Memories: Adventures in DART-Land

While rummaging through old emails, I found this 'story' I'd written back when I was 16. I want to share it because as I read it, I realized the writing was very good for a 16 year old. Even now, I would be hard pressed to match or exceed this kind of writing. So I'll take it away!!!....
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Chapter 1

I awoke to the sound of my screaming alarm clock. Knowing it would have no mercy on my sleep-ridden body, I dragged myself lazily out of bed. It was six o’clock and I was tired. I begrudgingly pulled my clothes on and headed downstairs to get the awful morning taste out of my mouth. When I got downstairs and looked in the refrigerator I moaned remembering we didn’t have any milk so I couldn’t have cereal of waffles. There was no kool-aid either, which is what I normally use to get the morning taste out of my mouth. I quickly got out a can of soda and chugged that. It took the taste away but left my mouth dry. I grabbed my backpack and headed out the door.
As I walked to the bus stop I thought back to my instructions. The previous night I had called DART services to get the numbers of the buses and trains I needed to take to get to Irving, and what times I needed to take them:
"You’ll take the 582 bus, which leaves at 6:31 am, to Park Lane Station. At Park Lane Station get on the light rail heading to West Moreland and ride it to City Place Station. From there take the 409 bus which will take you right by Irving City Hall."
Sounded easy enough. So I was in pretty high spirits as I reached the bus stop. I sat down to wait for my bus. I had only a few things in my backpack. My CD player, my CD case, my internship papers, my bus instructions, and Harry Potter. I brought Harry Potter to make sure I didn’t fall asleep on the bus and miss my stop. But as tired as I was, I was well alert as the bus pulled up and I got on.
Also the previous day I had purchased a special sticker from Richland that they put on my school ID. This allowed me to ride all the DART buses and trains for free until September 1st. I showed my ID to the bus driver as I climbed the steps. He nodded and let me through. I’d never been on a bus before and I found it surprisingly clean. I took my seat and the bus took off again.

Chapter 2:

I was too afraid to take out my book for fear I might somehow miss my stop, so I just stared out the window at the sun, which was a soft color of gold and orange as it rose from the horizon. After awhile we pulled into Park Lane Station. I followed everyone else off the bus and onto the waiting light rail. I had my school ID ready but there was no one on the train to check it so I stuffed it back in my pocket. The light rail was a lot cleaner than the bus and was very orderly. I found an empty seat and slumped down in it.
Never having been on a train before, I couldn’t take my eyes off the passing scenery. The landscape rolled by and the train zoomed along. We went over a bridge, across a field, and through a tunnel. The train made stops every so often at other stations and I took these times to check the name of my stop again. I briefly noted the people getting on and off, but what was there really to look at? They were just people getting off and on the train.
"Next stop, City Place Station. City Place Station next." I heard the conductor say over the speaker system. We were just entering the tunnel so there was no longer anything to look at outside. I tried to see into the darkness but I could only see the occasional light fly by. We glided into City Place Station slowly. The station looked like a small cavern, being in the middle of a tunnel and all. I got ready to get off but I noticed no one else seemed to be worrying about getting off. No one in the station was getting on the train either as far as I could tell. The thought popped into my head that maybe we, the passengers, were supposed to get off somewhere else and the train was only stopping to refuel or something.
One thing I had noticed from the previous stops we’d made is that the train didn’t stop for long, only about a minute or so. I realized that if I didn’t hurry up and get off I’d still be on the train when we started rumbling out of the station. I quickly decided to get up and try to get off.
I walked up to the doors, assuming they had a sensor and would open automatically. It didn’t. What did happen was the train started again…abruptly. I lost my balance and thudded against the wall. I tried to act casual as I walked back to my seat. I don’t think anyone was buying it though, because I got a lot of weird looks. "Dang it!" I thought, as we pulled out of the station, "I’m going to miss my bus!"

Chapter 3:

I didn’t really know what to do so I went back to thinking as I stared blankly out the window. We were going into downtown now. I didn’t really know what I was going to do, so I just kind of sat there. We passed Union Station and something my parents had told me earlier flashed into my head. They had given me a brief explanation of what trains and buses to take before they has gone out of town for the week.
"It’s simple Derek, just take a bus from here on Forest and Abrams and that will take you to Park Lane Station. Get on the light rail and that’ll take you to Union Station. From there you can take a train which will land you about a block and a half away from City Hall."
Take a train from Union Station? But when I called DART they told me to take a bus from City Place. I wondered who was right, and if they were both right, which was faster. I tried to get off again at Union Station to check it out. When the train stopped I walked boldly up to the front door, thinking that last time it only didn’t open because the train was about to start moving again. However it did not open.
As I was standing there looking confused, as I’m sure I did, a teenage girl who had been watching me from a few seats back got my attention. "Push the button." she said. Of course I had absolutely no idea what button she was talking about. I began looking around for a button. I pushed what looked like a button but ended up just being a light, further adding to my feeling of stupidity. The girl saw my added confusion and came over and showed me, however I didn’t have time to push it because the train started moving again.
As I moped back to my seat I thought about what a stupid button that was. It was a little black button on a crossbar about waist level that said, "Push To Open Doors". It didn’t even glow or anything. Did the rail service just expect people to know how to open the doors? Anyway, I didn’t approve. At the next stop I hurriedly got off to make sure I didn’t get stuck on the train again. I looked around at the station and found that the next line that could take me back to Union Station wouldn’t come for another ten minutes. In that ten minutes I began to enjoy myself, looking out over downtown. I was amazed at how easily I’d gotten here.
The whole "not buying a car and just riding the bus everything" theory my Dad had frequently preached finally came into perspective. As long as you had a season pass, I guess you could call it, who needed a car? I mean, here I was way downtown and I didn’t have to do hardly anything! I was saving on gas and insurance all at once! Maybe I wasn’t saving on time…but it evened out. The train and bus systems are good, I decided. I didn’t have long to dwell on it though because the light rail came sliding in.

Chapter 4:

I got off at Union Station to check out if I could take a train from there to Irving. Getting off the stairs onto the station I noticed a stairway ahead of me going underground like a subway stair. "That must be where I get onto my train." I thought. As I started walking toward the stairway, the light rail pulled away, revealing the Trinity Railway Express, what I later found out was the train going to Irving.
I descended the stairs and entered a low ceiling hallway heading up. I started walking up the ramp. Suddenly a very awful and distinct odor entered my nostrils. The whole ramp smelled like rotting wood that someone had urinated on and had been sitting there for ages. I half-walked and half-ran up the rest of the ramp, entering into a much larger area that looked like a lobby.
There was a person here and there sitting down reading various papers and magazines. I thought at first they were waiting for the train that was supposedly going to take me to Irving. I looked around trying to find directions to the platform, or even the times when the train came in. I didn’t see anything though. There was a counter across the room, but there was no one behind it. I couldn’t find anyone that looked like they worked there who could tell me about the train.
I walked back down through the smelly ramp and back up the stairs into the station. The light rail going back to City Place was just pulling in, so I jumped in. I got off at City Place and luckily the next bus going to Irving was just pulling up. "Man, I’m pretty lucky!" I thought as I climbed into the bus, flashing my ID at the driver.
I was finally able to start reading my book, since it would be a long time before I had to worry about getting off. I didn’t really look up from my book until we pulled into a station. I didn’t know what station it was, but according to the street signs I saw, I knew it was close to City Hall. I didn’t know whether to get off the bus now and walk around looking for City Hall or just wait on the bus and see if we went any nearer. I decided to wait.
Fortunately the bus went right past City Hall and I was able to get off.

Chapter 5:

After explaining to my supervisor why I was late, she said it didn’t really matter to her. I knew she was right because the whole reason I was working there was to get two hundred hours for my internship course for my associates degree. So if I missed time I would just have to make up for it later.
She started me off watching one of the other interns while he worked. He was taking about one hundred and fifty images and having to manually resize them in Photoshop. The first thing I did was show him a technique in Photoshop where the system would go through and do the exact same thing to all of the images with one action. Not only did this save him a lot of time but the computer was working on it’s own.
So while the computer went off on its own, we got to talking. His name was Chad Powell (no relation) and he was only eighteen. He’d been interning there for about 2 years so he knew all the ropes. Since I showed him my technique, I was already on his good side. We had a lot in common and it was fun talking.
The computer eventually finished, but by the time he had to go so I didn’t really get to watch him do anything. After he left my supervisor loaded me down with a huge stack reading to do: tutorials, software manuals, and company statistics. Luckily I was reading at a computer station that was normally used by someone else. I browsed around the computer and found his 300+ mp3 library, so this kept me somewhat entertained as I read. The rest of the day passed slow and eventfully.

Chapter 6:

I finished my last book at around five o’clock and left. As I was descending the stairs from the building I remembered that I had forgotten to ask the DART representative the night before what buses/trains I needed to take to get back home. Not knowing exactly what to do, I just went and waited at the same bus stop I had gotten off at earlier that morning, hoping that if I got on it would eventually return to City Place.
After waiting for about twenty minutes I decided to go back inside the building and call DART and ask. Once inside I asked the guard at the front desk if there was a courtesy phone I could use. He said he was using the only one but he’d be off in just a second. From what I heard it sounded like he was talking to a friend. I thought it pretty rude that a guard who has free reign over the entire building would use the courtesy phone to make his personal calls…
He quickly wrapped up his conversation and handed me the phone. I called DART and they put me on hold to wait for an operator. I noticed the guard was just kind of standing there glancing at me every now and then. I figured he wanted to call back whomever he was talking to before and finish his conversation. After several minutes of being on hold, and not wanting to be a bother, I just hung up. I thanked him and headed for the door.
I looked back to see what the guard did after I hung up. He was walking off (to do more guard stuff I guessed). He was probably just making sure I didn’t steal the phone or anything. I felt slightly insulted but shrugged it off and walked back out to the bus stop. I hoped that the bus hadn’t come while I was inside. However, after sitting there for another ten minutes, it looked that way. I began looking around. I noticed a sign across the street that said "Trinity Railway Express" with an arrow pointing ahead.
Trinity Railway Express was the name of the train I saw when I checked out Union Station, I remembered. I started following the sign until I saw another one and kept following the signs for about two blocks and ended up at the train station. After finding out when the next train to Union Station was, I sat down to wait for it.
I got on the train easy enough and enjoyed watching the passing scenery out the window. It was easy getting the rest of my way home, but what an experience the day was.

epic failure

My precalculus class is ridiculous. Ridiculous, ridiculous, ridiculous. The more I go to class, the more I believe that. What's ridiculous about it? The stupid teacher. The teacher is like no teacher I've had. He's not bad at teaching per se, but he is a bad professor. Unfortunately for him, teaching the subject isn't the only part of being a professor. There's also grading, communicating, helping students, curriculum choice, etc. He fails at pretty much all of these things, in an epic way.

Grading: This guy is the toughest grader I've ever seen. He has admitted in class he plans to count off points on anything he can. He insists you show all your work on tests. Correct answer+no work=0 points for the question. Correct work+wrong answer=0 points. But it doesn't stop there. On the first test I had a problem that was simple enough that I didn't need to work it out with any algebraic steps, I was able to logically solve the problem. I gave logical reasoning for my answer, but was still counted wrong because apparently he was looking for me to show specific steps (which obviously were unnecessary). On another problem, as I was solving it I was debating between two possible ways to solve it. So I worked through the problem both ways. I eventually decided on one way, which was the correct way and supplied the correct answers, but he still counted off because I left the incorrect steps on the page as part of my work. He has counted off for not writing 'X=' before the solution, he has counted off for not having a perfectly sketched graph, with lines not bending at exactly the correct curvature, but still passing through the key points. Etc.

Communication: He talks to the white board the entire class. Half the time he is covering up his work with his body, making it difficult to follow along. He insists on us knowing the hows and whys of every formula he presents, and spends 15-20 minutes proving each formula before presenting it. He insists we need to know the specifics of why these formulas work. I disagree. I do lots of websites as a means of side income. I use computers all the time, but that doesn't necessarily mean I need to know why or how a computer works. That doesn't mean I should spend all the necessary time learning the details and specifics of what a diode is or a circuit so I can understand how a computer works. I don't need to know those things in order to use it. I don't need to know why a math formula works, just how to use it. If I was majoring in math, or was intending to be a mathematician, I would agree with him that it needs to be learned. He spends at least 40% of each class period proving formulas and other mathematical facts.

Curriculum: His curriculum isn't terrible actually. He has 4 tests, and a final, and the final will count twice to replace your lowest grade of the original 4 tests, if it would raise your overall grade. That's pretty decent. However, the way things are looking, I may need 2-3 tests dropped. The worst part of the curriculum is he only allows 75 minutes for tests. For a math test where you have to show your work in a very concise and detailed way, that's not nearly enough time. On the last test I took, only 2 people finished the exam before time was up. No one else had time to complete the test. He insists that math is not only about knowing how to do the problem, but also about how fast you can do it and further insists that his time limits are enough time to complete the test if we 'know the material'. Personally, I think that's a load of crap. I can tell you I knew the material on that test. It's one thing to take a long time on a problem because you aren't sure how to do it, and it's another thing to take a long time on a problem because it's just that type of problem, regardless of how well you know how to do it.

I didn't study or do any of the home work for the first test, as a point of gaging how tough the course would be. I got a 45 on that test. Out of the 5-6 people I talked to (15 in the class), none of them got a higher grade than me. Oooookay, gotta try harder. So I buy the book, do the homework, stop falling asleep in class, pay attention, and try hard to keep track of the kinds of minute details he is looking for on the tests. Second test...I get a 51. The professor acts surprised that there's so many low scores (I'm sure...like he isn't used to people failing/dropping his classes). Test 3 comes before the drop date next week, so I'll be able to take that and if I still fail it, I'll have to drop the class.

It's just stupid. I've gotten A's in both algebra and trigonometry before this, in trig I got 100s on all the tests but the final. It's not the material I'm struggling with, and that's the worst part. The only thing standing between me and an A in this class is this stupid ridiculous teacher. The problems in the homework are all simple problems, straight forward, sometimes a little complicated but still easy. The problems on the test are like the most deviously constructed and are as far from simple as you can get. This teacher isn't trying to teach us precalculus I've decided. He's just trying to fail us all with his stupid questions, his horribly picky grading, and his incredibly boring classes. This guy is more worried about the red tape of precal than the concept of it. He's the bureaucrat of the math world. He's the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. Only thing is, he's teaching us the spirit of the law, but grading us on the letter of the law. He's an idiot. Having to drop his class and retake precal in summer 2 is the very last thing I want to do, but I'm not sure I can pass this class. I don't even know what to improve on. I totally understand the material, I'm very comfortable with it, but the test questions are overly complicated and unclear sometimes. And it's not like its even just me. Like I said, almost everyone else I've talked to in that class is failing. If it was just me I would know that there was something I could do to make up my poor performance, but if it's 80% of the class, you have to wonder at the teacher.

Usually near the end of the semester, the school will have the students fill out anonymous reports on the performance of the teacher. I'm hoping these go out before the drop date, or that I can get a good enough grade on the third test that I don't have to drop it, so that I can give him the worst possible review I can, along with everyone else in the class that's failing. Far as I know, only 3-4 people tops, are passing. I would be very interested to know what the pass-rate of this class is, or even his average pass-rate for all this classes. I would bet it's below 30%. What a dick....

dry ice

Yesterday marked an epic day in the history of my life: It marks the day of my first real interaction with dry ice. Sure, I've seen it before in stores and bowls and stuff like that, but I've never gotten my hands on any to actually play around with and test and experiment with...until yesterday.

Eddie had a chemical shipped to him at work that had been shipped in a carton of dry ice to preserve temperatures (commonplace) and he brought the dry ice home to show me and the kids. Of course watching it melt in water is cool, and it sure entertained the kids (except Brynnley, she didn't want anything to do with it), but after awhile that got boring and Eddie and I decided to revisit our juvenile sides and tested out some dry ice bombs. Apparently dry ice bombs are all the rage, and I'd heard about them before, but lemme tell ya, they sure are fun. We were using standard size ozarka bottles instead of 2-liter bottles like most people use. The first one we threw into the pool, but since it was mostly filled it air, it just sat on the surface until it exploded. It was a lot bigger of an explosion than I was anticipating lol. Kisty came running outside from the house wondering if all her kids were in 1 piece still. The second one we wanted to sink in the pool, so we duck taped the bottle to half a brick and tossed it in. Well, the brick apparently wasn't heavy enough because although it sunk partially at first, as the pressure built up in the bottle it floated up to the top, again exploding quite louder than I expected. The third one we tied to 2 full-size bricks and sunk, and this one stayed at the bottom, floating upside down tied to the bricks. When it exploded the ground shook. Not a lot, but it definitely shook, which I also wasn't expecting. The burst of water in the pool wasn't anything extraordinary, it was mostly the submerged 'boom' and the ground shaking that was fun to experience. We sunk a few more, until we ran out of empty bottles. It never got any less fun. I don't see myself ever wanting to do anything malicious with dry ice bombs, but I sure do intend to revisit them sometime.

gladys

Haha so I was at the grocery store today with my friend William and we happened upon one of the nosiest and rudest older ladies (or even any person for that matter) that I've run into for a long long time.

So William and I were at the store right, we'd just come from Wingstop which was around the corner and we brought our drinks with us. As we were going down the aisles William stabbed my Styrofoam cup with his toothpick at the base so it leaked out what was left of my drink. I was kind of embarrassed we made a mess on the floor, so we got someone to come clean it up and then went walking down the aisle again. I told him I felt embarrassed when something like that happened, and he said he didn't. He said he didn't feel bad if someone had to clean up a mess he made, if it was on accident. Just then, an older woman passed us, she was probably in her 50s, we'll call her gladys). So Gladys passed by us with her grocery cart and turned the end of the aisle. Shortly after she passed, William began to say how if he, for instance, threw his open cup into her cart and made a mess, he would feel bad, because it would have been on purpose.

Now, Gladys is a nosy old lady, apparently she hadn't gone as far around the corner as we thought, because after William had mentioned her, she decided to poke her head back and ask (rather demandingly) what we had said. I thought that William would just simply tell her to mind her own business, but no, he politely explained to her what we had been talking about, and how he had used him throwing his cup into her cart as an example of making a mess on purpose, to which she replied, and I quote, "Well that's just a stupid thing to be having a conversation about!" I was shocked. First this lady decided to eavesdrop, maybe unintentionally but all the same, and then bluntly states that our conversation topic was stupid! I'm not a very controversial person, but even I was about to tell her off, but I couldn't get a word in as William started ahead of me. William proceeded to tell her that it was none of her business what we were talking about and it was a private conversation, but more rudely. She replied with some other nonsense about us being disrespectful and called William 'four-eyes' (he was wearing his sunglasses lol) and 'fat ass'. lol I couldn't believe her. Butts into our conversation, insults us, and then insults us some more. Those are the kind of people you hate to service when you're working, but love to run into in public places where you can call them whatever will make it right...ahhh.

katydids

So in Texas we have a bunch of Katydids, which are a close relative to the grasshopper. They make incredibly loud noises for insects, mostly at night, however the noise I can deal with. Katydids and grasshoppers are, in my opinion, the ugliest insects I see here in Dallas. I'm sure there is uglier, but for some reason I've harbored this personal vendetta against grasshoppers and katydids since I was little. I just think they're so gangly and disgusting, ugly little heads and spiky stick-life legs, yuck. Probably one of the few insects I make a point of going out of my way to kill.

Today I had the immense pleasure of killing 42 katydids while mowing my parents' lawn. I've never seen so many in such concentration. I guess they were just kind of hanging out in the leaves covering my parents' lawn and when I turned on the mower the vibrations must've stirred'em up because I could almost always see one or two jumping around ahead of me trying to get out of the way of the mower. A few of them weren't mobile enough to get out of the path of the mower, and even a few that did I hunted down to run over. Most of them, however, I left the mower and had to go stomp on. Call it cruel, call it hatred, it's probably a little of both but I don't really care. I don't even know why I hate them so much, there definitely are uglier insect. I think it's just that every time I've gone to pick one up, especially as a kid when I didn't know better, they would maneuver their disgusting legs around to latch onto you and then proceed to 'spit' or bite you with this ultra-disgusting mouths. Anyways, it was fun for me to have the opportunity to destroy so many of these hated insects, including running 20ft chasing after one flying away and doing a hop, skip, jump right onto his face, hah.

regretable moments

One of my most regrettable moments, this one involving a girl, was when I was 17. I was 7 months into one of the least satisfying and most complicated relationships of my life, but I'll explain that at another time. Anyways, so I was looking for a reason out of this relationship with this girl Sara, even though I kind of still liked her deep down. So I broke up with her and started seeing this other girl I met in another stake (stake being a boundary of church members), Julia. She lived like 45 minutes away so I didn't get to see her much, and that was a complicated relationship in and of itself, but it didn't last long. Over a month or two I started realizing I didn't like her as much as she liked me. She would sometimes get upset at me for not calling her much or not necessarily wanting to talk to her all the time either. I was perplexed why I didn't like this perfectly wonderful girl who appreciated every aspect of me more than I did. I just couldn't figure it out, then one day I figured it out. We were talking on the phone about our relationship and I had an 'epiphany' and, in all my teenage wisdom, thought I'd share it with her. I told her that I was becoming less interested in her because I realized she was only a rebound from Sara, the previous girlfriend. Yes, I told a girl she was a rebound. Yeah...that relationship didn't end well...

potato gun fun

So when I was a teenager, or more specifically 15-17, me and my friends found plans for and constructed a potato gun made out of PVC piping. We were met with success. We did lots of fun things with our new instrument of entertainment, often destructive things. The gun could shoot a piece of potato about 2 in. tall/wide and about 3 in. thick at about....1000fps? Definitely we could shoot holes through wooden fences, 4x stacked drywall, aluminum mailboxes...in any case it was a force to be reckoned with.

On one such particular night of youthful delinquency , we were driving around in my old Nissan late at night, looking for things we could shoot our gun at. We were driving through a neighborhood and drove past an elementary school. The school had a simple lit sign in front by the street used to display announcements. We thought it would be great fun to shoot the sign, see what kind of damage we could inflict. Well so we pulled up to the sign planning to fire the gun from inside the car, but just then we noticed a car in the distance pull around a corner and was heading our direction so, in a spur of the moment decision, I pulled into a nearby alleyway and turned my lights off. The car was a little ways off, but close enough to see a stopped car quickly drive into an alley and turn the lights off (almost certainly more suspicious than just sitting in front of the sign would've been...). In any case, the car passed by us a few seconds after pulling into the alley, and I pulled out and started driving down the street away from the school, planning to drive around the block and come back. Well, so this car turns around and starts following me! I was certain it was following me because I made a point of taking frequent sudden turns around this neighborhood.

After about 2 minutes of this car following us, and us trying to figure out if we should be threatened or not, decided it was probably some nosy neighbor following us because we looked suspicious and wanted to see what we would do. So what DID we do? We stopped, they stopped about 15 ft behind me, and we loaded up the gun and my two friends got out and aimed it at them (it took two people, one to aim and the other to ignite the fuel). The car didn't do anything while they were positioning (about 6-7 seconds) and so we decided to fire it at them. However, we didn't want to get into criminal offense just yet, so they aimed high, above their car into the overhanging trees above. What proceeded was nothing short of hilarity.

The shot fired off (it had a pretty deafening boom when we did it right, and we did it right that night) and streaked through the trees above the car, causing leaves to fall down around the car. At night you could see the exploding fuel (flammable aerosol) shooting a little ways out from the barrel as the shot went off. The car immediately begins to back up quickly and attempts to turn around and go the other way, however the street is a small 2 lane street and the car is a suburban with a poor turn style so it would have to do probably a 5-point turn to turn fully around. So once it backs up as much as it can, and the people inside realize they can't escape quickly, whoever was driving just hits the horn and holds it. We jump back in the car and speed off while the car continues holding it's horn. We sped home, just dying over the whole ordeal. What I would've paid, even to this day, to know who was inside of that car, and to be able to see their reactions. What they were thinking when they began to follow us, and what they were thinking after they saw that shot go off over their car. Oh man...those were good times.