Bridges Built and Broken
Yesterday was the College of Lake County Engineering Week Balsa Wood Bridge Competition. My Algebra professor, Mr. Thornburgh, mentioned it to us in class last week and a few of us decided to try it out. I built the bridge with two friends I made in class, Bri and Jacqueline. We basically came up with the design idea on Monday then spent the afternoon on Tuesday building it.
Here’s the bridge - it doesn’t look bad from a distance 
But it wasn’t perfect, considering we’d never built a bridge before:
Here’s some pics from the day of the competition:
This is a pic of all of the bridges in the competition, though one was disqualified because it didn’t meet the requirements for loading the bridge with the weight:
And here is our bridge just before testing:
Well, we didn’t come in last place 
Ours held 25.5lbs, or 393 times it’s weight. The winning bridge held nearly 2000 times it’s weight, and was built by last year’s winner of the competition. Second place was about 1200 times it’s weight, then several were in the 600 - 700 times range, then ours, and a couple below ours at like 340 and 300 or so. Considering we are in basically the remedial Algebra class and had never done it before, I think we did ok Most (if not all) of the other bridge builders were in the Engineering Club I believe and had also built bridges and participated in competitions like this before. Also, an interesting commentary on the state of women in society was the fact the my friends were the only women who participated in the competition. And from what I saw we were the only team too.
It was definitely a fun project, and I made a couple cool friends in the process - even though we didn’t get to spray glitter on the bridge like the girls wanted because it was against the rules of the competition… I’ll add a few more pics once I get copies of them.
And since I’m on the topic of bridges built and broken… It’s hard for me to understand why it is that whenever I meet someone and share an intense emotional and sexual attraction as well as intimate details about ourselves and our lives, the circumstances surrounding the situation always end up destroying the relationship. I mean, I understand the circumstances of my most recent connection’s life that preclude us from moving forward with anything - not the least of which is the same issue that precipitated the demise of my last “relationship”: namely, being geographically separated by over a thousand miles. Ha, my cousin told me something funny about this a few weeks ago - that I can meet people over the internet but can’t even meet someone right here in my immediate physical surroundings. I don’t fucking know - I thought I could write something more introspective and significant, but perhaps the situation is too fresh and unresolved at this point…
But on another note, I got a new Parole Officer the other day, and he told me that if everything continues to go well that he was going to submit me to get off parole early. You have to serve half your time on parole before you can be submitted, so that’s a year and a half for me, and that date will be exactly June 11th 2008. In other words, I could finally be off of overt government supervision for the first time in my life since I was 16 years old in less than 4 months from now!!! I’m obviously not trying to get my hopes needlessly up, but that was certainly an unexpected and awesome surprise. I haven’t had the opportunity to get much of a concrete idea of what I will do if/when that happens in June, especially considering my personal situation recently as well as school work and working for my parents and trying to get an idea of what the hell I’m going to do to make money to survive. But one thing that struck my mind tonight was just packing some of my things, getting in the car, and driving off into the open road and future. I have no connections in life really, never have except for some all-to-brief flirtations with romance that always end before they even have much of a chance to start, as I just mentioned above. And I’ve wanted to get the hell out of here for almost as long as I can remember. So maybe by the Summer Solstice I can embark upon that long-anticipated yet never fulfilled desire. My cousin Danny has wanted me to come down to where he lives in Mexico once I get off parole, but I don’t necessarily know that that’s a good idea or what I intend to do. I mean, I’d definitely go down there to see him, but I really don’t know about staying for any significant period of time. I do want to travel to a lot of places, most of which are outside of the United States, and all of that takes money that I don’t have. So exactly what the hell I’ll do remains very uncertain. But a little more freedom may soon be here for me to experience.
