Say NO to Mind Reading

If you are randomly asked which super power you'd want if you could have any one, chances are that mind reading comes to mind. And who wouldn't love to know exactly what your friends thought or all the deepest darkest secrets of your coworkers. In theory, it's pretty sweet.

Now, think about what this actually means. You will be able to hear in your own head whatever is running through the minds of however many people who are within a certain radius of you. All those thoughts will be piled up on top of each other as each person's separate inner monologue takes place within your brain. And they never go quiet, do they?

Here's an example of what is literally running through my brain while I'm in the middle of typing this:

what if I have don't have anything interesting to say I mean think obviously cause it's in my brain but anyway oh snap I need to study for my math test it's in let's see today is friday because I have youth group tonight and we're doing something with toilet paper kinda interesting sounding I hope Jason is there but then the next day is saturday then sunday then monday so technically three more days and I totally forgot what happened before christmas break was that trig functions or maybe rates but we did rates with every type of function but we had to learn it at some point wait wasn't there that thing with an h that equaled zero what if it's on the exam and I can't remember how to use it

This has probably gone on long enough for you to get a glimpse of how you just literally think things non stop and they run into each and overlap and jump all over the place. And that's just the main part, there's other things like the song you have stuck in your head plus maybe a part of you that's processing what's going on around you.

I really don't think a person could stay sane with all these intimate thoughts from so many people they might not even know happening inside their head. Would you even be able to distinguish your own thoughts amidst the foreign ones?

ALL the words

Not to be the party pooper, I was just thinking of how seriously unfun that super power would be when it comes down to the finite details that no one actually thinks to think about.

No Biggie

I have only realized that I have failed to share a pretty major milestone in my life. Seriously, it's all any conversation I have with an adult I slightly know or am just meeting is about. I need to go sit in the corner of shame for a while and think about what I've done. But first, the news.

As you can probably infer from when I straight up tell you I'm in my last year of high school, I'm in my last year of high school. That means I'm headed off for university next year which is a both terrifying and exciting thought. Terrifying in that everything will be new and you have to fend for yourself. I've heard many horror stories about how your prof doesn't care about you and that your final will be worth most of your marks. And then all the what ifs of me not being able to handle it and not finding a group of people that doesn't want to only party at all times going through my head doesn't help at all.

First though, you gotta apply. I sent in my applications about two weeks after we got our pins from OUAC, which is the website Ontarians apply through. No little than three days later, I got my first two acceptances, both from OttawaU. Maybe two or three days later, Carleton called in with news of acceptance as well! I actually worked hard in grade 11 so they liked what they saw I guess.

Here's a summary of what I got myself into: At OttawaU, I got in for mechanical engineering and physics while at Carleton I was accepted for engineering physics (I see a pattern here.) Both universities gave me a $3000 per year entrance scholarship (that's 12,000 bucks ladies and gents. Super helpful!) and Carleton threw in a $2000 eng. phys scholarship cause they like me. My final decision is to go to OttawaU for mechanical engineering and do coop because I hate the feeling of being in debt plus who can say no to a little on-the-job experience? Staying home is much cheaper so I went with that even though my dream school is the University of Waterloo where math and science are really big.


I'm glad I finally got it over with and have a destination post-high school. I'm still wavering over whether I made the right choice between engineering and physics since I enjoy my physics classes very much but haven't actually had the chance to try out mechanical engineering, I only know what I've heard. I REALLY don't want to be stuck with something that I don't enjoy doing. I guess it all has to be taken one step at a time.

One AWESOME thing that has come out of all this (besides getting in and getting scholarships) is that I finally have something concrete to tell people when they ask me what I'm thinking of doing next year. No vague answers, I can tell them what I'm going into and where and let them draw their own conclusions!

Google Translate is Life

If you have not discovered it yet, Google translate is pretty much the best thing ever. You can do so many things with it that are either productive or just plain amusing such as:

Sound smart by speaking in a different language. Impress your friends by simply translating a word or phrase into some other language and slipping it into everyday conversation. When your co-conversationers ask what in the world you just said, casually explain that it means this in this language. You'll sound smart and well-educated.

Be grammatically correct. If you've got a project due in French, Spanish or Elvish, no sweat, Google translate is actually pretty smart. I'm not saying it will, without fail, be exactly and utterly perfect every single time you use it but it sure is helpful by giving you different suggestions and all that. (Something to note is that I'm very sure that they don't offer translations for the Elf language yet. Or that it's taught in school. But you never know so I just kind of threw that in there.)

Play the Translating Game. If you have never tried this out, you don't know what you're missing. Basically, what you do is translate a word or sentence into a random other language, then translate whatever you got from that into another language and so on and so forth. By the time you go back to English, it will be completely different and quite hilarious.
For example, I translated "I have two cats, named Oreo and Gingersnap, who like to chase balls of fluff around the house and are super crazy" to Japanese, got a whole bunch of Japanese characters and, when I translated it back to English, I got "My name is super crazy like a ball of fluff to chase around the house and Gingersnap Oreos have two cats." Crazy, right?You can do even more languages to mess it up even more.

Sometimes you stumble on something so random like when I translated "fox" into Polish, got "lis", translated that back into English and got "November".
This is great to do when you're bored. Kills time instantly.

Make the voice that reads it out speak to people. This really creeps people out when you turn up the volume really loud and make the voice say something random. They don't know where it's coming from and it isn't a voice they recognize. It's really funny to watch their reactions! The only downside is that there is a limit to the amount of words you can make it say. But you can just feed the voice short sentences and then the sky's the limit!

The above reasons are why I think all you need to live a fulfilling life is Google translate.

Zombies are NOT my thing

I just finished reading the book This Is Not A Test by Courtney Summers and am terrified.

Goodreads summarizes it as: It’s the end of the world. Six students have taken cover in Cortege High but shelter is little comfort when the dead outside won’t stop pounding on the doors. One bite is all it takes to kill a person and bring them back as a monstrous version of their former self. To Sloane Price, that doesn’t sound so bad. Six months ago, her world collapsed and since then, she’s failed to find a reason to keep going. Now seems like the perfect time to give up. As Sloane eagerly waits for the barricades to fall, she’s forced to witness the apocalypse through the eyes of five people who actually want to live. But as the days crawl by, the motivations for survival change in startling ways and soon the group’s fate is determined less and less by what’s happening outside and more and more by the unpredictable and violent bids for life—and death—inside. When everything is gone, what do you hold on to?

The fact that they were so powerless against the zombies was terrifying and I was just sinking further and further into the couch as I read those scary parts.

I finished the book mainly because I wanted to know how they managed to get out of this situation but I did not enjoy scaring myself as I read. I do get adrenaline rushes from reading some scary books (Living life on the edge, I know.) but this was not my cup of tea.

The characters and all their problems and interactions were actually really good though so that made reading this a little less awful.

So I can't really say I recommend this book since I didn't really enjoy it but if you enjoy the good old zombie thriller that still manages to have some kissing in it, go for it.