June 11, 2022: ELMO and K-pop

At 11-12, JX, a grader, took us outside to learn K-pop dance. We went to a very sunny, empty little concrete area to the right of Stever. It was interesting. The people learning were VH, EB, AZ, some of AZ‘s friends, and I. We all did fine, but AZ was trying very hard to get the moves perfect. He was also asking about what the exact beats for every move was. His approach seemed very logic & detail-oriented, which sort of makes sense. He didn’t think he did well, but I think he did quite well.

Then we ate breakfast. Technically, it was brunch, but Resnik was only serving breakfast foods. They only offer two meals on weekends, so there’s a table inside Stever with cereal and fruit snacks and stuff that we can eat on the weekend if we wake early.

After breakfast, we took the ELMO. The ELMO is a test that returning MOPpers wrote and new MOPpers must take. MOPpers are put in teams so that the returners on a team try to coordinate points for the new MOPpers on the ELMO. Teams are chosen by a “fair and judicious equal opportunity team selection test,” according to JC (which he tells me many days in the future, as I have not yet met him as of June 11). I’m on the IZ Fan Club team (because, if you recall, IZ became a sort of “meme of goodness” during Pre-MOP) with newcomers EW, EC, LZ, VT, and I, and returners KS, VivL, IZ, and JW. While newcomers take the ELMO, the returners take the Mock IMO.

Each year, students come up with a new ridiculous acronym for ELMO. This year, ELMO stands for “Elmo Let Me Out.”

Besides the ELMO, there is also the ELSMO. The ELSMO is for those students who call MOP “MOSP.” The ELSMO is just the ELMO formatted really, really poorly. This year, the ELMO was essentially cut into tiny squares and then pieced together randomly and printed.

LR went around asking people what we call this summer camp and, trying to be funny, I said something along the lines of “Mathematical OP… uh… Powerhouse?” LR almost wrote me down as thinking it was “MOSP” because I had four letters and “powerhouse” contains an “s,” but he was nice enough to let it go, so I didn’t have to take the ELSMO.

The graders proctoring us, Turtle and JX, were cutting ELSMO apart and piecing it together correctly. Later, during test review, someone walked past the table containing those tiny pieces of paper. The wind generated by the movement sent all the papers flying. Holden was very sad. 

The ELMO test review was also sad. Very few people understood Luke’s solution. Espen’s solution for the last problem was nice, though.

While the returners started doing MIMO review, I started to go back to Stever. As we crossed the street to the intersection, we decided to go get boba so as to feel better about doing poorly, or something, so EB, VH, and I went to Rose tea cafe. The interior design for Rose tea cafe looks very much like a roadside place in China: green plastered walls with silly posters, mismatched chairs & tables, and the boba cup lids were plastic coverings from some other place with words and fruits on them that had nothing to do with boba at all (like 苹果 and 李).

The only thing missing to complete the picture was for it to be located in a garage: then it really would be just like China.

Anyway, it was pretty good. I had some sort of thing with three different types of boba: some sort of grass jelly, some other type of jelly, and then actual boba. It was good and a bit cheaper than Fuku Tea (now that I’ve spoken at length about Rose Tea’s interior design, I need to talk about Fuku Tea’s interior design. It was really nice and pretty and aesthetic and minimalistic. It did not look like I was in a Chinese roadside shop).

There was a Speshul Assembly at nine outside Tepper. It turned out to be a birthday celebration of everyone’s birthdays during the week. There were, like, five or six people with a birthday this week. It was honestly ridiculous, particularly since many of the birthday people are TAs who can’t technically come near us because they’re not cleared yet.

We got our mafia roles for the live-action mafia game. Essentially, MG‘s organizing a game of mafia where each game day is a day in real life and the mafia must physically find people in order to kill them in the game. However, I will not write down my role while KS is looking over my shoulder (on June fifteenth lol I’m so late at my journal writing).

I went to Po‘s storytime today! (Technically, they’re called “office hours,” but we just all call them “storytime.”) It was great. Po was talking about his experience traveling. He uses United and Delta airlines a lot because they’re both airlines that travel across basically all of America. He’s used United since he was a young and green researcher and had to travel decently often to give talks at universities and generally make himself more known (advertising himself, basically). (His PhD advisor apparently advised him to put aside $10,000 every year for travel expenses). He then started using Delta because Delta gave him a credit card :P.

He also talked about one time when he was going to meet Bill Gates (and the way he just said it so casually was very funny). Bill Gates told Po when he would be free. Po just so happened to have a class to teach right before then. Clearly one does not simply say no to Bill Gates, however, so Po had to scratch his head and figure out some way to get to Bill Gates in time. In the end, he did manage to successfully plot out a plane ticket and get there. Essentially, the moment class ended, he had to rush to the airport and fly overnight. However, with the flight line he plotted, he had a stopover at some airport inbetween. At that point, he could’ve gone to a hotel to rest the night, but he thought that would be too expensive. At the same time, one does not simply meet Bill Gates with no sleep and basically drunk on sleep-deprivation, so instead, what he did was buy an inflatable bed (~$100) and just sleep like a hobo in the airport. Because apparently that’s how one meets Bill Gates 😜

Then, the conversation somehow turned to cattle (precious and otherwise). Essentially, most passengers are hurried onto the plane like cattle, but because Po is a frequent flyer, he’s treated well because he’s precious cattle! They even announce his name on the announcements!

Po always cuts it very close when he’s flying. He often only gets onto the plane a few minutes—or less—before the plane sets flight, and he’s usually the last one on the plane. The flight attendants on planes leaving Pittsburgh often go, “Oh, Po! You made it!”

Two days ago, I discorded Po to ask when VivL‘s birthday is, and after he told me when it was, he told me he’d just caught the plane in less than a minute. wOoOw. 

He described the thought process he goes through for catching flights by doing an example on the San Francisco airport: he needs twenty minutes for the rental car, ten to fifteen to get on the train to the airport (from the rental area), five minutes for security (he has TSA Pre), and the gate closes fifteen minutes before liftoff, so he’d get to the airport about an hour before the flight (with five minutes as bUfFer). 

Okay now KS‘s not here anymore. So. I’M THE MAFIA!! So excited 🙂