June 14, 2022: CVS

I attempted to shower with my mask on and brush my teeth with my retainers on. I was very confused for a moment why my teeth brushing felt rather strange.

I told JC this and he compared it to biting his pen with a mask on, and I said that that’s why masks are good for hygiene: you won’t become a squid and start spurting ink out of your mouth when you eat pens.

Classes

The two classes today were Elliptic curves, taught by JM, and Ptrmouitaen by MG (as Po typed on the schedule, which really means permutations).

The elliptic curves class started by wrapping up the generating function stuff from last time and looking at partitions. JM brought up Po and described Po as much-talked-about when he first came to CMU. I found that very amusing because of what Po said about becoming a CMU professor by accident. When I asked him about the disparity, JM was like, “There are some people who are brought to us by God and not by accident” or something 😝.

The second class, MG‘s, was quite fun. One of the questions was the one about 100 prisoners guessing their numbers from 100 boxes (the one involving the cycles). It was fun to watch the others who hadn’t seen it before mulling the question over. There was also a hat problem that was really frustrating and fun. I drew a mean wizard on the board.

After classes was lunch. 

Assembly

Then, there was assembly. JW and I sat at the back of the room during the assembly. At this point, I traded my nametag (which was VivL‘s, or KS‘s, or someone’s) for the nametag that said “LuT” (I don’t remember who had it, though). At the assembly, the T-shirt designs came out. One of them was a bit boring, the first one and fourth one were pretty and based on olympiad problems (ELMO 3 and USAMO 2, respectively), and the second one was amusing. (HM‘s, that’s the fourth one, won. His analysis of the t-shirts was that 1 and 2 were colored so thus bad, and 3 was also colored and boring besides)

I got two shirts, one medium and one small.

Oh, and the timetable was changed so that morning class 2 was 10:40-12:10 (5 min earlier) and afternoon stuff moved to 1:20 (five minutes later) to give us more time to eat (and specifically more time to wait in line for food). 

After the assembly, we all did COVID testing. Apparently (according to Mom), there was one person who tested positive, which she found out because it was some roommate of some child of some parent on WeChat?

CVS

Then, we went to get boba and went to CVS. 

While I was walking with RW, I noticed that the LuT nametag was somewhat broken on the bottom. RW gave me a roll of tape to tape it up and I was like, “But I don’t have scissors!”

 She kind of laughed at me—“Why do you need scissors?”—and then did it for me, taping up the bottom as well as making a tape smiley face. I was very impressed by how well and efficiently she handled the tape, so she mentioned that she used to make a bunch of tape figurines. As in, she’d take a bunch of tape and just crumble it and layer it until it formed a shape. Apparently, she made, like, tape dragons and stuff! She gave it to her teacher because she didn’t know where to put it and it was very high-maintenance, as tape gets dusty quickly and also peels off rather quickly.

We got HM and ZS (maybe it was Zi Song? I don’t really remember) to go to CVS with us since it was off-campus and therefore required staff supervision. Mostly, we wanted bug spray and possibly water balloons (we actually dropped by Entropy, first, a little shop on campus, but, unsurprisingly, there were no bug spray or water balloons). However, because we’re spoiled rich kids (based on our spending habits regarding boba and the like, at least), we decided to get boba at Fuku Tea, first. JW got something with popping boba, which is basically boba that will sort of burst in your mouth when you bite it and you get a mouthful of the sugary juice inside. I thought it sounded interesting, so I got it in some sort of masala chai tea thing. We both got large because large is a lot larger than small and it isn’t that much more expensive. Also, I’ve been gaining increasingly poor habits as MOP goes on.

I think I was surprisingly delighted with it at the first sip, but as the drink went on, it became a bit ugh. I think the masala chai spices were a bit too strong for me, and the popping boba was interesting for the first one but just became sickening by the end. I think the strawberry juice inside was just a bit too sweet.

Anyway, after that, we went to CVS. JW, KS, CH, and FY went with us. While we were there, KS and I each got a bottle of bug spray (which ended up being unwise because soon after we got back, DebL announced that they got a few communal use bottles of bug spray, so I highly doubt I’ll ever use mine). I also got some eye juice (i.e. contact solution. There was also one of the contact lens multi-daily reuse container box things). CH got some makeup, which was cool. JW and FY bought some water balloons. The water balloons were sold in a sort of plastic water jug that can act as a pump by pumping air in until the pressure becomes high, and then letting the water out into a water balloon. JW also bought a dog toy. It was a fuzzy Chinese takeout box with soft baozi inside. The baozi squeaks when you squeeze it, just like RW and DiaL‘s penguins!

I also wanted to get a bunch of hair bows or clips or ribbons in order to give one to each person in singing troupe and force them to wear it during the performance. That would be so funny!

Unfortunately, there was no such mass product being sold there (except a roll of ribbons, which HM persuaded me not to buy).

HM also got some jellybeans, because there was a huge cart of jellybeans they were apparently selling at a lower price because they were planning to throw it all away. While we walked back from CVS to Stever, HM was eating the jellybeans and giving me one every now and then and telling me to guess the color of it based on the taste. I kind of failed at it.

When we got back to Stever, they started juggling the baozi.

In order to juggle the baozi, we had to remove the plastic connector thing that they put on toys. We were all fussing over not having scissors, and then someone sort of just laughed at us and tore the thing out. We were all very in awe.

Around the same time, I also talked to the janitors for a while. The dude janitor was talking about how this is actually his favorite job so far. The kids are nice (enough) and it’s like, just nice?

He thought I was a student at CMU and was asking when I arrived, etc. I had to tell him I was, in fact, just here for the summer.

He talked about wanting his kids to come here because it’s nice.

It was a nice conversation.

Evening

Then we played fish.

Then we had dinner.

At dinner (or, well, after we’d finished eating and most people had left but we just kept sitting in that garage at Resnik), we (VH, me, EW, RW, some others?) decided to do some singing. At first, we sang some singing troupe songs (My Heart Will Go On, Defying Gravity), but then, we got bored and some other boys started rickrolling on the other side of the cafeteria. Obviously, we considered that so unclassy, so we decided to sing louder than them and sing something else, namely, various national anthems.

Very classy, no?

We sang the Chinese anthem, then the US anthem, then the British anthem, then “Do you hear the people sing?”

After dinner, there was supposed to be a seminar, but the seminar was labeled QQ, which means there was no seminar at all. 

Then, we participated in Singing Troupe. Basically, we just tried some new songs.

Po had storytime about what researchers do and how research works, but I didn’t actually go. Instead, I talked to CH!

They also held a ghost meeting today. The ghosts went over and sat on the couches in the lounge area near the front door, and then they all started talking. As I wandered nearby, I discover that JC was talking about me and my mafia activities, so I wandered over and whacked him on the head. But then I decided that I was still annoyed at him, so I whacked him a few more times, and then I wandered off.