Welcome to Gatorland Y'all!

So today I went to the guitar concert because I had friends in it, and I had friends in the light booth, so why not? The reason why not was a little 12-year-old boy, who went by the mononym, 'Gator.' He's my friend Chloe's cousin and was brought along because she was babysitting him and doing lights. I first met Gator as he climbed into the light booth from the window, and I knew Chloe was bringing her cousin, but I didn't realize he'd be a floater. He gets in the room and immediately starts making Yo Mama jokes. "Yo mama is so dumb, that she bought a ticket to go see Xbox Live!" He was real proud of himself. He gave us his credentials which were as follows: wrestler, football player, used to play Minecraft when he was like 7 or something cause that game is for babies, skateboarder (shred it up brah), and drank 3 red bulls for breakfast. Gator would have been alright, but like a wild moose, he felt his authority challenged and so he tried to fight me in the confined lighting booth. I don't wanna brag, but I was about two feet taller than this kid, and he was kind of small, so I'd just bear hug him cause I didn't know what to do.

Some Gator quotes:

• "I've kissed 8 girls"
• "I kissed 3 girls at once"
• "I like peanuts"
• "I have 100 times more Instagram followers than you"
• "Woah, you have a Facebook?!"

Eventually, Gator, Chloe and I went outside because we were making a ruckus, and then Gator decided we

were going have an to all out fight. He started circling me like a tiny ass shark, and then he kept trying to grab me! I have got to hand it to this kid, he has balls, but he kept trying to punch me, so I just picked him up. Then I didn't know what to do with him so I put him back down, and he came at me again! He kept punching me in the stomach saying, "I bet you didn't feel that!" He made me sad. I went in the lighting booth and proceeded to lock him out. We let Chloe in too, but apparently, while the door was closing, Gator taped it so he could get in whenever. That isn't to say he was really locked out because he had the window, but it's nice to have options. At a certain point in the evening, we hadn't seen him for a while, so I open the door of the booth, and he's there talking to some 20-something-year-old and checking out his skateboard. According to Gator, he used to have a professional sponsor.

Somehow the concert lasted over two and a half hours, a fact that Gator would not let us forget. I was scrolling through Facebook and came upon a photo of Donald Trump, at which point Gator informed me that Trump was a "douche bag." Gator also told me that he's kissed more girls than me and that, "your mom doesn't count." He even had me send his photograph to Ashley Lazarski.

Towards the end of the concert Gator was getting to be a bit too much, so when it ended, we were all extremely relieved. The pièce de résistance was when he decided to slide down the banisters in the auditorium stairwell, and that was when it was time to call it quits. For more Gator updates, follow his Instagram @GPFLUG7 where you will notice that he has significantly fewer followers than me!!!

Kittens Part III: Cataclysm

I woke up this morning at 3 am because due to a complicated series of events: I had my mom's phone charging in my room but it was supposed to be used to wake Joseph up, who apparently passed the 3 am shift off to my mom who, when confronted about it at 3 am, decided she didn't want that shift, so I had to do it. Earlier in the evening, a couple of Hursh family members showed up to visit the kittens but decided to call it quits after Caroline picked up one of the kittens who had pissed itself. **IMPORTANT DETAIL** Anyway, it's much too early to function and I'm getting the bottles and formula and what-have-you so that I can feed the kittens who, at this point, kept trying to walk off the edge of the dining room table. One of the kittens could not get enough food, and the other didn't want any, and I had somehow gotten a considerable amount of formula on both of my hands as well as both of the kittens.

After loading them up with some sweet, sweet caloric goodness, I had to burp them, and then do... the thing... to make them pee. Well recalling what had happened earlier, I figured that they obviously didn't have to be molested to go pee, so I just put them back in the cage.

I woke up at 7 to lots of yelling and mom telling me that I had to drive Sophie to school because one of the kitten's stomach got all hard because it didn't pee. So that was rough. That's basically when mom decided the cats were not worth the trouble, but then she had to tell the family. I was kinda sad, but Sophie, who had not taken care of these cats whatsoever, started WAILING on the ride home. She made an impassioned plea regarding the fact that the cats were her only friends, and that she, "fed them once the other night!" Basically, she cried a lot. I guess the petition didn't work but thanks for trying y'all. Also, my mom says a parrot might be next.

The End of an Era

Whenever I think of school ending, I pretty much immediately jump to that one song from High School Musical II which is definitely a generational defect. So the day that school really ended for me was somewhere in the second quarter, but when I stopped having to go to school by law was this last Friday. It felt like any other Friday, except we did absolutely nothing in class, except for chem, which I arrived at thirty minutes late. It really tells you just how little regard I have for that joke of a class. Nobody was paying attention, and I was blatantly on my phone, but that didn't stop her from telling me specifically to get with the rest of the class. Whenever she yells, Akshay and Sloan slyly put away the phones on which they are covertly playing video games. The last time walking out of that class was a freaking catharsis. It was like just being there made me feel like I was wasting time that could've been used giving back to the less fortunate. One time, to prove a point, I pulled up a video of paint drying. I hope that I passed on this brashness to some of the juniors, whose names I did not care enough about to learn until the last month of school. Hannah, Hannah, Maddie, Ellie, Matt, Kevin and others.

It's so weird to think about the fact that I really don't have class anymore until I go to FSU in the fall, but it doesn't feel like I don't have school because I have like 8 more exams, and then theatre too. I was going to direct another one-act, and like I told Mr. Carter, "third time's the charm!" But, then Carter insisted I act which means I have to find a monologue to do so I think I might just recite the intro to Nineteen Kids and Counting. With all this free time I've just been staying out til much earlier in the morning, so I suspect that at some point next week, my sleep schedule will flip and I'll become nocturnal. Honestly, being nocturnal would make it easier to take care of the cats, because I was supposed to feed them at 3 am today, but I slept through my alarm for six hours, and then I woke up at six and panicked as I ran to my brother's room to get the cats and feed them in my dining room. They would not stop trying to jump off the table so I eventually just covered them with the towel as I nursed them one at a time. The real challenge was getting them to defecate after their meal. I did the thing with the paper towel and the warm water, cause in nature the mom cat just licks "their parts" so that's what I had to simulate (note the choice of words was 'simulate,' and not 'stimulate'). The problem was that they weren't going, but instead, just making a lot of scary noises that led me to believe I was scarring them for the rest of their nine lives. I woke Sophie up, but she wouldn't do it, so I woke Joseph up, and he informed me that he had already covered my 3 am shift for me but he'd do this anyway, and so I went back to sleep til 9. I'd like to thank Obama for having my mom return the cats home.

Cats

So I'm lying in bed, watching some How To Get Away with Murder, on the 'flix, and all of a sudden I get a call from my mom. It starts with the regular spiel about how I need to clean my room and yadda yadda, but then she tells me that she decided that I'm going to be taking care of a couple 3-week-old kittens. I did not sign up for that, and it's pretty typical for my mom to get excited about an idea and then just go ahead and do it. That happens to be how Rosebud was brought home because dad was on a business trip to Atlanta. Mom calls me from the car where she already has the kittens. Great. I don't dislike cats, in fact, I like them and I wanted one when I was younger, but I was never allowed to have one because my mom didn't want one. Now I have two? Anyway, mom brings them home and plops their cage down in the middle of my- still dirty- room. Of course, as soon as we start to hold them we're all in love, but that's when the real bombs start dropping. The first bomb is that after we feed them we have to "rub them with a warm washcloth." "Warm what?" Sophie asks. "Their parts," mom explains. Ohhhhh nope. Count me out. Next bomb: they need to be fed every three hours, which means that because they're my responsibility, mom explains, I have to wake up at 3 and feed them. At this point, I'd like to acknowledge the fact that my mom either didn't know about the three weeks of IB exams or didn't care because she had determined that these kittens were a necessary responsibility for me. I definitely could not wake up  every three hours to feed these kittens, which is what I told mom, who still did not believe that studying and taking exams constitute 'doing things on my days off.' She had told me last week that, since I'm gonna be spending a lot of time at home, I'll get to help clean the house. That sure is a funny way you got of lookin at things, Steph. Anywho, my mom took the kittens back to the vet cause that's where they go every day to be monitored, but now she doesn't want to take them home again, even though I don't have a morning exam for another week.

Sign my petition to tell Obama to tell my mom to let me keep the kittens.
https://wh.gov/ioPHO