The Bus (Continued)

As the vehicle's engine slowly thawed and the bus pulled away from the stop, Lindy began to take in her surroundings. The interior of the bus was similar, for the most part, to the other BPTA buses that contstantly cycled through the city on their seemingly endless routes. It was similar, except for one thing.

"Hey, is that a GPS device?" Lindy asked the driver, glancing at the small screen positioned next to the steering wheel. She was seated too far away to actually see it's contents, but could tell that the driver was referring to it as he drove.
"Nghh." It seemed the driver didn't have much to say on this topic, either.

Lindy shifted in her seat, mildly annoyed by the silent driver, and just beginning to defrost from the cold outside. She wasn't eager to leave the warm safety of the public bus, but she could see that she would soon have to face the icy winds again, as they were rapidly approaching her stop and . In fact, they were approaching a bit too rapidly; the bus didn't appear to be slowing at all.

"Excuse me, mister. I think you just passed my stop!"
"Nghh." Oh God, not this again.
"But I have to get off the bus! I have data at the lab that needs to be collected at exactly 4:30!" She prayed that this idiot driver wouldn't make her so late that she would have to run her experiment all over again.
"Don't worry, it's been taken care of." Lindy was shocked, she had expected another grunt.
"Wait, what?"
"Don't worry, it's been taken care of." He simply repeated himself, a bit incredulous that she had not understood him the first time. Lindy did not respond, she simply stood there with her blue eyes wide and her mouth agape.
"Sit down, Lindy. You've got a bit of a ride still ahead of you."
"Who are you? And how do you know my name?" Lindy asked accusingly. But it seemed that whatever spell had animated the driver for those few moments had already been broken, and his eyes were fixed once more on the road ahead of him.
"Nghh."
Lindy sighed in response.

The Bus

Lindy McAbel made her way to the bus stop slowly, fighting the frigid January winds which whistled loudly and numbed her face with each step. She tucked her head in to her jacket, shielding herself from the chilly blows as she sat down on the bench to wait, hoping that the public transport would arrive quickly and spare her from this misery. She sat for about five minutes, but it felt more like twenty-five, and since moving her hands to glance at her watch would have rendered her head vulnerable, Lindy would never know for sure.

She heaved a sigh of relief as the large vehicle rolled to a stop in front of her. It was the same model and make as the other public transport buses, the same distinctive shade that was somewhere between periwinkle and gray, and in her haste to escape the cold Lindy did not notice that the bus did not bear the standard seal of the Boston Public Transport Authority. In fact, the bus was completely unmarked, and on any other day Lindy would have found this quite disconcerting. But today, she was far too preoccupied with the weather.

"Thank you," she whispered hurridly to the bus driver as she made her way to the back of the big blue bus.
"Nghh." He grunted noncomittally in response. Not much of a talker, this one, Lindy thought to herself as she plopped herself down on one of the many vacant seats. She didn't question the fact that she was the vehicle's only passenger; she knew that four o'clock in the morning was not exactly a peak time for traveling.

A Complex Tale

Meta: This is the introduction to what was going to be a blog-based story; the narrator (Ziv), like me, is an avid blogger - and so the storyline would alternate between standard first-person narration and blog-narration, but with only the blog-narration being available accessible to the other characters in the story. I also wrote this prior to NaNoWriMo 2006, but I abandoned it before it ever really got off the ground.

September 07, 2006

Any girl who knows anything about anything (which immediately discounts a large segment of our population, I’m afraid) knows that every calculus class has to have at least one cute guy in it. Seriously, it’s become such a cliché they even used it in Mean Girls. Yes, I saw Mean Girls, stop giving me that look. Okay, so there’s no way anybody could take that argument seriously (and if you did, I think there’s something seriously wrong with you), but with a little estimation and the Pigeonhole principle it makes a decent amount of sense. Think of it this way, if there are n calculus classes and “All Students Take Calculus” (that’s not just a mnemonic here at MIT, it’s actually true, at least for the freshmen), than so long as the number of cute male freshmen is greater than or equal to n, each freshman girl is virtually guaranteed to have someone to stare at when taking derivatives starts to get dull. Now, if the freshman class has approximately 1000 students, that’s about 500 males, and let’s say about x% of them are cute. So long as x is a reasonable number and you don’t have ridiculously high standards, x% of 500 > n. Q.E.D.

Now, if you turned in a proof like that for 18.100B, you probably wouldn’t get much credit unless your TA had a good sense of humor, but this isn’t 18.100B (Analysis I) – I’m not taking that until next semester. No, I’m taking good old 18.02, that’s Multivariable Calc, for those of you who don’t speak MITese, and I’m loving every minute of it… even when taking derivatives starts to get dull. In short, I’ve found ample evidence in support of my hypothesis.

His name is Connor Wheatley, and he actually lives just down the hall from me, but I never would’ve known it if he hadn’t told me. He’s one of those crazy overachievers who can solve their 8.012 p-set problems in their head while playing a concerto on the violin and rowing a single down the Charles at the same time. In other words, he’s pretty much never in the dorm, and the only time I ever see him is during 18.02 lecture. I don’t know what he’s doing taking 18.02 anyways, you would think someone like him would have advanced standing credit or at least be taking 18.022 (Math for Masochists), but it’s nice to have him around. He’s good to bounce ideas off of.

“Your proof is crap, Ziv.”

“What? What are you talking about, Connor? Everybody knows that when you cross two perpendicular vectors the result is zero.” Well, okay, not everybody. But Connor wasn’t everybody, and he of all people should’ve known that.

“No, not that proof, the one you posted on your blog. You know, about the Pigeonhole Principle.” My blog? Connor found my blog?

Love Story (continued)

Meta: Special thanks to everybody who sat with me in the lounge last night and went through my story over and over again, rehashing all the possibilities for the characters and helping me to cure my writer's block so I could churn out this next paragraph.

Four years later, a heart with the correct set of names mysteriously appeared one Saturday morning carved into the sidewalk directly outside Lobby 7 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Well... perhaps "mysteriously" isn't quite the right word; we certainly knew where it came from, Steve and I. And the rest of the world would probably pass it by without giving it a moment's thought; after all, both Steve and Amanda are relatively common names: so common, in fact, that the laws of probability would strongly favor there being at least three more college age Steve/Amanda pairings in the Boston area.

We had been on our way back from the Luau Party at Zeta Psi, draped with plastic leis and a bit drunk on both love and cheap beer. We were walking hand in hand, arm in arm, down Mass Ave, lost in a world that only the two of us shared and giggling at jokes that nobody had told aloud. That was when we saw the cement, freshly poured and still a bit wet, just the right consistancy for a small act of vandalism. It was something that neither of us would have done while sober, but somehow at the moment it just seemed right. It never occurred to either of us that we might regret it.

Drive (continued)

As she pulled into the cinema parking lot, she glanced at the digital clock display which glowed brightly beneath the spot where the small amulet had hung before. It was a quarter past six, forty-five minutes before she was supposed to meet her friends at the theater, and it was still raining heavily. ka-thunk, drizzle, ka-thunk, drizzle. She sighed. If only Donny had let her drop him off at practice on her way here, then she wouldn't have been so early. But then she remembered a lesson her father had taught her long ago:

"If you are running late, or you get caught at a red light, never worry. Don't try to speed up, or rush through life, because maybe the delay is meant to be. One day, that red light might save you from a car crash or who knows what else."

She wondered if the same thing applied to being early. Was she avoiding some awful, unknown fate by waiting patiently in her car in the local cinema parking lot? The rain was still pouring down around her, and as she shut the engine she pondered this as she watched other movie-goers clamber out of their cars and rush frantically through the parking lot. Why are they in such a hurry? What are they running from? She watched them with a mixed expression of mild interest and pity until the ka-thunk of the wipers quietly dwindled to a stop and her windshield was flooded with rain.

Meta: I'm No Eggers

During my senior year of high school, my English class read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. It was, at times, both heartbreaking and a work of staggering genius, and it's author made no show of being modest. To the contrary, AHWSG, as we came to call it, was a memior that blurred the line between fact and fiction. It was autobiographical in nature, and yet there were things that could not, or at least should not (we hoped not, as readers, for Eggers' sake) be true. But that was alright, because in addition to making no claims towards modesty, Eggers also made no claims toward truth. His stories may have begun in fact, but ultimately ended in fabrication. In essence, he gave himself the license to say whatever he wanted.

And this, in essence, is what I wanted to do here; the problem is that I am no Dave Eggers, and no matter how much I say otherwise, there will be those of you who believe that my work is just a thinly veiled collection of Mary Sues. In fact, the fact that I deny this over and over again has caused me to question it myself. But then I wonder, if these were really all Mary Sues, why wouldn't I just give every story a happy ending?

Ultimately, I think it comes down to what I want, since I am the author, and you are the reader. I don't want to be the characters in my stories; I don't want to be the girl behind the wheel in Drive or the one who crosses campus at midnight in search of love and adventure in my NaNoWriMo piece. Nor do I want to be the slightly strange but mostly harmless boy in Bad News (though nobody has accused me of that one, yet) or one of the chatty middle schoolers in Love Story and The Beginning of Something? All of these characters are a part of me, in some sense - they came out of my heart - but they are not me, and they live out a seperate existance from me.

Now, once again, happy reading!

Love Story

Meta: I wrote this story in October 2006, but with blanks in place of names, so I let a friend fill in the blanks right before I posted. I had some hope that this too would turn out to be a much longer story than it actually became, but alas, I moved on to other (though not necessarily better) things.

I might as well let you know up front, this is going to be a love story. Not the sappy, happily-ever-after kind of love story that you read about as kids, but the real kind; real characters, real feelings, real problems. How do I know they’re real? It’s no mystery, I cheated; too lazy to come up with an original plot and characters, I’ve borrowed heavily from my own experiences and the world around me. So if you’re holding out for that happy ending, forget about it. Real love stories don’t have endings.

I wish I could tell you that I fell in love with him while teaching him how to graph a cardioid function. That would be very fitting, very cute, but also chronologically inaccurate. As an eighth grader, I didn’t have a clue what a cardioid function was – we didn’t cover those until ninth. So the heart that I showed him on my graphing calculator that day was hand-plotted point by point.

I also wish I could tell you I was motivated to graph that heart as a not-so-subtle declaration of my love for him (in eighth grade, a girly crush and true love are seen as one and the same), calculating each point with great precision and care, but in truth I had no motive, and it also wasn’t my graph. My little brother had copied the figure onto my calculator off his homework assignment, and I was eager to present it to the first audience I could find.

“Hey Steve, check this out!”
“A heart? Cool, look at this.” He proffered a big squiggly star on his own TI in exchange.

“Whoa, how’d you graph that?”

“It’s a parametric function, how about yours?”
“Well, each point was plotted individually, see.” I showed him the list, but I was careful to avoid mentioning who had done the actual plotting. A thought tugged briefly at the back of my mind: “why do I want him to think that I did this?” but I shoved it away before it could become fully formed, before I could tack onto the end the words “for him”. And then I had a very bad idea.

“Kachina, look.” I tilted my calculator so that it was out of Steve’s field of vision, but still well within my friend Kachina’s, and I began to slowly type a name within the heart. L-U-K… wait! What was I doing? That should have been S-T-E. The damage had already been done, and for weeks I would regret allowing Steve to believe that my heart (literally) belonged to someone else. But I would not regret that moment, because that was the moment I realized that I had feelings for Steven Brown. Perhaps it was just a girly crush, but who’s to say that’s not the same as true love?

Four years later, a heart with the correct set of names mysteriously appeared one Saturday morning carved into the sidewalk directly outside Lobby 7 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Drive

As she turned the keys in the ignition, she noted that it was dark, far too dark for her liking. There was something not quite right about the whole thing, she could barely see the ground in front of her, and then she realized what was missing.

And let there be light!, she chuckled to herself as see flicked the headlights on and allowed their glow to flood the pavement. No wonder my brother wouldn't get in the car with me, she thought, I wouldn't trust myself either. She was sure that she wouldn't really have driven off into the darkness without her lights on, but she didn't blame Donny for worrying.

It was also far too wet outside for her liking, but there wasn't much she could do about that; turning on the wipers wouldn't stop the rain. They squeaked, too, but that couldn't be helped either. She reached down to pick up a small Chinese amulet that hung from the radio dial, paused for a moment in thought, then kissed it lightly before draping it over the rearview mirror. She then shifted the gear into drive and pulled away into the darkness, accompanied by the rhythmic ka-thunk, ka-thunk of the wipers and the drizzling of the pouring rain.

The Beginning of Something?

Meta: I wrote this in October 2006, in anticipation of NaNoWriMo; there's probably more to this story, but at the same time, I think this scene stands well enough on its own.

“Hmm… what do you think would happen if I just walked over there and asked him out?” I casually wondered aloud to my friends during lunch one cold February day. As eighth-graders, we had alpha status in the lunchroom, yet even during the coldest winter months our group of giggling girls still crowded around the table closest to the thin glass windowpane.

“Wait a sec, girl. You guys aren’t already going out? I totally thought you were,” commented my friend Maureen as she offered me the last of her Dunkaroos. In our class, everybody knew that “going out” was an adjective, not a conjugated verb. Couples didn’t actually go anywhere, they just wandered the hallways holding hands and stood six inches apart at eighth-grade dances during “A Moment Like This”.

“Huh?”

“You’re like, over at his locker every day, and you sit at his lunch table whenever you’re not with us. You’ve told practically the whole school that you like him, everybody knows that he likes you; if that doesn’t make you a couple, what does?”

“Well, don’t I have to ask him or something?”

“That’s what you’re doin’ now, girl. I’ll come with you, moral support.” And with that, she grabbed my hand and began to drag me away from the table. Hah, moral support my ass. Maureen needed to come along so she could report back on all the details to the rest of the gang just in case I refused to spill.

“Hey, Chloe, before you go… you gonna eat those Dunkaroos?” asked my friend Christine.

“Nah, you can have them.” I said, no longer struggling against Maureen.

“Thanks, and uh, good luck.”

“Okay, Chloe, spill. Tell us everything.” Christine and the others immediately demanded as I returned to the table, smiling deliriously less than two minutes later.

“What’s there to tell? He said yes.”

“And then what?”

“What do you mean?” I wondered. There was supposed to be more?

“Well, did he say anything else?”

“Uh, not really.”

“Maureen?”

“I think that was it, girls. I kinda missed it.” Missed it? How could she have missed the most monumental event of my entire life? I had just walked up to Connor Wheatley, the cutest boy in the entire school, tapped him on the shoulder, asked “Will you go out with me?”, and my best friend Maureen had missed it! Granted, the entire sequence of events had only taken about 30 seconds, but still… it was Maureen’s responsibility both as my moral support and as scout for the rest of the table to have been present and alert enough to serve as a reliable witness. Now how would anybody ever know that I didn’t make it up? In fact, how would I ever know I didn’t made it up? Maybe I’d imagined the whole thing. Maybe I’d never even left the table. I began to seriously contemplate this as the fifth-period bell rang and the ceaseless tide of students flowing through the hallway separated me from my friends and ushered me to my next class.

NaNoWriMo

Meta: I wrote this shortly after midnight on November 1, 2006 - the first day of National Novel Writing Month. If I had more ambition / hadn't been so busy / actually had a plan / *insert favorite excuse here* I might have continued it for the remaining thirty days and produced a full fledged novel. As it is, this is the first and only scene that I produced during NaNoWriMo. I passed my 3.091 exam that morning with a 52.

It was a dark and stormy night… No, really, it was, I swear – I’m not just saying that to make things sound dramatic or anything. The rain was pouring down at a ridiculous velocity, and the wind… well, let’s just say that the MacGregor wind tunnel effect is no joke. I think I need to get my window fixed, it was freezing inside my room that night, but I digress. Let’s see, now where were we? Ah – it was a dark and stormy night…

And I was sitting up in my room working studying for a 3.091 test, all alone at half past one, while the rest of the dorm was probably out in the lounge watching House reruns or punting p-sets , finding some other way not to do whatever it was they were supposed to be doing, or even sleeping (gasp!). I was supposed to be making an aid sheet to bring into the exam in the morning, but then a small dialog box popped up on my laptop:

tcreese: Hey Penny, you still awake?

edwardsp: Unfortunately… you make your aid sheet yet?

tcreese: Nah, still workin’ on it. You wanna come work with me?

Work with him? It was the middle of the night and Taylor lived across campus in Random Hall, which was situated closer to some of the sketchier areas of Cambridge than I wanted to be at this hour. But here at MIT, p-setting together is considered the next best thing to a date, and I won’t deny that I thought Taylor was kind of cute (albeit in a very nerdy way).

edwardsp: Sure Taylor, I’ll be right over. See you in 10 minutes or so, okay?

I hit send before my better judgment had the chance to stop me. What was I thinking, going out in the middle of the night to study for a test that I was already reasonably well prepared for? I was taking the class on pass/no-record, for crying out loud, I wouldn’t even get a grade! Yet something in my subconscious had prompted me to walk across campus at an ungodly hour just to study for a test that didn’t matter to me in the least. Maybe it was hormones, maybe it was fate… or maybe I was just too damn tired to think straight.

I ambled over to my elephant (that’s a closet, for those of you who don’t speak MITese, we call them elephants here) and tried to select an appropriate outfit. This was a challenge – high school had prepared me well compute nasty-looking derivatives and find the direction of magnetic flux, but nobody had ever taught me what to wear when wandering across campus in the middle of the night.

What is this, really?

Ok... so there's already a "what is this?" post on the sidebar, but it's a bit lyrical and doesn't really contain much substance, so if you're still confused, this is probably the post you want to read. All of "this" is fairly simple, really; it is a blog and an outlet for my writing, but it is not a diary in the traditional sense because (as indicated by the title) I make no claim to stick to the truth. Since I'm just getting started here, I can't really tell you what (if anything) will appear here in the future. My intention is to fill the pages with short scenes, some connected, others much less so; they will be the beginnings of stories (or maybe the middles or even endings), but since my attention span is short, I must warn you in advance that I may often fail to finish what I start. Some of the stories may be written in parts - I plan to make it obvious which entries are attached to previous scenes, you should be able to tell when it happens. Also, I may decide which pieces to continue and which to abandon based upon the feedback I receive - which gives you all the more incentive to actually read and comment her. ^_^ Finally, I must excuse myself for certain recurring themes, phrases, and names that you may discover in the next few entries, which are old scenes that I wrote back in November in anticipation of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month.) While these scenes are fundamentally different in concept, I reused several of the same ideas, since I had the feeling that only one of them would eventually develop into a full-fledged story. As it is, I have yet to develop any of them, and I'm not quite sure if I ever will, but nevertheless I want to share them with you. I hope you enjoy them. ;-)