Catapulting My Troubles Away

Children enjoy to think of things that they want to be or want to do someday when they become adults. Back in the day it was being a firefighter, carpenter, dentist, astronaut, etc. and nowadays we see children talking about being video game makers or runners of accountant firms (they're getting too smart . . .). As a child, I was uncertain with where I wanted to go in life. In my kindergarten play that had the theme of what we wanted to be when we were grown-up, I was a carpenter. Did I want to be a carpenter at the time? Maybe. My father is one and most children seek their parents as role models. I then converted over to wanting to be a teacher in my early elementary school years. I think the majority of children at that age have dreams of teaching because they want to someday reign over children like they are currently being reigned over. I used to play school by myself with stuffed animals or action figures as my students (I know -- pathetic). I remember a specific account where I had a single pupil, which was a Digimon action figure known as Wormmon, and I taught him math and even made up lesson plans, workbook sheets, etc. Eventually I aged, learnt more about the real world, and figured that teachers, for the amount of work they must do and how they must practically babysit a large room of kids, earn enough money that some must work a second job just to survive. Maybe the reality of it hit me when I realized that I had a hard time maintaining control of my nephew and nieces when trying to get them to behave. Just imagine them multiplied by ten! That's an average classroom. After that, I had fantasies of making video games, then I learnt that the video game industry was stressful and your pay was determined on how well the game sold and et cetera, et cetera. Somehow I got to my current status (and finalized the decision) of wanting to become a computer software engineer. That path will begin in the matter of a few months when I head off to the University of Scranton to major in computer science. I hope my senioritis goes away by the start of the semester.

I spent all day yesterday building a catapult with Matt. Before the government arrests me for making weapons, I'd like to do the pleasure of assuring them that we were forced to construct it as it's a physics project that's due Tuesday. The catapult came out pretty well. We had two problems with it though. The one time when we were testing it, the force from the lever arm was so powerful (due to the spring that we used) that it destroyed the stopper. The stopper was a block of wood held on by two triangular pieces of plywood. The plywood, which I originally had doubts about because it's thin and looks weak, broke. We fixed that problem by taking the stopper apart, doubling the plywood on the sides, and reassembling it. After testing it by flinging an actual projectile, a pine-cone, down my alleyway, a new problem arose -- the bottom of the lever arm where the fulcrum is located cracked down the middle. My father helped by nailing the lever arm where the crack was to hopefully prevent it from splitting more and adding some soft material to the stopper so that this material absorbs some of the force of impact and therefore causing less tension in the lever arm. This absorbent material, however, caused the angle of the lever arm to be less than forty-five degrees when the egg is to be launched from the catapult. Once we got this all straightened out, Matt and I ran over to the Archbald Pothole State Park (and not the infamous section of it but rather the sports complex) and tested the catapult one final time by launching an actual egg into the woods. The egg launched about thirty-seven feet from the catapult, but it veered to the right from the intended trajectory due to the lever arm being at a slight angle. The lever arm didn't crack anymore, thankfully. We're not playing with it anymore to be safe. Before Matt's mother picked him up, we quickly spray-painted the catapult orange and pink. It's safe to say that we may have the sexiest catapult in our class.

Our physics teacher is such a tyrant. Not only is this catapult due Tuesday, but we have a few hundred worksheets due tomorrow, we're supposed to have a one-page paper, about a class lab that we had twenty-five minutes to complete without any steps to follow because we had to make the procedure up on our own about how much potential energy of a metal ball rolling down a rollercoaster apparatus is converted to thermal energy, done for tomorrow even though the class didn't get to complete the lab, and we have another lab due tomorrow that makes very little sense. On top of this I have a calculus test tomorrow on material that I do not understand. I didn't exactly do the homework in there for this chapter either . . . so I'm a worrywart today. I'm also a worrywart in regards to more personal issues that I'm disputing with myself over and that I cannot disclose to the public. I don't even know where to begin with all this work that I have to do. My father expects me to have some scholarships done for tomorrow, I have an English quiz and statistics quiz tomorrow and Tuesday, respectively, I have to start working on my senior project paper that's due April 1st, I'm trying to decide if I want to go on a senior class field trip or not . . . it's terrible . . .

I'm going to go run off and read for a bit before I begin my workload. Have a good one!

[EDIT] -- The intended purpose of the first paragraph was to go on about childhood expectations and then to say, at the end, that "I never expected to one day build a catapult", but that goal got lost in my rambling. If you were wondering why I brought up my childhood goals, now you know why.