Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is bittersweet this year.

My thoughts are with the victims of terrorist attacks carried out yesterday on a hotel in Mumbai. The weather's a little gloomy. Piracy is still apparently rampant on the high seas; at least in Somalia. Jon Stewart won't have any new material until December 1. And the economy - well, you know.

But on the sweet side, we don't have school until Monday, I'm about to go stuff myself with turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, three kinds of pie and four kinds of popcorn, I'm going to see Twilight with my friends this weekend, Ms. Sarah Palin is staying where she belongs in Alaska (so far), and we have an incredible new administration ready and waiting to get in there and start FIXING things.

I invite you to post your Thanksgiving thoughts, wishes, hopes, comments, shoutouts, admonitions, or anything else that happens to be going through your head on this wonderful autumn day.

Have a fantastic Thanksgiving!

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Homecoming '08!

"Dance moves" is an oxymoronic phrase at Paly dances. Students are squished together so tightly on the floor of the gym that there's barely room to move enough to convince the parent chaperones that you are alive; I don't know how they expect to discern which dancers may have been under the influence.

Speaking of which, I almost failed my breathalyzer test. Not because I'd been drinking, but because I kept blowing incorrectly. The kind breathalyzer lady told me to blow into the funnel on the end of the air-horn shaped device just like I would if I was blowing out birthday candles. I blew. She was silent.

Oh my God, am I going to test positive for alcohol? Did the breath mint I just had somehow set off the trigger? I wasn't drinking, I swear it!

She peered at the air horn. "Blow harder," she said. I did.

She sighed. "Go on in."

After talking with several other breathalyzer virgins (who made up approximately 92% of my completely unbiased sample), I found comfort in the fact that I was not the only one who was seemingly incapable of blowing out birthday candles. One sophomore said that when she tried for the third time to get the device to register her breath, the administrator operating the breathalyzer snapped, "Moving your head around won't help anything. Look, blow on my hand."

But despite the indignities suffered, the procedure did seem to work the way it was intended to.

Two of Paly's assistant principals confirmed independently that there were no positive breathalyzer tests (although there was a rumor floating around the dance floor of at least one) and Assistant Principal Jerry Berkson maintained that the dance policy was much easier to enforce this year. "I've found that alcohol is a major contributor to raunchy dancing," he said, "and breathalyzers have really helped this year."

Assistant Principal Kim Diorio estimated over $3500 in ticket sales for a ticket count of 700, a figure substantiated by Principal Jacqueline McEvoy. According to Ms. Diorio, that number is about the same as last year. 

Of course, this means that demand for tickets has actually fallen among, to quote a certain vice-presidential candidate, "real" Paly students, and it is only the extra 100 freshmen who have made up the difference.

But I don't begrudge the freshmen. They've provided us with a number of really amusing amazing dancers. I caught up with one of them - actually, I yelled questions at him over the music and he tried to yell back but I missed most of what he said (like his name). His style of dancing is quite unique and really fun to watch; it's a combination of octopus arm movements and moonwalking. Apparently, this new genre was developed quite recently; the man with moves like an extraterrestrial mollusk didn't go to any dances at Jordan, although he did go to the first Paly dance.

And so ended the 2008-09 Paly Homecoming Dance. Congratulations to Homecoming Queen and Senior Spirit Commissioner Lucy McComas, and to her male counterpart, whose name I did not catch.

Has the administration hit on the right balance between control and freedom, inconvenience and safety? Only you can say, but what I can say is, live from Palo Alto, that was Saturday night.

PSAT: Are you ready?

Paly juniors this week are preparing to take the PSAT, a test that (supposedly) gives students an idea of how they will score on the all-powerful SAT, the mother of all tests.

Time was, anyone from the freshman with the overachieving parents to the senior who wanted one more practice round before the real deal could take the PSAT. This year, the Paly administration has decided to limit testing strictly to juniors.

The majority of freshmen, sophomores, and seniors probably couldn't care less, and I'm looking forward to that 10:45am Wednesday start time just as much as the next kid.

But shouldn't anybody be able to take the test if they want to?

Being a true Palo Alto kid, I trekked over to the tower building as soon as I heard about the test to ask the kind guidance staff if I could possibly take the PSAT this year. Pretty please?

This is what I got: "No. You'll have to make arrangements at another school."

Pause.

Um, could you maybe tell me which schools are allowing us lowly sophomores to partake in the sacred ritual of the PSAT? Give me a phone number? An email? A website? A name? Anything?

"No." Pause. We stared at each other.

Then, "I'm sorry. I don't know which other schools are offering it."

Um, lady, you're the supreme head of all standardized testing at Paly. You're sitting in front of a computer. There is a phone two inches from your right hand. And you can't make one call so that you can at least tell every overachieving Paly sophomore about another school to which they could pay money to sit for hours and take a test they don't really want to take anyway?

I left. We'd said all there was to be said. Well, I'd thought it, anyway.

Of course, there are legitimate reasons for the administration's decision. Yeah, there are a lot of Paly kids who'd like to take the PSAT. (Those extra 100 freshmen always ruin everything! :-) Yeah, that means more work for whoever fills out and files PSAT registration forms. Yes, I suppose if you really wanted to, you could make the warm-and-fuzzy-feel-good case that taking the PSAT as a sophomore and flunking it would kinda lower your self esteem.

But come on now. Kids as young as 7th grade are allowed to take the SAT! The real deal! And we, three years older, can't rely on our school to help us take the practice test? There isn't a way to register online for this test, like there is for the SAT. Collegeboard says, and I quote, "This test is administered by high schools, not through test centers. Online registration for the PSAT/NMSQT is not available."

It's like telling a 5-year-old at Great America that if they really want to go on Xtreme Skyflyer, they can go buy a ticket over there at the window. But a 10-year-old? No, you can't go on the carousel. You'll get hurt if you fall off the horse.

Eye Contact: The Presidential Debate

Pundits have been saying for days that this debate would not be about what the candidates said, but how they said it and what their body language was like.

I think most people could agree that the debate was fairly equal in terms of substance; if you agreed with one candidate at 5:59pm, your opinion was no different at 7:31.

Jim Lehrer started off by encouraging the candidates to speak directly to each other. It was a legitimate request; Barack Obama and John McCain know each other. They've worked together in the Senate.

Obama immediately picked up on this and was completely open and direct in his body language. He addressed McCain directly as "John" and called him out when he strayed from the truth.

By contrast, McCain never even looked at Obama.

He directed all of his comments to Lehrer and never once called Barack by name. Obama might as well not have been there.

McCain's message was pretty clear. As far as he was concerned, Obama wasn't really there. And if he was, he certainly wasn't worthy of consideration.

If McCain was coached on this, and he most certainly was, that was very carefully calculated to send a certain message to the American people.

Now, not having a TV myself, I went to watch the debate in a hotel bar. After it was done, I talked with a hotel worker about the outcome. He said he thought both candidates were crazy, but he also said, "I just couldn't vote for Obama. I don't trust him."

And even though you didn't say it, you knew why.

And it's scary. It's scary that America is so racist. If we can't make the right decision, I'm all for California seceeding from the union.

Arnold can be our president.

And you know what the really scary thing is?

I'm not kidding.

UPDATE: If anyone saw Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric: Why does Sarah call her running mate by his full name? Are they not even on first-name terms yet? Yikes.

Palo Alto's Party of the Year

A golden September twilight was sprinkled throughout the air. The light slowly faded into a shimmering darkness, illuminated only by occasional laughter and clinking of glasses. This being a Tuesday night, I had math homework, endless ions and compounds to memorize, and a complex number quiz to study for, but I could not have cared less.

I had just shaken hands with an Oscar-winner, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, and the former vice-president of the United States of America.

I'd just met Al Gore.

My luck had come from a friend with connections to a certain company known for the incredible gourmet food it serves its employees, not to mention one of Silicon Valley's best-known companies.

The food at the party wasn't bad, but the company was phenomenal. You couldn't walk two steps without bumping into the CEO of FedEx, the author of a bestselling childrens' book series, or at least two journalists from the New Yorker. Barack Obama and Lance Armstrong had been on the guest list as well, but couldn't make it; Obama because he was down in LA at precisely that time at a fundraiser with his own celebrities, and Lance because he's busy training for his announced 2009 comeback to competitive cycling.

I forced myself to calm down as I stood a few feet away from the man who had been mere hanging chads from being the leader of the free world. Finally, he turned and fixed me with a piercingly intense stare. "It's such an honor to meet you," I said.

"Best of luck to you," he replied.

I already thought I was a pretty lucky girl. But a little extra from Al Gore doesn't hurt.

Wrapping Up the Torch

Olympic. The word has come to mean the epitome of greatness. An Olympic feat is a task one step short of superhuman. After all, people are only human.

But the 2008 Olympics came about as close as is humanly possible to the superhuman. From the moment the fiery footsteps started on their path across Beijing, events that would never even have been possible 20 years ago (and still stretch our conception of what is possible today) became reality.

43 World Records and 132 Olympic records were broken at this Olympics. A single person garnered eight gold medals; more than any other in history. (By the way, this same person gave swimming lessons to 30 lucky youngsters last week at the New York YMCA as part of his Visa sponsorship.) And whether or not the pool depth or various other tweaked factors made any impact on the athletes' performance, the fact remains that it was a human who broke each and every record, who swam each stroke, who ran each step, and who launched themselves airborne for every flip.

And speaking of humans, approximately 3 billion humans worldwide watched the 2008 Olympics.

One of those people was Lindsay Y, a senior at Paly. And she was actually there.

So, how bad was the weather? "It was hot for a few days, but I could definitely breathe. It was so much better than Shanghai," said Lindsay.

Tickets were sold by event, but at $30 per ticket for evening track finals, the cost was definitely not the limiting factor. "A lot of the tickets were reserved for Chinese companies to hand out to their employees," Lindsay said.

An international rumor was going around back when the Beijing venue was announced that there'd been an American who offered several thousand dollars to any hotel who could guarantee him a room for the Olympics. As the story goes, the hotels told him they could not guarantee him a room. Of course, many international guests were able to secure accommodation for those so very important 3 weeks in August. "There were definitely more foreigners in Beijing than normal," Lindsay said.

And of course, these Olympics did not go down without some contention. Liu Xiang, the famed Chinese hurdler, pulled out of the 110 meter hurdles with a severe injury to his foot after one false start. Clearly in a lot of pain as he took his mark for the start of the race, China's track champion started off the block only to be called back because of a false start. And that's when he made the decision to sit out. "I personally was really surprised because I didn't hear about his injury being that serious," said Lindsay. "I think about 60% of Chinese felt that it was not a legitimate injury. He was under a lot of pressure, though. He's really big in China - he was in so many ads."

The international stage was anything but calm as the fireworks exploded over the Birds' Nest, though. George W. Bush was seen chatting amiably in his seat next to Vladimir Putin as Russian tanks rolled into the former Soviet country of Georgia, and China endured criticism about their violations of Tibetans' human rights all throughout the Games.

However, this Olympics, China, the most populous nation in the world, showed how much can be accomplished with people power. This is a lesson Barack Obama and John McCain must understand as they ready themselves for the homestretch of a campaign that went on longer than any other in history. This is a lesson the Chinese government must also take in if they are to continue to grow economically and socially in world society. And this is a lesson we all must internalize and remember every time we think, "What I do doesn't matter. Someone else will do it."

But in truth, every chorus member, every background dancer, every person who moved a box up and down and made cherry blossoms bloom on the Great Wall of China, and every drummer counts towards the whole production and every person who participated makes the performance that much more spectacular.