What's an Ego Cat?

                Since I plan to use the phrase “ego cat” in conjunction with the thoughts of overfeeding and starvation, I figured that the least I could do is explain exactly what an ego cat is and where the term originated.

                It started with a Scholastic Bowl end-of-season get-together. M.G., H.B., D.K., and I met with our adviser for lunch at a local Olive Garden. We were just chatting when someone had the idea to make toasts. So we each made a personal toast to the people within our small little club. I was last to make my "speech" though I still hadn't made any plans as to what I was going to say. And so, I said the one thing that I could think of.

                Let me be the first to explain that I was not the first to tease M.G. for his black hole of an ego. It had been a joke that the club as a whole played on more than once on bus rides to matches, and fate was about to bring his ego to a new level of fame through 'ego cats'.

                So, back to the toast. A paraphrasing of the conversation that ensued is found below:

-M.G., you know those people who have cats? And they feed their cats waaay more than they should, so they just end up having these massive, fat cats walking around their houses?

-Yeah…

-Well, you’re a massively fat cat owner, except instead of a cat, you have an ego. And you just keep feeding it over and over again until it becomes humongous, so you have a fat ego… Cat…

            And thus, ‘ego cat’ was born. Today it is used as a regular vocabulary word in the daily linguistic habits of the Scholastic Bowl team and their friends. Be cool like the Alden Scholastic Bowl team. Embrace the Ego Cat… And then feed it, because it looks a little half-starved.

Turning a New Leaf

Starting now, things are going to be changing here. No more will answers with semi- nerdy twists be given to prompts from Online Publishing teachers. No. This blog is going to get a little less cool, supposing that your idea of "cool" is worshiping professional athletes or actresses. Instead of things I’ve been posting before, I'll be starting a few new things- book reviews/lists, nerd rants, poetry and short stories, and personal updates- as well as continuing with things that I deem to be relatively exciting (past readers will note the existence of Otaku Zone and Word War III). You should also be following the Twitter page for this blog, which will let all of you know when new blogs are posted here. Follow @srg_tntm for updates!

Contest! If someone can think of a catchy, nerd-friendly catch-phrase or slogan for the end of this blog, 1,000 Awesome Points will be fed to your ego cat (see the blog “What’s an Ego Cat?” for clarification).

I'm Best at Humiliating Myself

My life is a series of embarrassing moments broken only by infrequent breaks of normalcy. I’ve done a lot of embarrassing things. Trust me. I’ve fallen up stairs, fallen down stairs, tripped over flat surfaces, trip over not-so-flat surfaces, blurt out incorrect statements in class with an extreme amount of confidence, and think that I’m being funny when in actuality I’m just being ridiculously stupid. That being said, I don’t think I can tell just one embarrassing tale about myself. At least, not in detail. So, a list of things that I’ve done that embarrassed me with minimal detail!

• I thought I could dance… But I really, really can’t, or at least shouldn’t.
• When  my cat walks away from me, I make like it’s a soap opera and firmly tell him that I never loved him anyway (which is a massive lie). 
• I frequently find myself slipping into nerdy rants… And usually nobody listens. 
•  Some of my favorite people in this world are people who intentionally teach me things 
• I frequently encounter “Nerd Girl Problems” 
• Example: I went to the beach with a paperback and read for a while, then went swimming. When I left, I pushed the book against my chest, and by the time I got home my book cover was ruined.
• Example: I have more fictional friends than I do actual friends. 

• I often say something along the lines of “Hey, guys, check this out!” This statement is almost always followed by the statement, “Uh… Pretend you didn’t see that…”
• Some of my favorite songs are created and sung by Japanese artists. That would be pretty cool, except the majority of them are related in some way to anime. And it probably wouldn’t be as embarrassing if I didn’t try to sing along as if I understood what they were saying (which I don’t).

There are a lot of other things that I do or have done that are incredibly embarrassing, but I doubt that anyone who really wants to blackmail me needs any more ammunition against me than I have already provided to you.

Word War III: Exploring American and British English Grammar

Try to think of your middle school life. Easy classes, unstable friendship foundations, a more easygoing atmosphere… Remember that foreign language course from seventh and eighth grade? Learning another language is hard, particularly when it comes to sentence structure, subject-verb agreement, and nitpicky things such as spelling. Now think of learning a different dialect of your current language. Just as there are many differences between Hebrew and Italian, there are differences between Spanish spoken in Mexico and Spanish spoken in Spain. The same applies to the English language as well. English spoken here in the United States is similar to English spoken in Britain. Of course, it would only be fair to remember that English is a wonky language to begin with, having just as many rules as exceptions to rules. This fact applies to both British English and American English. Only certain things like spelling and minor grammar rules are different. My hope is that anyone who reads these will walk away with a better understanding of the differences between American English and British English (Note: Future Word War III blogs will mostly feature the differences in structure and vocabulary between American English and other foreign languages, but I would eventually like to expand that to compare two foreign languages against each other) (Other note: Expect all Word War III blogs to be relatively long).

So, the first and most obvious difference between American English and British English is the spelling. Commonly, words that end in “-or” in the United States will end in “-our” in Britain. Words like “color”, “flavor”, and “honor” would be spelled with the “-our” ending across the pond (“colour”, “flavour”, and “honour”). Some words that end with the letters “-er” in American English are reversed in British English. For example, the American spelling of the word “theater” is spelled “theatre” in Britain. The same rule applies to words such as “center” (“centre”) and “meter” (“metre”). In America, words such as “patronize” or “hypothesize” must be spelled with an “-ize” ending while in Britain it is acceptable to spell them the American way or as “patronise” or “hypothesise”. Many other endings of words are different, but the ones listed and explained above are the most common spelling differences.

There are a lot of insane and complex rules in both American grammar and British grammar. I don’t know them all, and I wouldn’t expect anyone reading this to know all of them either (but if you notice that I make a mistake, please let me know in the comments). So, let’s just go over the very basic differences. In Britain, phrases usually use present perfect tense (a tense used to relate events happening in the past to the present, as seen in sentences such as “he has broken his leg.” {he broke the leg in the past, but the past action is related to the present in that his leg is still broken}). In America, present perfect tense is used in addition to the simple past tense (a tense used to describe any event in the past, as seen in sentences such as “I went to my grandfather’s house.”). These differences in sentence structure drive the major differences in grammar. Without getting into specific differences (because this blog is quickly approaching five hundred and fifty words), British English seems to generally be more formal than informal while American English usually has a more relaxed structure.

These differences between the English language gives all English speakers the ability to remain unique within themselves as language-speakers. We can determine a person’s nationality by their speech or text patterns (ex, the difference between “grey” and “gray”, or “you needn’t fret” and “you don’t need to fret”) unless personal preference of spelling takes over. Besides, it just wouldn’t be any fun if we were all speaking the same language with no variation. To me, the fact that there can still be so many regional differences between a language without needing to consider them different languages is complete amazing, and I know that there are others who believe this too.

The Correlation Between Hopes and Failures

Let’s talk a bit about hopes. They’re fickle things, really, changing from day to day like the weather; mildly steady for about a week before being lost and forgotten in the fog of the human mind. We all hope; we all dream; we all hope that one day we’ll actually have enough courage and determination to follow through and actually see one of these hopes through to the end. But time after time we let ourselves down, distracted by the latest gadget, the most recent post on (insert media site here), the next best thought that enters our fragile heads. We are so easily swayed by what is right in front of us. And maybe that’s the problem.

I myself have had several ideologies of how my life would be by the time that I graduated high school. I would be well on my way to finishing my first novel. As a person who has struggled with their weight and the constant flood of self-hating because of it since I was little, I imagined a self who was comfortable in her skin regardless of the size (though I admit that I remained hopeful that I would perhaps be wearing skin that wasn’t so big). The harsh cold reality of the fact is that at least half of what I had hoped to accomplish as of four years ago never happened. I have novels that are infantile, barely out of the second chapter with a style that I probably wouldn’t recognize anymore as my own. I am still extremely self-conscious and have a volatilely negative perception of myself, which has refused to shrink despite many attempts to fix it. These now simply feel like childhood fantasies, the type of idea that all children get when they are little and imagine their futures in twenty years: famous, more money than they know what to do with, a spouse, children. There are probably hundreds of reasons that I haven’t been successful in many things, but I credit it at least partially to my faith that hope and hope alone could pull me through my problems. That isn’t the way that this world works. If you only hope for something, your chances of getting what you want is negligible unless you’re a Disney princess. You actually have to work for it, and want it more than anything else. And if you do fail… Maybe you just didn’t want it badly enough to begin with.