One last standing ovation

After I got home from church today, I got this message from my favorite Colombian:

Vie Bizarre: Casey, post your speech from yesterday in your blog

So, because Laura told me to, here’s the speech I gave last night at IB Senior Celebration:

Fellow students, teachers, parents, friends, Mr. McGonegal:

It’s been a crazy four years: sleepless nights, endless lectures, perpetual work, and bottomless cups of coffee. And now we’re growing up, about to venture out into a world where we have to do all of this grown-up stuff: get jobs, pay taxes, … get jobs. It almost seems impossible that these past four years have sneaked up on us so quickly. But, I will remind you that in the time since we entered the hallowed halls of PHUHS, so much has happened that we may have once deemed impossible. The Buccaneers won the Super Bowl, the Red Sox won the World Series, J-Lo and Ben broke up. So, maybe our progression into a big people school was inevitable.

But still, we’re all human. And humans will remember. Humans will reminisce. Humans will think back on the years we’ve spent roaming the hallways of PHU and remember them fondly. What will you remember? Will you remember how no matter where you sat, Señora Gleason feng suied you without fail? Will you remember Mr. Valdez’s unhealthy obsession with Julia Roberts? Or maybe it’ll be the way Pete Just would keep his desk absolutely barren (like his head).

Personally, I’ll remember all of the stuff I didn’t quite understand. Like matrices (sorry, Math Department…). Like who actually killed William Robinson. Like Mr. Coffman’s grading system. And like how in the world I am expected to eat a whole elephant.

To the parents here tonight: thank you for supporting your child through these last four years. Without your support, they wouldn’t be here. And if they weren’t here, I would have no friends. So, thank you. I’m sure they’ll thank you too, as it’ll make college that much easier. That is, they’ll thank you right after they get done screaming, “WHY?! WHY HAVE YOU DONE THIS TO ME!?”

To the faculty and staff here tonight: Henceforth, you will be referred to as officers, Mr. Burkett and Ms. Lowry as marshals, and Dr. Brown as warden. You run a tight ship (especially you, Mrs. Kolhoff), but in the end we know that it’s for our betterment. Palm Harbor is the single best place we could be spending our young and malleable years. Thank you for training us to be responsible young people. And while I use the word “responsible” loosely, I’m sure that you know how much you have impacted our lives.

And finally, to the 40% of you who are NOT going to UF: It’s been a pleasure to have known you. I speak on behalf of everyone who is moving two and a half hours up the Interstate (two if you drive like we do) when I say that we will miss you dearly. The bonds we have formed on this campus are too strong to break, so make sure you keep in touch with us, wherever you go. And yes, that does mean “Facebook me!”

Folks, this is so surreal. Unlike the bouncy-bouncy of the moon landings and the chippy-chippy of the Great Pyramids, this is actually happening. You see the movie Grease and you think that a Danny Zuko-like graduation will never happen to you. But, short of a magic red convertible flying into the sky, it’s here. And it’s happening. Now we know that what once seemed so impossible, so far off in the distance, is truly possible. Now, it’s up to us to make the best of our own futures.

Thank you, Palm Harbor University High School. And thank you, everyone. We’re all in this together.

See you in Gainesville!

Best thing since sliced bread

For Christmas, Ian got me a network adapter for my Playstation 2. I haven’t been able to use it until now, though, because I needed a wireless LAN adapter so that I wouldn’t have to run the world’s longest CAT5 cable through my house. Now I’ve got the wireless bridge, so all is well.

Ideally, Ian would get a Playstation 2 and a copy of Madden ’06 so that I could beat him from home while he’s living in Gainesville. However, he hasn’t purchased a console yet, so I’m stuck playing games of Madden with a bunch of Redskins fans who feel that they have something to prove (i.e. they can win with more than 120 total yards of offense and aren’t handed the game by the refs).

But let me tell you right now: this is awesome. I can connect with anyone around the world and play football with them. It will come in quite handy during the offseason when all I have to enjoy is baseball and hockey, which are the lesser of American sports because white people are generally physically inept. I guess I’ve still got basketball, but I refuse to watch a sport wherein everyone participating has a rap album. Anyway, I digress.

That said, if anyone has a Playstation 2, a network adapter, Madden ’06, and the desire to be completely annihilated, go ahead and contact me so that we can duke it out on the field.

I love technology.

The Return of the Clapper

If you recall, last Christmas I told you about the greatest Christmas gift I had ever received or ever would receive. Santa gave me my Clapper, and all was right with the world.

What I didn’t tell you, however, was the perilous tale of how I managed to break my Clapper mere weeks after getting it. A word to the wise: never vacuum with your Dirt Devil plugged into a Clapper. It’ll work, but as you get closer and closer to the electrical outlet, the Clapper mistakes the moaning and groaning of the vacuum for innocent bouts of applause, causing the vacuum cleaner to turn on and off so much that the fuses and electronic components of the Clapper end up fried. In honor of Clapper #1′s memory, therefore, I have refused to clean my carpet for a year. It would be too traumatic.

This Christmas, though, I got a replacement Clapper. I have yet to hook it up to anything, though I think I’ll just put it on my lava lamp and this neon Corona Extra sign that my Mom stole from a bar for me.

The point of this story, though, is that Santa did it once again. Right when I thought that nothing could be worse because I had to undertake the arduous task of flipping a switch to turn on my lamp, good ole Chris Cringle came through in the clutch to brighten my life. And for that, I am forever grateful.

Thunder's Bad Day in School

In honor of my 18th birthday, I thought I’d take the opportunity to show you how my genius has remained steadfast throughout my growth. Take, for example, an epic piece I wrote in kindergarten. For 12 years, it has made readers laugh, cry, and inevitably learn something about themselves and the state of mankind.

Consider the following (text in bold, comments in italics):

“Thunder’s Bad Day in School,” by Casey Peterson

Note: Thunder is a brontosaurus, and does not resemble in any way the stupid tyrannosaurus rex sticker my teacher slapped on at the end. Gosh.

“Thunder, sit down!” the kids say. So he sat down. Uh oh! Gum on the seat! Thunder is stuck on the seat on the bus.

Notice the detail given to that piece of gum. It’s not just a blob, like the rest of the photo, but actually resembles a chewed wad of Bubblicious. The idea there was that the reader would focus upon that main piece while the other parts of the picture sort of revolve around it.

The driver has to unscrew the bus seat because Thunder is stuck to the seat. Then, as he got to the bus driver’s seat, he couldn’t get through the door. So he had to walk sideways through the doorway.

No human elements were introduced into the picture like the bus driver’s hand to portray the insatiable sentiment of loneliness in a dreary and unforgiving world that Thunder is experiencing presently. Also, the basic ideals of the three-element plot that is implemented in many, many fairy tales begins to take shape here. Problem 1: Gum on the seat. Problem 2: An immovable seat. Problem 3: You’ll see.

When Thunder got to school, he got off the bus, he got into his red line, he got inside the school, and he sat down in his cubby. Then, he gets stuck in his…

To clarify, the “red line” is a colloquialism to my particular elementary school, as it was a line painted on the ground upon which you were until the school opened its doors in the morning. Also, it was cool at my school to sit in your “cubby,” which was pretty much a locker sans door and made of pressed cardboard. We hung our lunch boxes there. You should pay special attention here to the suspense implemented by the discontinuation of the final sentence. Even in kindergarten, I knew that suspense is a vital component necessary for making any climax more exaggerated.

Cubby! Then he goes home with the cubby on his back and the bus seat on his bottom.

Problem 3 has arrived! It’s the cubby on the head, which is pretty much the oldest trick in the book. I like how suddenly I changed my mind about the type of dinosaur Thunder is, which caused me to draw him like Nessie of Loch Ness fame. I did this to convey the inherent feeling of belittlement within Thunder: with the entirety of the world looking upon him, he had to come to terms with the fact that the being he had become was totally different from the Brontosaurus that got on the bus that morning. He was now devoid of all confidence and made his sojourn home, dejected and alone.

By Casey Aostin Peterson, C.A.P.

I included my picture along with Thunder’s on this page to convey the message that Thunder’s tale is not an isolated event. Deep down, aren’t we all a little like Thunder, green and herbivorous? Also, I used the less common spelling of my middle name to make it look fancy and European.

The End

This piece serves two purposes. There’s the obvious fact that it exists to formally end Thunder’s tale of hope and heartache, but there’s something deeper in the conglomeration of pictures gathered below the text. The rain clouds, rain, and mud all serve to convey a motif of sadness and hatred, but the smiling sun in the midst of all of Mother Nature’s fury hints at a small bit of hope: hope that Thunder had, hope that the author has, and hope that, I think, exists deep down in the hearts of every person who is to read this classic piece of modern American literature.

Going up!

When I awoke this morning, I had no idea that this day would amount to what it turned out to be. I rose, took a shower, got my coffee, and went to school as usual, never suspecting that the day would hold anything as wonderful as the events that transpired.

Surprise.

After lunch, I was given the honor of riding in the school elevator for the first time in my academic career. I was on the ground level outside of Mr. Coffman’s room, complaining that I had to walk an unreasonable distance to the stairs so that I could get to my coaching class in Mr. Pete Just’s room – a location directly above where I was. I would have had to walk so far to get to a room that I could physically see.

That’s when Lizzie Wellings lent me her elevator key. God bless her.

The moral of the story: make friends with cripples, because they will make your day that much sweeter.

Chance taken

If you talk to anyone who has known me for more than four minutes, they’ll all tell you the same thing: out of general principle, I am diametrically opposed to most (if not all) forms of affectionate interaction. I say this just to give a general idea of how far I actually went out on a limb this morning.

Every morning, I go to the local Krispy Kreme and order a medium bold coffee (with whole milk and three sugars) before I pick up my carpool (which, by the way, is very funny when Angus tries to get into my super-cramped backseat). I’ve gone every weekday since the start of school and have become quite the regular – most of the time, the lady who serves me every day only charges me 50 cents instead of the usual 99.

But for some reason, today I was driven to change my scheme. Instead of pulling up to the speaker box in the always empty drive thru lane and saying the usual line (“Just a medium bold coffee with whole milk and three sugars, please”), I decided to call her by the name that I had noticed on her name tag two days prior.

“Good morning, Debbie – I’ll just have my medium coffee with who-”

She cut me off and said, “Okay, pull up, sweetie pie.”

My friends, it seems that such a personal remark worked in my favor. Instead of a cup of coffee and the newspaper that comes with it, Debbie treated me to a doughnut in addition to my usual order. It was hot and delicious. Probably even more delicious because it was free.

Either way, this could be a lesson: once you’re comfortable with a person, once you’ve gotten to know them, once you’re no longer threatened by their strangeness, feel free to take that extra step and refer to your fellow human by name.

It might get you a free doughnut.

Faster than a speeding bird

At minor league baseball games, there are usually a bunch of scouts with radar guns behind home plate who keep track of how pitchers perform.

Tonight, one of them clocked me at a depressing .86 miles per hour during my nightly race around the bases with some lucky kid. They say, though, that I improved since my last race, which was run at .84 miles per hour.

The sad thing about all of this is the fact that during the competition, even though I must lose, _I’m trying_.

Why my job is cooler than yours

I don’t feel that my previous and rather nebulous description of my new job is sufficient enough to completely describe the awesomeness thereof.

Last Saturday as I was showering, my good brother Ian knocked on my door and said, “Dude! I’ve got the perfect job for you!” So, after getting dressed, I went to his room to see what the entire hubbub was about. It turned out that he had seen an advertisement on the Dunedin Blue Jays’ Web site about a need for a mascot. And here’s the kicker, folks: no experience was necessary.

So, after pacing around and dialing six digits like a little schoolgirl who just wants to breathe heavily into the receiver and hear that cute boy from English class answer the phone, I called a contact with the team and left a message regarding my interest in the position. I hadn’t heard back from them for a few days, so I assumed they had found someone more favorable for the position.

Therefore, when I got a callback on Wednesday of last week, I was adequately surprised. The good folks from the Blue Jays wanted to meet with me that evening before their game against the Lakeland Tigers, an offer which I immediately accepted. I met my contact with the team and we had a nice interview in the box office of Knology Park.

I returned on Thursday’s game against the Tampa Yankees to learn the ropes from Dave, a freelance mascot who knows what he’s doing. It was a good thing, too. I wouldn’t have had any idea how to do the mascot thing.

Then, on Friday night, it was my turn. I donned the outrageously warm blue fur and proceeded to mess with each and every person in the stands at least once. I raced a kid from first to third base after the second inning. He smoked me. After the last out of the third, I participated in a game in which I threw rubber chickens into the air and two kids with giant clown pants tried to catch them in their festively colored garments. By the time the fourth inning rolled around, I was atop the dugout and entertaining the cozy Dunedin crowd like there was no tomorrow. And when the game encountered the seventh inning stretch, I led the masses in a stirring rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

And by the end of the eighth, I was out of costume and restoring my original body temperature in the stands while watching one of the better extra inning ballgames of my short existence. And the best part of it all was that in normal clothes, no one in the stands was wise to my alter ego as D Jay, the happy-go-lucky Blue Jay.

I had a lot of fun last night. The only downfall of the job is its heat factor, but other than that, it’s a veritable perk machine. Free drinks; free baseball; the opportunity to say, “Hey ladies, I’m a mascot” and a schedule that mandates only 2.5 – 3 hours of work whenever I’m scheduled to appear. And the kids love me, so that’s nice too.

But the best part, my friends, is the fact that I am the first kid I know to actually be on the front of a real, live baseball card. One day, I’ll get some and sell them autographed for $19.99 on ebay.

Moving down the dial

I know I don’t usually venture outside of my thirty year old box when it comes to music, but I recently acquired the “Bishop Allen”:http://www.bishopallen.com/ _Charm School_ release, and believe me when I say that this little indie band is going to be big one day. Very big.

Ode to Gravity

Just when you think nothing can look up, things fall down. Perhaps I’m being a bit too cryptic.

Today, as I took a jolly jaunt around the neighborhood with the dog, I got to thinking as each of my feet hit the ground. I thought about lots of stuff, but mostly how thankful I am for gravity’s perfect attendance record.

Sure, you can overlook it as easily as one takes breathing or meiosis for granted. But once you take into consideration the fact that in billions of years, gravity hasn’t taken one sick day, governmental holiday, or weekend in its timeshare in Southern San Bernardino. Gravity doesn’t even go home: it spends day after day cooped up in its little office, ordering in Chinese food on the company’s budget.

And how are we beneficiaries of gravity’s undaunted work ethic? Everything we hold dear, gravity, too, holds near. However, gravity is not so developed as a workaholic tot he point of overbearing dominance upon the surface of the earth. That is, gravity is like a cool babysitter that holds its children close but allows a certain degree of independence. While we are held to the globe like a fly on spherical sticky paper, gravity allows us to lift our feet to move.

For its unceasing respect for the terrestrial responsibility to which it has been ascribed, for the dominant execution of its duty, and for its flexibility that correlates with our human desire for controlled independence, I commend Gravity and owe to her much of my good fortune.