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Lost in Translation

As I told in the guest post for Teenage Blogger Central, the Dutch seniors pull pranks on the rest of the school on their very last day before Central Examinations start. This day is traditionally called 'Kolderdag'. Kolderdag was forbidden at my school because some idiots flooded the school hall. The school hall didn't like that and the floor boards decided to act like a sponge and eventually turned into a swamp. So no more Kolderdag pranks at Krimpenerwaard College...
Until a brave group of vwo-students did the unexpected: they asked permission for a prank and got it! So last Thursday night, my classmates and I made sure the school would never forget us and our pranks.
I was photobombed XD
'Harmless' pranks
Because of that flooded school hall, we had to think of some harmless pranks. Stuff that wouldn't break or damage other stuff. We came up with a few plans: filling the principal's office with balloons, wrapping the computers and desks at the administration area in clingfilm, blocking the hallway to the teacher's room with plastic cups filled with water. And when we got permission, we were so excited.
But then the havo-seniors came along. They hadn't asked permission for anything. Out of the blue, they started throwing with eggs, flour, for some weird reason even mandarins and then worms... Oh, and then they decided to flood the hallway to the library.
After that 'prank', no one was sure if we were still allowed to pull our pranks. But Thursday came along and at 7pm we were let into the school to set everything up.

I was more or less in charge of the balloon prank, since I (well actually my Mom :P ) managed to get 500 balloons from the local supermarket, 200 from the shoe store and another 180 from the Opel dealer. V. and I bought some colored balloons (200) and some other people brought leftover balloons from birthday parties. All together, we had a little over a 1000 balloons. At the end of the night, the principal's office looked like this:
Nothing was broken, except his desk... We had decided to fill some of the balloons with confetti, so it would be even more of a mess when they tried to pop the balloons. Roos and I attached some of these balloons to the ceiling. This involved a lot of climbing on furniture and almost falling of furniture and then almost breaking furniture. Roos climbed onto the principal's desk, when we suddenly heard a loud CRACK.
'Please tell me that was a balloon,' I murmured.
'That was not a balloon...'
We were in trouble... Panick struck. Until a guy said: 'Wait, the desk just slid off a piece of wood. I can put it back on.' And so he did. Apparently, we hadn't broken anything. The desk just had a moronic design.

Clingfilm and Cups
Anyone who's ever been at the administration area knows that the ladies who work there can be cruel. Mean. Nasty. S.D. hates them with a passion. She took charge of Operation Clingfilm. Desks, computers, chairs, everything got covered in clingfilm. Including S.D. herself. The rest of my class, including myself, finished the Balloon Prank and then went to help with the Cup Cover. Because there was no piece of floor to be left for the teachers to stand on. It all had to be covered with plastic cups. We filled them with water (added tea bags to some of them) and put them on the floor. Everyone helped. I sat side by side with a guy who's never spoken to me before, happily chatting and working. Our entire class was suddenly a team, one big group of seniors, instead of the patchwork of alliances we usually are. 
It was wonderful to see everyone working together, everyone getting along and most of all helping eachother out, passing eachother buckets of water and more cups. But even though everyone helped, it took hours to finish it.

But the result was totally worth it. 12.000 plastic cups covered an area of more than 100 square metres. Litres and litres of water were used to fill the cups. Even more water got spilled. A stray garbage can was used as a bucket - and left on the spot, also filled with water.

Meanwhile the artsy people drew the most wonderful mural my school has ever seen. 6 VWO is the official name of our class. They painted it on the wall in the school colors, bright blue and green, and made the V into the mask from V for Vendetta.

While I was putting down cups of water, my friends were turning the school into total chaos. Harmless chaos, but still, chaos is chaos.
The lockers were wrapped in leftover clingfilm. Garbage bins were thrown on top of lockers. Chairs were tied together into grotesque statues. An actual statue was renamed to 'School Anus', because it looked like a butt... Every painting in the school suddenly hung askew. The toilets were blocked with clingfilm, so the first one who peed the next day peed on him/herself. The words '6VWO' and '6V' were everywhere, on balloons, on pieces of paper, on the windows of the principal's office and even duct-taped on the floor of the school hall.
When we left the school at 10 pm, it looked like... like... like a bunch of seniors pulled a prank :)

The next morning, while I was still in bed, sleeping the day away, V. and some others went to school to see the reactions of the teachers. They filmed it, so the lazy people like me got to see the reactions too. Most of the teachers took it amazingly well. The principal's reaction was the best. He walked in, saw all the cups, then tried to get out of the school again (there was a freaking security guard to keep us out of the school that day), demanded to be let out of the school and when he finally got out, he said one word to my classmates: 'AWESOME!'

Our pranks were highly appreciated by all the teachers. They hadn't had a good laugh on Kolderdag in years. One of my teachers even told me that we made her day after the awful foodfight the havo-students caused. We even made it to the school's Facebook page that usually's never used.
After one long night at school, way too many balloons and even more plastic cups, after dozens of laughing teachers, we know one thing for sure about our class:
Krimpenerwaard College's class of 2014 was freaking AWESOME

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If everything goes according to plan, I'll get my diploma on June 26th. A four hour ceremony will take place on that day in the school hall. I had no idea how this could possibly take four whole hours, but now I know. Part of the tradition, part that I never knew of, is that the mentors of the graduates tell a little something about their graduates.
My mentor is a good guy, but when he handed out the sheets with questions to base his speeches on, he should have known he was making a mistake. S.D. and I did mine together, which always means ridiculousness. My mentor surely wasn't expecting this to happen.

Name: Envy Fisher

Study: German at Hogeschool Rotterdam (decided to switch from English to German at the very last moment)

What are your positive features?
  • sense of humor!!! (says S.D.)
  • smart
  • great memory for pointless stuff, like the number of days left till the next Marvel movie (see 'things I'll remember')
What are your negative features?
  • Too critical
  • Too much of a perfectionist
  • easily annoyed
  • known for holding grduges
  • good at hating stuff I'm not good at
  • way too good at listing my own flaws
What will you always remember from your time at Krimpenerwaard College?
  • S.D.'s doodles in my math notebook
  • the releasedate of every Marvel movie
  • our hilarious math day in 11th grade
  • Maze's smelly lunches
  • the Tale of the Drowning Otter
  • the bench and plant from the administration area
  • Hodor (S.D. and I used to talk like Hodor during math)
  • Potoooooooo (we switched to Potoooooooo when we got bored with Hodor)
  • C6 (I could explain this, but it'll make me look like a stalker, so I won't)
Anything else on school, yourself or your plans for the future?
In a few years I'll be living in San Francisco with a man who also hates Superman :)

I can barely wait till June. This is going to be one hell of a speech!
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Today I went to my final Latin class. For six years I've studied a language that no one speaks, a language that is annoyingly complex and freakishly weird (what language needs seven different verbs that all mean 'to kill'?! Or a word for elegant feet?!).
I am going to miss those classes. I've always liked Latin, saw it as a puzzle I had to solve. There were times when I was less than amused by a certain poem I had to translate.  But when I look back on the last six years, Latin was definitely my favorite subject. I'm also quite good at it. When most people hear that, they ask me stuff like: 'How do you say 'I want to be a flying pig when I grow up' in Latin?'. I always give them the same answer: 'No idea.'

Some actual information
The focus of my Latin classes was on translating, speaking Latin was never part of the curriculum. Why? Because it's way to hard. Romans like to throw all their words into a blender, blend them, take a quick look to see if their sentence-smoothies are confusing enough already and when they are, blend them some more just to make sure. No worries though, they've got a complex system of cases to make sense of their nonsense: the subject is in the nominativus, the genitivus is used for property and ownership stuff (excuse my lack of Englishness today), the indirect object is in the dativus and the object in the accusativus. Everything else is in the ablativus. To make it more confusing: every noun has another way of changing when it's in another case and prepositions and verbs can have influence on the case, but not always.
What's more? Oh right, almost forgot about that: Romans hate subjects, so they presume you know who or what is the subject when you see the end of the finite verb. So amas means 'you love', but amat means 'he loves'. And then, because the Romans have fifty thousend different tenses in present, past and future, verbs can change even more. So amavit means 'he loved', but then amabit means 'he will love'. Good thing the Romans didn't have computers; a typo would have been a downright disaster.

And you're still asking me if I can speak Latin? Okay, okay, I speak a little Latin. Four sentences to be exact. And they aren't exactly helpful either...

'Habeo famem'
Habeo: to have, first person, present tense, 'I have' 
Famem: accusativus of the word fames, meaining 'hunger'
In correct English: I am hungry

If you ever find yourself in the streets of Ancient Rome, hungry after a really good gladiator fight but without a clue of where to get yourself some food, you could tell people you're hungry by saying 'habeo famem'.
Warning: though there were some nice lads who called themselves emperors and handed out bread to the hungry and the poor, there were also some assholes who got to be emperors. Be careful when you say 'habeo famem'; it might get you some food, it might get you killed by annoyed emperors and no matter who the actual emperor is at that moment, there's always a chance of getting killed by other Romans who just don't like your hungry ass.

'Mortuusne es?'
Mortuus: 'dead'
Ne: shows us we're dealing with a question, otherwise totally useless
Es: to be, second person, present tense, 'you are'
In correct English: Are you dead?

Apparently, this is what they ask the pope when the poor guy dies in his sleep, chokes on his food, gets attacked by the stubborn pigeons of Rome or whatever. If the pope dies, someone, probably a cardinal (I wasn't paying attention when this was told), picks him up or shakes the old guy a little or dangles him from one of the balconies of the Vatican and asks: 'Mortuusne es?'
If the pope responds, he's obviously not dead. If the pope doesn't respond, he is dead and the people of the Vatican can be proud of themselves for asking a dead person in Latin if he was dead.

'Jupiter in templo sedet'
Jupiter: Roman version of Zeus
in templo: in the temple (yeah, sometimes it's as easy as that)
sedet: to sit, thrid person, present tense, 'sits'
In correct English: Jupiter sits in the temple.

The most useless sentence I've ever learned is also the one I'll never forget. It was the first sentence I ever translated. Jupiter sits in the temple. Good for Jupiter. Now can we get on to the more interesting things? Nope, first we have to translate five more sentences telling me that Jupiter sits next to Juno and he has a scepter... Halfway through my first Latin class, I was bored to death with Jupiter. Six years later, I still am.

'Cucurbitam describe!'
Cucurbitam: accusativus of cucurbita, meaning 'pumpkin'
Describe: imperative of describere, meaning 'to draw'
In correct English: Draw a pumpkin!

The silliest sentence I translated must be this one. Draw a pumpkin!
There's a story behind it, though. Once upon a time in Ancient Rome, there was an emperor who had his head up his ass and thought he was the greatest architect of all times. He forgot about the truly great architect Apollodorus, who had been the most important architect in Roman Europe when Trajanus was emperor. So the empreror, Hadrian (yes, the guy from the wall), showed Apollodorus his blueprints, which weren't actual blueprints back then, but as I said, my English isn't at it's best today.
Apollodorus took a look and wasn't impressed. Not at all. Apollodorus was insulted by the arrogance of Hadrian and said to the emperor: 'You know nothing about architecture! Cucurbitam describe! Draw a pumpkin!'
BURN! Nah, not really, because Hadrian felt threatened by Apollodorus and had him killed. And then they lived happily ever after. Except Apollodorus of course.

Can you curse in Latin, Envy?
No. Just no. I can command people to draw a pumpkin. I can tell them I'm hungry. I can ask them if they're dead. I can even tell you in which temple Jupiter likes to sit on his ass and argues with his wife and be proud of his scepter (that sounded wrong, but I didn't mean it that way. Honestly, I didn't. Maybe I read too much Catullus poems). But that's it. I'm sorry, but that 's it.

Vale!
Your blogger Invidia Piscator
Muahaha, see what I did there? That's right, I said goodbye in Latin and translated my own name to Latin. So maybe I can curse in Latin. You'll never know ;)
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When you go to a movie with me, prepare for total chaos. Why? Because I'm overexcited every single time I go to the cinema :D I actually have a whole list of movies I want to see in 2014. As a kid I never went to see a movie, so now every single one is special and deserves a three month countdown. Last week's movie: Captain America: the Winter Soldier.

Since Rosanne's boyfriend left for New York, we've become closer again. So when E. kinda let me down, we went to the new Captain America movie together. Was it total chaos? A little. Mostly because I was bouncing around the house with excitement, didn't have 3D glasses and Rosanne thought we could make it to the cinema in 20 minutes and I thought we couldn't.
As soon as Rosanne drove up in front of my house, I ran out without putting on my shoes. Running on high heels isn't easy, running with high heels that fall off your feet is even harder. But the traffic gods were good to us. We made it in time, with shoes on our feet and 3D glasses ready.
The next thing I turned into a chaos was the cinema itself, first of all by just being there. The guy checking the tickets saw Rosanne and me approach and though: romantic comedy for sure. When we handed our tickets, his jaw almost dropped to his feet. Why yes, good sir, ladies like the Captain too.
Rosanne wanted to get some food and something to drink. And then I had my little moment of GIMME MOUNTAIN DEW. I think I wrote about Mountain Dew before, but I don't drink it that much. I can't handle the cafeine in it. On special occasions, I need it though. The thing is: they sell a lot of food and drinks in the movie theaters, but pop corn makes me nauseous (almost puked all over E. when we went to Catching Fire...) and the movie makes me sleepy even when it's awesome, so I need the cafeine in this case. Hello, Mounain Dew :)

We walked into the room five minutes early. Suddenly I understood why the ticket guy looked at us like we were aliens. Rosanne and I were neither nerds in our early twenties, nor a couple, nor a family with a twelve year old kid. We stood out a lot a little. 
Double glasses? Sure, why not?
But standing out doesn't matter as soon as the lights go out. The only thing that matters from that moment on is the sheer awesomeness of Captain America. That, and the everlasting question of how to wear your 3D glasses over your normal glasses (answer: not). After a while I developed a system: 
  1. push normal glasses up a little
  2. push 3D glasses up a lot.
  3. try not to move your head
  4. move your head anyway when you eat some chips
  5. try to push up both pairs of slid-down glasses at the same time
  6. fail
  7. get frustrated and give up, but try again anyway ten minutes later
It's a crappy system, but not seeing the Winter Soldier shirtless would have been a lot worse :P Just kidding. I'm not a drooling fan girl, just an overexcited one. Marvel movies are always great and this one was so awesome that I don't know how I'm supposed to describe this much awesomeness. There's so much to like: everything that can explode, will explode. Chris Evans is awesome and runs like a normal person (most actors run like idiots). There are some great jokes. There was a cameo that no one but me seemed to notice. And did I mention that everything explodes?
Yup, Captain America: the Winter Soldier is now one of my favorite movies of all times :) I know most people aren't into superhero movies, but I can't wait until the next one comes out. August 14th, please come around soon.

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About me


Envy. Dutch blogger. Est. 1996. No relation to the famous biblical sin. Worst bio writer on this side of the blogospere. Lives on cookies, apple juice and art. Friendly unless confronted with pineapple on pizza. Writes new nonsense every Thursday.

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