Clubis

So much has happened in the past month. Where do I begin? And how?

It all began with a question. An awful, miserable, unanswerable question that is the bane of all philosophy. Uttered often by those depressed and deep with despair, this question is all too often the not-so-figurative death of those weaker minded who ask it. And even to the intellectually strong? The mind is a fragile thing. It doesn’t take much to break one.

The question usually goes something like this: “What’s the point?” or, on a larger scale, “What’s the point of anything?”

It is the bane of happiness and life and, I say again, philosophy, because you could use the question to question philosophy itself. The question creates a sort of circular reasoning in the mind that is impossible to solve, so I went about dealing with it in an ironically “roundabout” way.

Let me note here that I do not intend to sound boastful for dealing with this question, for I have been struggling with it for nearly three months since the death of my sister and subsequent deep depression of my mother. Only yesterday did I find an answer, and it comes down to the following realization:

“There are some things that you shouldn’t think about or try to answer.”

I began to treat the question as if it were not a question at all, for it is not. It’s like a bad habit, and to break it you just have to stop thinking about it and distract yourself with something else, and soon it will go away forever. I call this approach the Bad Habit Theory, which suggests that everything opposed what you would imagine as the “normal” operation of your mind is merely bad habit, and you should deal with it as such.

And it worked, and I’m happy again. And I can talk about it because I’m over it.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to during my rudely unannounced absence. Well, that and trying to finish High School and deciding which College I will attend this fall, in addition to finishing the political philosophy class I’m talking at the local university. What can I say? I’m busy these days. Add this to the pressure of different people inviting me to do things on the same weekend, trying to get a girl to like me, and not letting anyone down when they ask me to do things for them, such as building tournament worthy Magic: The Gathering decks on their limited (but much higher than my own) budgets. You know, typical teenager stuff.

Life is good though. My only regret is that I can’t talk to my mom about anything important because she’s too depressing. It seems mean, but I can’t wait to get out of the house this fall so I don’t have to be constantly surrounded with the ubiquitous melancholy reminders of the day my sister died in my arms.

She’s gone. Yes, it’s awful but you have to move on at some point. It all goes back to what I was saying earlier. Sometimes it’s better not to dwell on things. I don’t think Jill would be upset at all if my Mom tried to push the thought of her out of her mind so she wouldn’t have to cry herself to sleep every night. But that’s just my opinion.

Okay, so now, employing the techniques of Bad Habit Theory, I will stop thinking about everything I said above because that kind of thinking doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s high time to liven things up with a passage from The Po-Zor Newsletter on an altogether unrelated topic: Geeks.

Sector 1 - People
 
Today we will talk about boring people who try to be funny. You’ll want to avoid large groups of these people if you can.

MATH GEEKS

Maybe you know a math geek, or maybe you know someone who isn’t really a geek but loves math anyway. These people are actually math geeks in disguise.

Unfortunately, I know a math geek in the truest sense of the word. He wears glasses and has braces. He always has a stuffy nose, and he has acne. Yes, the whole shebang. Normally it’s okay to know a math geek. They can be very helpful while doing math homework for instance.

You don’t want a math geek who attempts to be funny. They can really cut into your happiness at school. Here’s an example of a conversation I had with a math geek who tried to be funny:

Math Geek: Want to hear something?

Me: Umm…

Math Geek: Did you know that if you subtract the log at the base of six 18x from three log at the base of six 3, and if the answer is one, then x equals 9! He, he, now don’t assume by my excitement that I implied some sort of factorial notation*!

If you don’t know what factorial notation is, you wouldn’t get the joke. Unfortunately, I had some idea of what he was talking about, but I failed to see his humor in it.

I was standing there squeezing my eyebrows together while he’s laughing his head off and I’m stuck looking at his acne and braces from another new angle.

The best thing to do about Math Geeks that try to be funny is to avoid them. The downside of knowing a Math Geek greatly outweighs the benefits. It would be better to do your math homework by yourself anyway, and who would date you if you always hung around with a math geek?

I can think of many, many ways you can make fun of people who hang around with math geeks, but I won’t get into that today. (You can read about stuff like that in my Supervillain Monthly Magazine issues of the Po-Zor Newsletter.) Then again, I probably will make fun of people, but not until after lunch.

*Factorial Notation has to do with using the “!” as a symbol to mean multiplying something a lot of times. For example, 4! means 4×3x2×1. So, 9! means 9×8x7×6x5×4x3×2x1.
CHESS GEEKS

It seems that I’m mostly talking about geeks today, but that’s okay. Geeks make up a majority at Newmarket High, so I’m just going to apply it to all school systems across the country. If you are a geek, don’t take it personally. I have nothing against your people.

Does your school have a chess club? If it does, you almost always have chess geeks. Have you ever read the chess thing in the Sunday paper? It’s something I just glance at after I read my horoscope and peek at the answers to the crossword. I can never understand the chess column because it’s written in some weird language I can’t comprehend. It’s all: Kp3, Ra2, Qb4! I don’t get it, but that’s how chess geeks talk. I sometimes wonder if when they whisper, “Qp5” as I walk by, they are plotting to kill me with a Rook.

Don’t get me wrong; I know how to play chess. But I’m not a geek about it and I don’t know any of their cultic language. I suppose that when they play the game they imagine themselves as the pieces, fighting on a medieval battlefield. I wonder what it’s like to imagine yourself as the castle. How do castles move anyway? Do they sprout legs and walk across the board? What is this game teaching our children anyway? Why isn’t there a parents group protesting it? Why aren’t atheists trying to rename the “bishop” piece? Let’s take a critical look at how to play the game:

How to Play Chess
The goal of chess is to kill the opponent’s king. You can murder him from a frontal assault, angled attack, or you can stab him in the back. You start the game by sending your “pawns” off on kamikaze missions they are doomed to fail. Your “better” pieces consist of the “knight”, the “bishop”, the “castle”, the Queen, and the King. A horse head that can “fly” over the other pieces usually represents the “knight”.

We must note that there are “white” and “black” pieces. These “white” pieces get to go before the “black” ones. Chess players also have this cultic language that only they know how to read, but yet they have bits of their doctrine printed in almost every newspaper in the country! What parent would let their children play a game where pieces change gender when they reach the end of the board, presumably the chess cult’s “paradise”? Yes, when a “pawn” reaches the end of the board it “becomes” a Queen! Why would any parent expose their children to this cultic, racist, violent, bigoted game of fantasy?

Now that we know the trouble with chess geeks, we should probably avoid them. But again, I unfortunately know a chess geek who tries to be funny. He goes:
 
“And he said to move the King’s Pawn two, but then I said, ‘Why move the King’s Pawn when you can check with Qb4!”

I smile slightly, to give the impression that I know exactly what he means. When he said “Qb4!” I giggled inside and wondered if he was implying factorial notation. That’s why knowing Math and Chess geeks at the same time is bad for you.

SCIENCE GEEKS

Science Geeks are probably the least harmful of all geeks. Sometimes they might even seem normal. If you know a Science Geek, you are lucky. There are hours upon hours of possible humor if you know how to talk to them right. Science geeks may be in either the Biology, Chemistry, or Physics fields. The more attributes they have, the more humor you can squeeze out of them.

Here are some fun things to say to science geeks:

1. On the other side of the world, does gravity work the other way?

2. What if there’s a planet somewhere that obeys a completely different set of physical laws?

3. How deep is a black hole?

4. Why don’t we try shaking it?

5. I moved that plant into the sun because it seemed to be wilting, but don’t worry. I moved all the other plants around too so our data would stay the same.

6. An ant is close enough to being a spider to classify it as one, right?

7. What’s one more electron in an atom going to do to anything?

8. I put a little of that blue chemical in to make it look better.

Now you can laugh as hard as you want (on the inside), as the science geek tries to explain to you why something works the way it does. Act confused and ask for more explanation. By the third or fourth round, your geek’s forehead will begin to turn red and his face will scrunch up. The fun can last for hours.

It’s especially good if you have one as your project partner. Then they will feel a need to explain things to you so they won’t fail. You can relax and know that they won’t ask you for your help, and you’ll still get half the credit.

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I hope you enjoyed that.

And now to repost a fresh little article about none other than yours truly concerning a subject 0% of my readership will be expected to be familiar with. I include this not out of vanity, but rather because it’s kind of funny how this guy plays up the whole situation and also because if you do recognize the subject then you might get some sweet deck building ideas.

Going Blue by chaz riley

“May 1st marked the creation of Eric Hadley’s Immobilize 2.0. What’s new? An utter lack of vulnerability. We all remember 1.0, featuring Glare to freeze the opposition and the sheer power of Kodama of the North Tree and Jitte to charge up and trample through to victory… and don’t forget about the Muse/Drinker lock. The clout of this deck is its indiscrimination of threats. Play an 11/11 indestructible trampler? Tap it down. Play a 2/1 wizard? Tap it down. Yet, playing Green/White comes with a hefty price tag: one shot of mass removal too often wins the game for your opponent.

This has left us all in an unremitting state of curiousness, pondering the immortal question: is it possible to get all the benefits of Green/White Glare without the susceptibility to Wrath of God and friends?

“Yes,” Eric said reticently last Thursday at Paperback Bazaar in Somersworth, NH. “Just counter them.”

The plan seems, to use a bit of Hadley’s chic speech, “assuredly logical.” But adding a third color, even with the mana fixing madness of cards like Sakura-Tribe Elder, is a huge gamble.

“No, you don’t understand. I’m going Blue. All Blue.” Eric said with his usual astuteness.

That’s when the seventeen-year-old local favorite told me about a little gem from Urza’s Destiny called Opposition. The card works exactly like Glare of Subdual, boasting the same mana cost and ability, but with the added bonus of being able to tap down a land as well as the “glarific” artifact or creature. Of course, it’s also mono Blue. Moving the colorless Jitte over is no question, and the inclusion of token generators like the amazing Meloku, the Clouded Mirror and a slew of other wizards like Jushi Apprentice, Archivist, Temporal Adept, Azami, Lady of Scrolls, and Patron Wizard incline me to believe that this deck truly cannot be beat.

“Of course I’ll also toss in a few Gifts Ungiven,” Eric casually noted, “and I might be able to generate a lock with Zur’s Weirding or Intruder Alarm.”

What will he miss most from 1.0?

“Probably Seedborn Muse and Loxodon Hierarch. Both of those cards are insanely powerful and I’m sad to let them go, but if it means I get to use counterspells then I suppose it’s worth it.”

Glare of Subdual and Opposition… I believe we have discovered Hadley’s quintessential technique. We’re all looking forward to seeing if the new Immobilize appears on any of the Top 8 decklists at upcoming Regionals!”

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So anyway I just thought that was cool. And to answer a previous comment, I’ll be a teacher my whole life, but it will never be my job.

Until next time, just enjoy the simple perfections of life.

–Eric

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.