The High School Years: Part 9 - The Trebuchet And The Super Bowl

Forget or missed a part? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

I know that a lot of this thus far has been about my relationship with Alura and that has essentially been the spinal cord in the body that was my last 2 years of high school, but for the next few parts, I am going to branch out from that a little bit more. During this time period of the next month or so, while things with Anna steadily improved overtime in the aftermath of Part 8, Alura pretty much chose to ignore everything and anything that I sent to her. For the first time, my chats with her and Anna were not at the forefront of my personal life of interest, therefore, they will not be on the forefront of this story. Just know that they are still where they are as I talk a little more about Kait and Kelly.

My relationship with Kait and Kelly took an interesting turn. We pretty much ignored each other for a while afterwards. No communication, no nothing. We were three separate people living 3 separate lives (well Kait and Kelly were always friends, but you get my point that there was not contact between me and them). Then all of a sudden I received an email from Kait claiming that I was “spreading false rumors again”. This was a preposterous accusation that had no merit and was completely untrue. And really, it was. Last time I was a bumbling idiot trying to lie my way out of any trouble, this time, though, I was completely innocent. Truly, I was.

I wondered where Kait was getting this information from. I thought about finding out. Where would Kait come up with such a thing? Was she making it up or did she legitimately hear this bullshit from someone? I thought sending Anna an email about this. Alura was completely ignoring me, but even though it seemed like things were going better for me and Anna, maybe I was just blind. I thought about emailing her and asking her about it……but then I thought better of it. Whether it was a result of a lie on her part, false information from someone else, or a straight-out delusion, it was not worth sending Anna another email about Kait. I was not going to potentially further put my friendship with her in jeopardy. I had been there once and it made me completely miserable. Kait just was not worth that.

However, I was still curious about it, so instead of emailing Anna and finding out what she knew, I emailed Kait and told her that wherever she got it from, it was bullshit. While there was some hesitation on their part, they did believe me and we got to talk about other things, such as our mile-run time and physics class. It wasn’t an argument either. It was a civilized conversation. A first for myself and Kait.

From there, our relationship grew and grew.

Sometimes in physics class, I would talk with Kait and Kelly sometimes before class about general things and other times we wouldn’t even acknowledge each other’s existence. There was kind of a hesitancy on both of our parts but there wasn’t any malice between us. I think they had over time forgiven me for what I did even though they’ve never explicitly said anything about it to me since the whole thing went down. Then one day, my physics lab group and their lab group (Kait and Kelly are their own group) worked together on a lab because their lab station was not yet set up and in order to get done they needed to join a group and they happened to choose my group. While working on this

This completely took me by surprise. After causing them so much headache at the beginning of the year, they actually asked me to join their group because they had been struggling on some of the labs and needed my help. Seeing as I did not feel like I fit in well with my group, I said yes to them and thus joined their group.

Our first big assignment together came in January of 2008. What was it, you ask? To build a trebuchet! No, seriously. Somehow we needed to use physics we had not learned yet to build a medieval weapon that we would later launch golf balls from for a grade. Yes, I have contemplated the totally legitimate thought that Mr. Johnson may be crazy. Biting sarcasm aside, Mr. Johnson is actually an excellent type of person to hang out at a bar with, have a few drinks, and watch a football game. Which as you can imagine, does not translate to being a brilliant physics teacher. But I digress….

So, what on earth would we do? 3 people, not planning on being physics majors anytime soon, were about to embark on an entertaining journey of building a medieval weapon. Mr. Johnson gave us time to work on the project in class, kind of necessary when you have clueless people building trebuchets. While not a physics major, Kait did not math like none other and she was a sophomore. I’m not even joking when I say that as a sophomore she was probably the second smartest math student in the school (she only does not get the consideration because Albert Einstein In Flip Flops went to Windy Hill at the same time). So naturally, she researched trebuchets online and discovered a really small one that required precise angle measurements. And by precise, I mean the thing would have been thrown off if we set 2 pieces of wood (yes we did use real pieces of wood, this was not a joke or anything) at an angle of 57.7 degrees as opposed to 57.6 degrees.

As you can imagine, our precision was not exactly precise and we that idea failed miserably. It took us a few days, but angles be damned, when your trebuchet is hardly 2 feet high and you are looking at others that are 5 and 6 feet, it does not matter how good your angles are, the damn thing is going to suck monkey ass in comparison. And before you say we should get an A for effort, part of the grading had to do with its performance in comparison to the other trebuchets. Part of me was petrified that not only could it not hurl a golf ball, but the weight of the golf ball in the pocket would be enough to knock it over. Disturbing on every front.

We did abandon that idea and after doing some more research found a more basic, taller, and not relying as much on angle precision trebuchet that would be buildable and if done right, at least competitive against the other trebs.

But class time was running low. There was no way we could complete this thing on time in class. People who knew a bit more about what they were doing barely got done and they did not scrap their idea midway through it. We had no choice but to meet on the weekend. Kait, Kelly, and I came to the conclusion that the best day for us would be Sunday. Super Bowl Sunday. In case you can’t compute what year we are in relation to football, I’m talking about Giants-Pats Super Bowl Sunday.

So while Fox was airing Super Bowl pregame shit, Kait and Kelly were coming to my house to work on a trebuchet. But seeing as it really is an impossible task to carry tons of wood out of Mr. Johnson’s room, we needed to go to The Home Depot to buy wood.

You know that whole stereotype about girls taking forever shopping? Well, guess what? It holds true for shopping for wood. Oh. My. Gosh. I swear we must have been there for at least a couple of hours just picking out the right wood to use. It was incredible.

So we finally get back to my house and it’s time to finish building this baby. Progress was slow, but we had a plan and we had the necessary materials. The one thing we did not have though, from the perspective of me, a football fan, was time. There was no way we were finishing before the start of the Super Bowl. And guess what? We didn’t.

Now I had mentioned in passing a few times that I wanted to watch the game (and invited them to stay as well) but, I was dedicated to the project. Only they were not dedicated to me.

“No, no, you need to be watching the game”, Kait would inform me.

“I am dedicated to this project, Kait, I don’t care about the game, I want to help”, I replied back.

We went back and forth on this for quite a bit. Until eventually she starts pushing me out the garage door and into the house. In other words, Kait was forcing me to watch the Super Bowl.

Naturally, my parents were wondering why I was watching the Super Bowl and not working on the trebuchet? I told them, and not even they could convince Kait to let me help. Disturbing, I know, especially seeing if nothing else, this was vintage Kait. The whole time Kait was forcing me in my house, Kelly was with the trebuchet laughing at the whole thing. She’s a quiet person so she would never do the forcing herself, but suffice to say, she found this amusing.

I check on Kait and Kelly every now and then just so that I prove to my parents that I actually care about the project, which I do, although they obviously thought that I was the most incompetent of our incompetent group. Come to think of it, if that was what they thought, they were absolutely right.

Eventually we, er, they, finish it! MIRAC LE!

Not football fans, I say goodbye to Kait and Kelly for the day and go back to watching the Super Bowl without worrying about two girls playing with wood in my garage. The 2nd half was about to start and with it, the end of a Patriots dynasty.

But this is not about sports, and even though we had finished building the trebuchet, this nightmare of a project was far from over.