder is our offical team mascot. Keep it simple!" Thus, the Cupholder Principle was born.

Recreation. No, not Ultimate Frisbee. Pool noodles!! Yes, watched over by Stu and Julie, we all grabbed noodles and ran around playing tag. I got completely crushed by Steph Schmitke. But that got boring, so we also did a strange game in which we pretended to be Jedis in a circle and challenged people to duels in the middle. Chad was a monster at this. I think we also played a fruit salad type game, during which Angela and I crashed into each other really, really hard. We bowed out of the game in pain.

Let's talk dinner. Oh wow. Lasagna. Another thing I had never eaten before. Somebody pinch me. I totally get Garfield's addiction now. My mom is going to think I've become even more of a banana than ever.

After dinner was a time to be scared. We were going to the Great Hall to get briefed on the major design project I had heard so much about. We might still have been hyper coming in, because one of the staff said,"I heard they were beaning each other with pool noodles this afternoon." Haha, it sounded so funny that way. So obviously, the senior staff had little input on our recreation.

The session was quite monotonous. The staff went around, following Chad's careful system, doling out sheets of project guidelines. Apparently, our theme for 2004 was to design a component to assist Canadian students in an emergency situation. I almost cried...it sounded so boring. Ah well. I've always loved to design (just don't call it "engineering", dude). And it's close to entrepreneurship, which I've always wanted, but never had the guts to do. Yellow design team, I decided, was so gonna kick butt. Oh yeah, and I was doing calculus the whole time Ed was talking...

I had a horrible sense of foreboding about the project. Especially when they mentioned "budget" and "power tools." I later found out that most of my nightmares were destined to come true ;)

More Tiles! Welcome to House 3:

Alvin plays the violin, is super "cool," and has eclectic musical tastes (French rap!!)
Jordan's tile is pink...haha. He's traveled the world. Loves that Calgary Stampede.
Antina is a badminton freak. She had to saw off the end of her raquet to get past airport security with the tile.
Chen is a genius, and is really involved in her community as well :)
Billy draws like something amazing. He's also very tall.
Teddy is very down-to-earth like his name implies.
Bogdan is nineteen and of Romanian descent.
Sarah goes to Sacred Heart in Halifax!! I remember that school!
Danielle is a vibrant personality, who dances and laughs her way through life.
Eileen is from Calgary and an IB kid. Has the prettiest smile.
Jennifer is a true Floridian, and as I found out, is awesome to hang out with.
David is from Surrey. He's very, very tall. Hell, I think the only person who's not a tall Asian here is me!

Ate snack. Was anti-social (I can't help it!). Did math. Got forced to go to sleep again.

July 6th: I was there when you were young and strong and perverted...

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 18:58:25 GMT

...and everything that makes a young man a star.

July 6th

I wanted to go home quite badly. I don't remember why, because I've since grown to absolutely love Shad, but I'm sure it was valid. Maybe I felt too quiet and shy--honestly, the whole first week, I thought I was going to puke my guts up... Now that I'm home, I would give anything, anything to be back. I hope that I stopped being "The Ice Queen," as Eiston had quipped (because "shuang" in Chinese means "frost" and I seemed kind of loner-ish), in the subsequent weeks.

Day three of Shad found us up to our ears in lectures. E2 became extremely familiar, as we trudged back and forth to learn about how to generate ideas ("Catch a lot of fish and throw back all the little ones"), define problems, find the "next" right answer, tolerate ambiguity, be willing to fail, and cultivate a sense of humour. I noted to myself that it sounded a lot like my Theory of Knowledge class, where Mr. Quigley spends all his time ranting about "lateral thinking" and "Is this really a table?" It would, however, be the foundation of the summer in the long run.

The best thing was definitely the bit about Applied Whining; that is, engineers see problems, get pissed, and then do something about them (for better or for worse). At this point, I still had no idea that Shad Valley was so engineering-based (I mean, my mom thought I'd applied for maths camp!), so I was kind of confused. However, our first exercise was to find things wrong with the University of Waterloo, and the floodgates opened...like so...

depressing paint colours
scattered mulch
offending butts caused by water fountains
dangerous approaches to Dana Porter library
dead animals in pond
dark showers
posts in the middle of steps (apparently, Dan ran into one)
campus maps are unreadable
crows in the morning ("caw caw!")
goose droppings
architecture sucks (great choice of words from Parisa)

The afternoon was punctuated by more lectures at E2 on (gasp) criteria, constraints, and choosing solutions to design problems.

goal: what we think when we think we know what we know...
criterion: a quantitative condition that must be met before an engineer snaps out of "we're screwed" - ness.
constraint: restrictions that are there and you can't do anything about it, although in general engineers write them in their logbooks and promptly forget about them... In other words: "Crap! We forgot about gravity!"

I was about to nod off, but then Chad bounded up and told us we had to get ready for Music Night. He asked for everyone who could play an instrument to stand up at the front. I've played piano since I was nine and violin since I was eight, but I'm really bad at both of them (to the point that my mom told me I should leave my violin at home), so I stayed glued to my chair. However, so many people ended up going up that Chad announced everyone had to do something--each group had to come up with their own musical act for the evening. To this day, I believe it was planned. In my group, we had like five piano players. I felt kind of bad, since some others had zero piano players.

But there was no time to feel bad. It was time for rec! Ultimate Frisbee! I hadn't played that since grade eight, but it was a lot of fun. Sweaty fun. I even managed to assist on a score. When we were finished, I was famished. I made a beeline for the food at dinner.

Our music group decided to sit together at dinner to figure out our act. We decided to sing something, but didn't know what song to do. I chimed in with the lists of songs I could play on piano, and we crazily chose My Heart Will Go On, since everyone knew the words. I ambled off by myself to practise it in one of the practise rooms. That song had been my mom's favorite for years, so I could play it with my eyes closed. The others finished dinner and trickled in as well. Frank came in and tried to make off with my copy of On My Own... So we practised singing the song with the piano--it was great, but we wanted to spice it up. "How about some theater?" put in some enterprising soul. "Dan can be Jack and Doug can be Rose."

"Oh, oh!" I exclaimed, noticing that Dan was wearing his bathrobe. "Doug can wear the robe and it can be like that scene after Jack finishes drawing Rose!" I think everybody collapsed with laughter. So the plan became that Dan and Doug would pantomime around the stage, then suddenly they'd run towards each other and Dan would pick Doug up and spin him around... Plus, we added the sunset scene where Rose is like, "I'm flying! Jack, I'm flying!" Best thing ever. However, we also wanted another song to sing, so Cathy got out her trusty book of guitar chords, and we found With A Little Help My Friends BY THE BEATLES! Everyone knows I love the Beatles.

"What would you do if I sang out of tune, would you stand up and walk out on me?
Lend me your ears, and I'll sing you a song, and I'll try not to sing out of key
Mmm, I get by with a little help from my friends..."

Everything was set by five to seven, and we hurried to the Great Hall, so as not to be out of sync with Shad Time.

As fate would have it, we were up first. We did a rousing rendition of With A Little Help..., with great playing from Cathy and Eiston. Then My Heart Will Go On filled the room, as simultaneously, so did the laughter. Spin him around again, Dan! I was laughing so hard I could barely play. I thought we did brilliant.

Following that the other groups had their turns. We were treated to Jimmy's interesting speech and rendition of Eidelweiss, tap dancing by Emery, and so much more stuff I can't remember. Then we had a free-for-all: whoever wanted to play could. Again, there were lots of memorable acts, including Stephanie Kim and Eiston's version of Heart and Soul x 100000000000, Sam piano piece ("It's the only one I know how to play"), Winnie and Victoria on the flute, Loheetha's Indian violin, Cathy's Your Still The One (watch out, Shania! Simply Cathy is catching on!)... As well, the staff got up and did the Shad 2004 song, simply the best song ever. No one is calling us geeks, indeed. If anything, Shad is a celebration of geekdom.

The day was finished with another round of tiles. It was house two's turn. I was really messed-up by then and went up before my time, hehe. This is what I learned:

Ted likes to take apart stuff. I saw this a lot in our design group too...
Crap. I feel bad. I don't remember what Jon said. I must have passed out again.
Angela wears glasses, but she's not on her tile picture. Actually, the tile picture doesn't look like her so it's fine to be confused, okay?
Amanda fences! In the non-picket-fence sort of way...
Dan has his tile on a piece of notebook paper. HE HAS ALL THE BEATLES ALBUMS ON VINYL. I must break into his house.
Winnie is from Penticton and loooooooves tennis.
Victoria is going into grade eleven. Plays soccer.
Eiston has a lot of nicknames: Ice, Iceberg, Einstein, Iced Tea...
Alex is sick of people commenting on how he looks too young to be sixteen
Eva is multi-dimensional...loves to read...
Stephanie Wong is into sports and adores Simple Plan

My own tile was not that creative. I just copied the logo I had designed for my website, Floating Pi, and mapped out a board game border of what I liked around it. So everyone found out that I love the Beatles and Oasis, I'm in love with a dead guy (George Harrison), I'm addicted to maths, and I have a thing for coffee.

Snack plus sleep equals good.

I probably did calculus before I went to bed. Steph always had to yell at me to go to sleep. I wanted to be a good sport, so I always went to bed by 11:30 pm. But yeah. I did maths almost every night during Shad Valley.

July 5th: Haven't you always wanted a mon-key?!

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 05:55:15 GMT

July 5th

I woke up at 6:00 am to both mine and Steph's alarm clocks. I was vaguely pissed, for even IB Biology had only required me to get up at 7:00 am. Kind of dumb; wasn't I the one who set the alarm in the first place? Steph's alarm clock seems to be prone to changing volumes for no reason...odd. I made my sleeping bag and other random things. I admired the view from our window, which was of the back lawn of the college over the patio so that we could also see down the hill. This was certainly not Newfoundland. I felt a little flip in my stomach.

Breakfast at Shad was like wow. There was a hot dish, at least ten different types of cereal, and practically unlimited milk (chocolate and white). The food at Grebel alone is worth the cost of tuition. I'd previously had giddy visions of mystery meat and runny gravy. Why was I ever worried??

After the ceremonial stomach-stuffing, everyone met outside on the lawn and we had our first count-off. We learned there was a record. We decided to beat it. I decided we were nuts. Subsequently, Chad took us on our first hike to E2, one of the engineering buildings. Checking my schedule, I noted that it was mini-projects for the morning. Of course, I had no idea what to expect...

At E2, we got into our houses. I was in house two. We're definitely an interesting bunch, and I say that with utmost sincerity. Each house was given a sheet of paper encrypted with what looked to be Morse Code and a duffle bag of random stuff. As Linda later said, "We went to the dollar store and said, 'Yup, this looks like something they can use.'" Our house had the brains to figure out we had to build something, but what? We began by noting that we knew what S.O.S. was in Morse Code, and from there, we worked our way outwards, like cryptogram. I felt kind of useless for a while, since everyone was crowding around the papers and I wasn't really contributing (being at a mere 5' 1''). Oh well. Twelve people and Morse Code. What could I have expected?

We eventually cracked the code. It turned out we were agents on a spy mission and a colleague, Georgio, was in trouble. He was being pursued and needed to cross a fifteen-meter reflecting pool with his only supplies being what was in the duffle bag. Our mission was to design a structure to aid him. "Who's Georgio?" I asked ingeniusly. In reply, Paul McKone, one of the senior staff, brought us...a stuffed monkey. "Ladies and gentlemen, meet Georgio." I nearly died of laughter. Then we got to work and it became less funny.

We agreed that a boat was the logical thing to design. It was the only thing we agreed on. The thing is, when twelve people so accustomed to being leaders are pushed together, personalities clash. It was clear in house two that some people were super-excited (read: Dan, Eiston, Ted). Therefore, this was my signal to become Shuang the Introvert...

So we spent a good two hours sparring over whether we should use a Pringles can or an umbrella or a Coca-Cola bottle for the body of the boat. We also dug out one of those battery-powered, foam-blade fans that the group decided could work underwater as a motor. I thought it was a great idea--we even tested it in an ice cream container full of water and got the whole table soaked. See, at this point, if not for the paper towels down the hall, Georgio could have been dead before ever hitting the water... But then, just as the Pringles can, too, had been finalized, Paul said helpfully, "You know, you can barter among yourselves..." Bad idea, Paul. Suddenly, we were inundated with requests. In one of the craziest scenarios, we were offered a second fan (I could just see Dan's eyes glazing over) for our ruler. During the exchange, however, we realized: "Hey! Where are the batteries?! You thought you could cheat us, didn't you?" I was probably rolling in the aisles by then (in a, you know, introverted way...), especially after it was pointed out to us that no one said the whole thing was a competition.

"We SHARE at Shad" being Paul's solution to Shad discrepancies, George Bush, and cancer.

Anyway, after procuring two of everything, we finally built the stupid boat. It was nice. Kind of plasticine-y, but nice. I vaguely heard Georgio praying for the preservation of his dryness...

We took our prototype outside to the "reflecting pool" to test. It floated. We cheered. It moved. We cheered again. "Okay, now take it out before it blows up or something...!!"

Inside, I compiled my resevoir of sketches and wrote evaluation/conclusion for our design. I later found out we didn't need it. I abominate that kind of stuff.

After lunch, the staff threw us for a loop--yes, in addition to sarcastic remarks, they were quite capable of tossing loops of various sizes. We weren't going to test our prototypes. We were going to build each other's prototypes from the documentation only and then test them. Our house received the documentation of the team whose task was to design a component to take a picture of something three meters above a certain point. The design seemed to be of a periscope with bendy sticks attached. At this point, I felt the effects of no sleep (well, not enough sleep)... I think I passed out because when I woke up, the periscope was built. I hoped that being able to follow directions portended good things for house two...

Then came the dreaded testing. Out we marched into the vestibule, and first up was the device to deliver a bug between Paul's legs, which did the trick but didn't have the bug turned on. Similar difficulties came with our prototype--we managed to take the picture, but only after we realized that the camera wasn't on. This was followed by testing of the structure to remove a component from a large bottle, which didn't really work even though I thought it was an ingenious design (clay on a stick, anyone?)...a way of thinking that later became Team Yellow's "Cupholder Principle." Then Georgio and boat took the stage, with catastrophic results. Apparently, we should have written in "apply A LOT A LOT of clay" in the assembly instructions, since as soon as Georgio hit the water, the boat began unraveling. So poor Georgio drowned. Honestly, I'd never felt so close to a monkey in my life...

But that wasn't the end. After the staff ripped apart our designs in the classroom, we trooped out to see if the original Santa Georgio (as Dan called it) built by house two, could fare any better. Personally, I had complete faith; our clay was smothered all over the boat. It was funny though--as we delightedly watched, Georgio (another Georgio--Paul seems to have lots) made it across the reflecting pool...very...very...slowly... I was then glad we had done bartering. If this was the speed with two motors, imagine how it would have been with only one! I recall that time to have hosted my first real sense of contentment. The previous moments, I had been either tired, cranky, hostile, cynical, or homesick. I guess monkeys (both human and stuffed) have that effect on me.

We went back in. I lost my eraser and then found it, something I ended up doing a lot at Shad. On the blackboard back were both the Georgios. On top was "Georgio the dead"; on bottom was "Georgio the dry." I found it immensely adorable.

What came next was an interesting scenario called "4 On Design." In a pseudo-play, Linda, Ed, Paul, and Peter got up in front of the Shads and ran through the design process. The problem: can't dry laundry in Grebel rooms. After a lot of brainstorming, they came up with criteria and constraints, and a few off-the-wall solutions, including a hammock (??)... Then Paul pretended to go build the prototype, and in one of my favorite moments at Shad, reappeared with a monstrosity like a fence junction. "What is that??!!" cried the other staff, and proceeded to reject it. Paul blinked innocently--"But it folds! It's cool! Look, it's got BEVELS!" I wasn't exactly sure what a bevel was, but I laughed like crazy.

Stu then organized a campus scavenger hunt, apparently so we could find our way around UW. I guess it didn't work, because I don't remember a thing about it, except for visiting the girl's washroom to find a phone number for a clue and yelling back to Ted, " You can't come in, okay?"

The evening got off to a boring start. We got to hear rules, rules, and more rules...about Shad, Grebel...snore. You see, I love rules, but not when they have to be explained. Usually, rules are self-evident to me and I think explaining them in detail is simply making it clearer to rulebreakers just how to go about doing what they do best. I know that doesn't make sense. One good thing came out of the meeting though--I discovered there were music practise rooms. It was blatant from the first day that I was horrible compared to the music virtuosos at Shad, but it cheered me to know there were pianos just waiting to be touched. I also discovered that there was a laundry room. I made a note to avoid that room at all costs.

The rules meeting was followed by house meetings. House two filed into the games room and did quick introductions. Our P.A. was Kim Paradis, who seemed very interesting. Actually, I think "House Meetings" was just another way of saying "More Rules...But With A Smaller Teacher-To-Student Ratio." I'm not quite sure what we accomplished.

At 9:00 pm, we began presentations of the 20 by 20 tiles the Shads had been told to prepare. This day was for house one and I found it an amusing session. Here's what I learned:

Jaye is from Barbados!! Wicked. She's also an amazing drawer.
Garrett hails from Lower Sackville, a municipality of Halifax, where I left my heart a while back. He's Acadian...and then I realized Aucoin was one of the surnames I had to memorize for grade seven French...shudder.
Stephanie Chen is my roommate. She forgot her tile at home, but described it. Talented singer, amazing vocabulary.
Beth is from Fort St. John, not St. John's! She loves country music and is laid-back and mellow.
Daniel Dent is a computer genius with his own company. Wow. And apparently, a fine eye for ESM etiquette.
Cathy loves playing guitar and writing songs. Loves her family.
Parisa is an aggressive driver!! Baby, you can drive my car...
Fraser...plays the piano...and I don't remember...maybe he liked skiing? Yeah, always a safe guess...
Doug is known as the guy who usually smiles. That's an awesome rep.
Stephanie Kim has actually played at Carnegie Hall. Amazing.
Kerry hates it when people try to rhyme stuff with her name.
Adwait's parents created the perfect human being...namely, him. Hehe.

Fun times. Additionally, this was the beginning of me feeling talentless. My mom always said I tried too hard to be good at everything and ended up being good at nothing in particular. But I was excited to be hanging out with all these brilliant individuals. It looked like Shad would be wicked time.

Snack was served by house one. I was glad to be in house two. I decided I needed to keep my mouth from hanging open by stuffing it with food.

In our room, I passed out on my pillow, as per the plan I'd formulated at 6:00 am.

July 4th: But don't you lose sight of me now.

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 05:17:19 GMT

It's funny.

All my life, I've waited for a monumental epoch that would irrevocably alter everything.

I think I found it. It's over.

I applied for a program called Shad Valley after hearing a presentation by Ricardo Le, who had gone to England with Shad Queen's the year before. The powerpoint presentation wasn't particularly well done, nor was Ricardo particularly entertaining, but for a brief moment, I saw that this was an opportunity to do something with myself. I had spent my last summer doing precalculus and baby-sitting my sister. It was the next logical step to do calculus this summer... But suddenly, Shad made a lot more sense than maths, which was vaguely perturbing.

The competition for Shad initially looked stiff. My whole IB class seemed to be applying. And each seemed more holistic than the last. I had to congratulate IBO on that. Yet in the end, it was only I who was enamored of this program to such a degree as to not forget about it in the hodgepodge of junior year at Holy Heart. The five copies of my application were shipped off, and I spent Christmas biting my nails in suspense. So to speak...I don't have anything worth biting...

In February, I received a large white envelope in the mail. My first large white envelope. Like the ones people get accepted into Harvard through. I was ecstatic. I was ready to shout it all over Bluekaffee, but then my parents had conniptions over the tuition and refused to let me go. As I recall, I wept quite a bit. In my mother's opinion, I could have all the large white envelopes I wanted once I graduated... So I ignored Shad and Cheryl Thompson for a month. I think I was extremely bitter, or at least exasperated that I had wasted all that time writing the application.

Out of the blue, in April, they offered me a full scholarship. Then my mom had to me go. That's when I had a feeling the summer was going to be something very, very different.

I was right. Obviously, or what would have been the point of such a leading sentence? So it began on July 4th. I had just turned sixteen five days before, and even now, I still believe that I wil remember Shad as the turning point of my life.

This is on the one, a subjective expostulation, and on the other, as much of the truth as I can understand of it.

July 4th

After staying up into the wee hours of the morning talking to my friend Calculus, I awoke at 5:00 am for my flight to Shad. Sleepy, apprehensive, and about to throw up, it made for a somewhat somber breakfast. Mom, however, bustled about and whipped up a pan of friend dumplings for me, which I promptly emptied into my lunch container and deposited in my backpack. The plan was that Dad would bring me to the airport and Mom would wave feebly from the porch. Yeah, everything went according to plan: we hugged, she waved, we said goodbye, Dad and I drove off (not, of course, implying that I was driving. Cars are huge weapons to me).

The St. John's airport was...normal. It's like, in retrospect, the T2 at Pearson, except more Arcadian. As I stepped out from the car, I couldn't help thinking that it was strange to be going inside for the first time since I arrived in Newfoundland over two years ago. I had seen Dad leave for exotic lands so many times from my perennial shotgun seat in the car...it was finally my turn.

We trundled up to the AC counter. I felt like such a tourist in my own city. Here, I got slapped with my less-than-auspicious commencement to the journey-- The lady asked if I was aware of lahdedahdedah (standard procedure) and of course my dad said yes, but she just looked at us sternly and said, "SHE has to say it." I had never been offered, or rather, in this case, adjured, to have such a quantity of independence in my life. I was also scared to death of her. Freaky lady.

Dad and I ambled upstairs to the metal detectors, where I manifested more of my awful greenness by almost sprinting through and having to be yanked by the collar back to my dad, who obviously, wasn't allowed to go any farther. After I had tended to my neck, we parted and I realized in a wave of panic that if I didn't get a move on, the plane would leave and Mom would give me heck. Hurriedly flashing my boarding pass and student ID, I ran through the gate.

Inside the plane, I was too weak to put my stupid suitcase up. Either that or too short. (Loheetha, the hazards of being tall, indeed!) Well, at least in my aggregated travels, I've found that in such times of need and humiliation, there is always a nice strong man behind you in line to demonstrate his muscle power by launching the bag into its correct place with one hand. Such was the case, and I was given pardon to locate my seat. I didn't get lost doing that. Then the plane took off and my stomach lurched and my ears popped and I hoped hard that I'd brought Abbey Road with me. There are moments in one's life during which only George Harrison can alleviate one's suffering. George had gotten me through final exams...what was a plane compared to IB?! So as soon as the seatbelt sign went off, I fished out my discman that I had just gotten for my birthday and popped in "Beatles/Oasis."

Liam is so hot.

Sorry, I had to say it. He's a sleazebag, but it's true.

I listened to Here Comes The Sun a lot. It's always held a special place because (1) George wrote it (2) It's on Abbey Road (3) The acoustic guitar is brilliant (4) It's so sunny and beautiful and makes me want to cry. The flight was smooth, until we hit turbulence. Wow. That was a very redundant sentence. Anyway, guess where I was? Yep, lavatory. Fun times. Then I heard: we are now beginning descent...and literally bolted. This time, I did get lost. I spent a while looking for my seat. And my ego, which by that time was smeared all over the nice first-class upholstery.

I got to Pearson intact, or sort of. I got told off by a lady at the washrooms. Then I spent an hour waiting for my stupid suitcase. Then I got lost looking for Airways Transit. I went up the elevator so many times... How did I not see that there was a hidden corridor on the ground floor, grumble. I eventually found it, and promptly got laughed at by my driver and the clerk. "Told you I'd have a customer for ya," the clerk remarked after he'd finished laughing. Good thing my ears were still clogged from the flight.

The ride to Conrad Grebel College was uneventful. The driver tried to make conversation, but I'm a dull sort of person, so he just gave up. Our conversation consisted of:

"So where are you going?"
"Shad Valley."
"What the hell is that."
"A program."
"Oh."
"Yup."
"Well, this is the Niagara Escarpment."
"Uh-huh."
Silence.

We got to the college in forty-five minutes. I'm surprised the radar guns we passed hadn't pinned the driver down. Cecilia later theorized that drivers get more money for driving more people, so he wanted to dispose of me as quickly as possible and hunt for more profitable people to talk about escarpments with. Subsequently, I was left alone on the front steps of Grebel.

The first people I met were Ed Jernigan, the program director, Chad Schmitke, a P.A., and another guy who I think is Irish and whose name I forgot. He shall from now on be referred to as Paddy. So Ed carried my behemoth suitcase to my room, Chad smiled wide and reminded me of a tour in fifteen minutes, and Paddy sat in a chair. As I waited for the tour, I met a nice girl named Beth Chemlyk from Fort St. John, BC who had arrived the day before. She had a thing for country music and a bulletin board plastered with photos. As we hung out, I also met Parisa Gerami and a funny guy named Eiston Lo ("That guy," said Beth. "His name is like Iceberg or something...?"). Finally, we went out on the aforementioned excursion.

Paddy took all of the early arrivals on a walk to East Side Mario's. I still had that container of dumplings in my backpack, so I wasn't exactly keen on ordering anything. I was there for the experience of being a Shad eating with other Shads. Daniel Dent later commented that that might have seemed rude to the restaurant. Oh well. It's not like the restaurant has any feelings. It was amusing to watch the others eat. A bunch of the girls ordered salads and they were MONSTROUS.

Somewhere along this lunchtime excursion, I believe I told Eiston to "leave me alone." I don't remember why, but I know I regretted it for a long time after. I was trying hard to adjust to this high-energy, extroverted atmosphere, and I wasn't really thinking. There were several things I regretted doing at Shad Valley, the major one being that I was quite determined to be introverted for a lot of the first week. To me, this incident counted as mistake number one.

I expected my rommate to be there when I got back to Grebel, but she wasn't. So I unpacked a bit and then went to seek out others. Soon, a bunch of Grebelites had organized a tour and led us around Ring Road. It all went over my head, but on walking I met Victoria Lee, a friendly gal from Winnipeg who had just finished grade ten. Victoria, Doug, and I then went to work on figuring out how to set up a tent on the front lawn. Somehow it stood up and we were rewarded with cold drinks. When this ended, Stephanie Chen had arrived, thus completing our room. We sat on our respective beds and talked for a while, also working on the roommate info papers we had been asked to use.

Dinner was served at 5:30 after everyone had arrived, sign in, gotten keys, gotten black book/binder/tee shirt/nametag. Let's just say I was very impressed by Grebel dining. The food was amazing. Yay for food.

Following dinner, we had ice breakers in the Great Hall with Stu and his sister Julie. It was an onslaught of games, including, but not restricted to: flinchmaster, helium stick, throwing paper clips at a target, fruit salad, spelling words with paper letters, hula-hoop chain, counting to ten in a chain with eyes closed... It was like summer camp for eight-year-olds compressed into two and a half hours.

I called my parents right after from the staff phone. At that point, I felt physically ill and wanted home quite badly. Not that I hadn't had fun; it was just automatic.

Snack was served by the staff. My mouth must have been hanging open. I think it was the first time in my life that I had had organized snack at 10:00 pm. I went to sleep that night dazed and confused...and wondering where the heck my Led Zeppelin cd went...

0: This is the story of a girl...

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 02:50:53 GMT

...who cried a river and drowned the whole world.

{{ How many days in a year
She woke up with hope, but she only found tears
And I can be so insincere
Making her promises never for real
As long as she stands there waiting
Wearing the holes in the soles of her shoes
How many days disappear
When you look in the mirror
...So how do you choose? }}

Once upon a time, there was a naive girl named Shuang, who, after writing a ridiculously long application, became a naive Shad. This is her story.