And I know the answers to two questions that I know I answered incorrectly.
Still haven’t seen the grade for my FRQ section. Can’t have been very good, skipped a lot of math questions and tried to answer as many essay questions as I could.
I am NEVER throwing down a Rockstar right before a 3-hour test again. I was planning to take a 5-Hour Energy, but Long’s didn’t have any. I was literally twitching in my seat during the multiple choice section…couldn’t concentrate…
started singing outside my window sometime around 4:30-5:00. I wish I’d thought to take notice of the time.
Ah well. Doubt this will be my only chance. The sky’s turned from navy to cerulean - prelude to the sunrise. Time to take a quick 40-minute cat nap before I have to get up for school…
Friday, March 27 was International Food Day at our school - most of the clubs set up tables in the courtyard during lunch and sell ethnic foods. Since all three of our ERA club presidents are graduating this year, they were pretty determined to make it an awesome day. Meaning it was a really busy week.
We’d already met at our house once to discuss the ERA club jackets. Connie and Jessica turned out a pimpin’ design. The only problem was that we couldn’t get the design and the jackets to a professional printer and get them back by Friday - so we did it ourselves.
Monday: Prep Day #1
Connie called me from a Dick Blick art store to ask me if I’d be interested in helping to silkscreen thirty-something jackets for our club members. We had some silkscreening experience from our jobs in the gallery last year. I agreed with some mixed feelings. While I thought it would be fun, I was anticipating a major disaster.
They dropped off the supplies at my house:
one large silkscreen and one small
a base frame
clamps
white and blue ink
big squeegee
photo emulsion and remover
ink fixer
I cleaned off the shelves in my closet, covered the screens with photo emulsion, then set them inside my closet to dry in complete darkness. Nothing to do but wait.
Tuesday: Prep Day #2
The plan for the day was to have the main design (which we planned to print in white) burned onto a screen. About 20 seconds after we started burning the screen in the sunlight, Connie realized it was backwards.
By then it was too late. We scrubbed out the screen with photo emulsion remover and prepped it again.
That night I hovered anxiously over the screen as it burned under a floodlight. An hour and a half passed before I thought it had burned enough. I crossed my fingers and, in the absence of a high-pressure hose, scrubbed out the screen with a toothbrush. The design came out perfectly.
Wednesday: MAJOR SCREENPRINTING DAY
The night before, I’d emailed Eric a long list of instructions and cautions. They would be doing the first segment of the screenprinting process without me or Connie.
As soon as school ended, Connie and I rushed to Alick’s parents’ laundry shop to check out the progress - there were some problems with the screen getting blocked with ink, but some of the jackets were coming out really well.
Connie, Emily and I went back to my house to burn the next screen, with which we would print the blue part of the design. No mistakes this time. We checked and double-checked to make sure the design wasn’t on backwards.
We barely had time to deliver it back to the shop before it was time to go back to school for our afternoon Organic Chemistry lecture.
Ahhh my brain
By the time my lecture was over, the sun was setting. Connie and I went back to burn the last screen, the front portion that read ERA ‘08-‘09, by floodlight as we ate a quick dinner.
The guys had finished printing the white part. Some of the worse-off jackets had been printed with blue in an attempt to salvage the design. However, the blue was not lining up very well to the white, so the designs that had printed well the first time were left untouched.
Everyone picked up the pace to finish the last segment. SUUUUPER SILKSCREENING AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT.
It was late by the time we finished cleanup. I took the jackets that needed stains and smears washed out back home with me.
Thursday: COOKING/IRONING
The club presidents bought like 30 pounds of chicken. They got a headstart on cooking, defrosting chickens and peeling potatoes.
I spent most of the afternoon in the garage ironing jackets, heat-setting the designs into the fabric. Either the jacket or the ink was giving off fumes. I opened the garage door to get an air current going.
The few times I ventured into the kitchen, I walked into a bustling crowd of people cutting half-frozen chicken, peeling potatoes, cutting them into strips or cubes, or running around with pots and knives.
Our house was still busy in the evening. I finished ironing all the jackets - however, many of the jackets did not have blue printed on them, following Wednesday’s debates about taking that risk. After a lot of discussion, I decided to print blue anyways on my jackets and for anyone else who wanted it.
One failed stencil later, I managed to make an accurate print by looking through the gaps of the screen and tugging the jacket into position. Success! However, the screen had to be washed out every time, and the blue ink was running out.
Connie decided to introduce the guys to Karaoke Party. -_-
The chicken was cooked by the time everyone had to leave; Eric took the potatoes home with him. Overall, our prospects for International Food Day were looking good.
Friday: International Food Day: HUGE SUCCESS
Wayne picked me up in the morning so that we could get the club jackets and the food to school. So much chicken x_x
We set up frantically in the courtyard during advisory; we needed two tables for all of our food. Jessica’s banner was amazing. We taped it up behind our tables for all to see and bow down to.
We had a HUGE amount of food, the coolest club jackets (hand-printed!), and a LOT of buyers. The line of people at our table stretched halfway across the courtyard.
I had a great day! I had to leave to give my last Z-Club presentation before cleanup was over (and they took the club-photo-with-jackets after most of the non-seniors had left to go back to class D:<).
It was a great week, and I’m glad we got to do some silkscreening again. There are a lot of people dedicated to ERA. With our founding club members graduating this year, we all kinda wonder what will happen to the club next year.
Also, today I washed my club jacket in the washing machine for the first time. The ink didn’t come out! Success!
These past three weeks have been a hectic scramble to keep up with everything. Today is the only day I didn’t have to power-homework, and, it being a lovely day outside, I used it to take a quick bike ride around a few blocks before catching up on sleep.
Z-Club Drug Presenations
Anyways, not all of it has been homework stress. My last Z-Club presentation to the freshmen health classes was on the 20th. Z-Club is the club at our school that focuses on raising awareness about toxins and how they affect our health and environment. Since the school curriculum already focuses on the health aspect of drugs, our presentations were about the environmental impact. We discussed four different drugs; nicotine, marijuana, methamphetamine, and the big daddy of drug-related environmental damage, cocaine.
I really enjoyed these presentations. There are so many scary facts out there that nobody is aware of; while health is the dominant issue in the war on drugs, the environment suffers crippling damage as well. Here were some highlights from the presentation:
4 miles of paper go through one cigarette-making machine per hour.
The tobacco industry uses 12% of our world’s timber.
One tree produces 300 cigarettes, which is only enough for two weeks’ worth for the average pack-a-day smoker.
A cigarette butt takes 25 years to decompose. That shit is nasty.
In 1993, the U.S. alone produced 30,800 tons of cigarette trash (picture 1 cigarette butt). The demand is increasing.
Growing marijuana is illegal; therefore large-scale planters cut down trees and make plots in national forests. This screws with a very delicate ecosystem, and the use of pesticides results in bioaccumulation. Bioaccumulation is the process of toxins becoming more concentrated as you go up the food chain; the predators die off and population control disappears.
Governments have to come in to clean up the plots. It takes $15000 of your tax money to “clean” one acre. Ironically cleaning up is almost as messy as the plot itself.
For every pound of meth created in a lab, 5-7 pounds of toxic waste are produced and disposed of incorrectly. When it rains, the toxins run into the soil and waterways.
The number of children going into foster care as a result of meth abuse is increasing. It is statistically proven that women are more likely to become addicts than men, mostly from the stress of being single mothers.
The U.S. is the leading consumer of cocaine at 300 tons of cocaine per year, with demand rising.
80% of U.S. cocaine comes from Columbia, %70 of which is grown in the Amazon, our #1 source of oxygen and the largest ecosystem in the world.
In the Upper Huallaga Valley alone, 1.5 million liters of paraquat are used as pesticide for growing cocaine. Paraquat is so toxic that in many countries it is used as a suicide agent.
Cocaine and marijuana plots deplete the soil fertility. After the planters clear out a new plot and begin planting again, nothing will grow where their previous plots were.
Local farmers forget their earth-friendly growing methods and take up this method of chemical farming. They grow cocaine instead of food crops, creating starvation and cancer.
The best way to prevent any of this from happening is to simply cut off the process at the monetary source; the consumer. While the consumer may think that he or she isn’t directly responsible for the environmental impact (aside from the 30800 tons of cigarette trash), their money goes directly through the supplier to the source of the drugs.
We showed this video at the end of our presentation. An artist shows the visual effects of meth-usage with a clay sculpture.