Return of Memoryfest - Day 21/31

[bironic]

We went stargazing tonight at a small observatory about 60 miles east of here, almost at the end of the north fork of Long Island. After a nice 90-minute lecture on naked-eye astronomy from a local university professor, we went out into the bitter, windy cold so one of the employees could point out the easier constellations and show us some

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[thewlisian_afer]

When I was in third grade a boy of Iraqi descent (years later I learned that his father was actually born in Iraq and came here when he was a teenager) named Darius moved to my school district and joined my class. He had glasses with unattractive frames that were never quite straight, his parents dressed him like Steve Urkel, he walked like Urkel and he was just generally Very Strange. My two best friends and I did our very best at first to help him fit in more, but he was completely unreceptive of help from girls. This annoyed us more than a little, so we decided to let his weirdness run rampant.

He was convinced that if you ran around a tree in the school's front yard at a certain speed, it would have strange effects on the space-time continuum. So he would spend all of recess racing around this tree and then trying to figure out if it had worked. My friends and I finally began picking out different time periods and different names for ourselves, and when Darius would come over to us to see if he could find out if his time travel or whatever had worked, we would pretend to be from these different time periods. We acted confused as to how we ended up in this strange place in these strange clothes.

I don't know if he actually bought it or if we were really all just playing a game. But years later in high school (he was still a complete social disaster and the most disliked and picked on person in the school) he asked me if I still had "the computer chip." I can't remember exactly what role "the computer chip" had played in the game, but all it was was one of those little wooden things that came with individual serving ice cream cups for you to scoop the ice cream up with. I told him I didn't have it anymore. Which was a lie.

I still have it.