Swords, Shenanigans, Fire and Euclid

I moved up in life into the Overachieving section of Euclid, set fire to the Gearage driveway, and drew blood in the parking lot.

It’s been an interesting week.

See, Dr. Z has to deal with all 3 freshman sections for Euclid; he classed us the Overachievers, the Underachievers, and the Other Section. Only a week ago I was still in the Underachievers: consistently a few props behind, half an hour struggling on a single definition, runs overtime and a prop behind on the same class the Overachievers finished early. But no more. As we entered the dreaded lists of book 5 – lines and lines and lines, breadth without length and props without logic and mind without thought – they began to flounder. Not, you understand, that they’ve lost any brightness.

No, they put themselves behind quite deliberately one fine Monday morning, when the entire section (as I am given to understand) walked into Euclid without having learned the assigned prop 5.8 (an absolute humdinger, in all fairness) and proceeded, in a glorious display of team-work and incompetence, to deliberately stall every prop the entire class, so that they might not have time to reach 5.8 .

They achieved their goal.

Now, however, they have to deal with the consequences. Which is to say, Dr. Z threw them over without a second thought; referred to us as the “new overachieving section” in his very next homework email; and there we stand, tenuously but tenaciously clinging to the crown.

The dethroned section made a good try at sabotaging us this morning. Rusty made a bid to sit in on our class and ask dreadful questions after every prop; but first he engaged Dr. Z in Euclidian discussion right as we should have been starting, thus delaying class for a whole 5 minutes. He was only banished when four guys got up, flung open the door, closed in on Rusty on all sides, and dragged him away from Dr. Z mid-sentence. They threw him out and slammed the door behind him, and there was general cheering on all sides.

(We not only finished the day’s props, but put up a volunteer for an optional prop, thus climbing once more ahead.)

That was the main academic excitement. In other news, I lit the Gearage parking lot on fire the other day.

Fine, so it wasn’t quite that dramatic. Nor did I do the actual lighting (trust the Crusader to be faster on the draw when it comes to sending things up in flames). We had a stove repair lesson for Outdoor Leadership stuff, and after a brief and suspiciously lackadaisical overview of the three main stove problems + repairs, we were handed a full tub of broken stoves and told to practice. (Obviously no ulterior motives in this lesson or anything.)

My stove was… uncooperative. It started leaking gas right away, and I had to disassemble it again. One of the leader-y types said we should burn the gas off so it’s not just sitting on the driveway, so my good friend Crusader set a lighter to the concrete where the stove had been.

Flames sprang up around the lighter – and went running all the way down the driveway through the crowd of Prospective Leaders struggling with their recalcitrant stoves. The wall of flame was a good ten feet long (less than a foot high, but still. A wall of flame is a wall of flame.)

I’ll note it took us another forty-five minutes to get the stove working.

Still, nobody could accuse us of sitting around waiting for OLP to provide excitement in our lives, exploding stoves or otherwise! The pvc-pipe + foam swords only brought out a day or two ago have already been baptized in blood. Dueling in the parking lot makes an excellent study break from paper-writing, you see.

Blood, glory, flame – it’s been a decent week. And it’s only three class-days left before we’re heading into Holy Week.

Yes. All in all, it’s good.