The tea leaves say that tomorrow will have a wind chill of 20°, a 47% chance of snow, and three whimsical events before sixth period lunch.

I wish I knew how to get my tea leaves to tell me more specific things. Like if there'll be a pop quiz in Lady HuuuuuniiiiIIII's class tomorrow. That way I'd know to wear a helmet.

I heard coffee grounds are more specific, but also less reliable. Do I dare trade reliability for specificity?

...when it comes to Lady HuuuuuniiiiIIII, yes, yes I do.

There was a pop quiz in Lady HuuuuuniiiiIIII's class. In retrospect you could totally see it coming, but that's the trouble with this stream of images and a memory that only works backwards.

It's been getting pretty cold in the van at night, but it's insulated and we can fill up hot water bottles in the locker rooms. And have not showers. But it's easy to fall asleep in the cold because your mind just shuts down and then it's easy to see the pictures.

And in my pictures last night I saw the legs of the desks in Lady HuuuuuniiiiIIII's class and detailed faces I'd never seen before and someone feeding a horse a sugar cube out of the palm of their hand. The usual stuff.

But today when the pop quiz fell out of the sky and bounced off @Klarya's helmet and hit me in the face and made my nose bleed it was all so clear! I'll never make that mistake again that's for sure. But you can't always see it coming in Lady HuuuuuniiiiIIII's class of Dangerous Shapes and Dangerous Shape Studies.

Like any student, I'm lucky to have my own personal interests align perfectly with my studies. I'm talking of course about how Invisible Life Hacks and Dangerous Shapes and Dangerous Shape Studies have SOOOO much in common!

EVERYTHING is about shapes, ya know? The past has a shape you can see, the future is made of shapes you're discovering, and the present is how you feel out those shapes in the future and figure out the right shapes to fit into it. Which is where Invisible Life Hacks come in, and understanding the Shapescape and proactively working with it.

But Dangerous Shapes and Dangerous Shape Studies takes it to a whole other level. In Lady HuuuuuniiiiIIII's class EVERYTHING is dangerous, even if it's the shape of a fried egg sandwich, or buying a bus ticket. Because anything can be used by a weapon if you're Lady HuuuuuniiiiIIII. She just wants us to understand the shape of things to come.

And it's a great class because @Caroliner Rainbow is really mellow and she's my friend. And it's got @Klarya who always has something to say. And the best part is it's totally a class I'm gonna get an A in!!!

Shapes to you!!!

I ran smack into another shape today. You don't have to tell me they're dangerous. But for a fortune teller I sure have trouble seeing them. Lady HuuuuuniiiiIIII says I move too fast and don't look where I'm going.

But I want to know where these shapes come from. Is it like a boulder field stretched out into the distance all laid out for us to pick our path around? How did they get there? Are they man made? Do they have serial numbers? Or are they natural?

I hung out with Lady HuuuuuniiiiIIII after class and asked her these questions.

Thank heavens, I finally kicked my illness. Turns out I accidentally walked under the ladder in the Scientia Wing -- you know the one. It's ebony black, and has two rungs missing, and has this historical tragedy tied to it, and if you walk under it bad things happen, and during Thanksgiving we put a stuffed turkey on top? Yeah, that one. Never walking near that thing again. I missed being able to breathe through my nose.

It's weird, I come back from my sick leave and there's a whole wave of new kids in my classes. Usually students don't transfer as upperclassmen, because of Psyhigh's trial by fire policy for transferring credits, but they've appeared regardless (and curiously unscorched, I might add). Lady HuuuuuniiiiIIII told us with her shapes that some of these new students will be in our class tomorrow, and that we better get along with them or else. Then she started the chapter exam by making all the shapes explode. She's dramatic like that.

Gosh, I hate chapter exams. In the Introduction class to Dangerous Shapes and Dangerous Shape Studies all you have to do is Sense the shapes and Know the proper Avoidance Procedure. But in the AP class, you have to Understand their personalities and allergies and behaviors and not just dodge, but Manipulate, Persuade, and occasionally wrangle them like cows! If I don't manage to get a 4 on that AP exam, I swear I'm going to cry.

I hope these new kids know what they're getting into. I met one of them in the grand living room in the northwestern dormitory (a.k.a. Senior Territory). She was asking around about secrets told by the coffee stains. I'm not the best at coffee interpretations -- I've always felt tea and soda were easier dialects to read -- but I found a good one for her. It was about an amphibiod student, who had a secret tailsman hidden ontop of one of the bookcases. But the tailsman got corrupted, and started causing... bad things. This kid tried to fix it, and spent many nights crying into his coffee as he desperately researched solutions. The Tailsman Repossession Squad eventually tracked down the tailsman and contained it, but the amphibiod boy was never the same again. The story kinda gave me the creeps, but the girl... uh, @Jessica Moon I think it was... she seemed to like it. Funny, that name sounds familiar.

Dang, I've been rambling for too long. I'll sign off now. Kudos to anyone determined enough to read through this obnoxious wall of text.

Obviously shapes come in all different... shapes. But they also come in all different sizes. Lady HuuuuuniiiiIIII says there's more sizes than we can possibly imagine--even an infinite number of sizes, from the nano-microscopic (and smaller) to the impossibly-large universe filling (and bigger). But because of the infinite variation in size, there's always something bigger, or smaller. So what's the point? And why is it poking us?

Today she ran us through an obstacle course of shapes ranging from basketball to truck sized. We put on the goggles and could see the shapes laid out over the rolling grounds, down the hill from the administration building and into Woodhull Field. Lady HuuuuuniiiiIIII blew the whistle and we all tore down the hill and whisked through the shapes as fast as we could. Space and time around them was slippery and we started to go faster and faster. I glanced over at @Klarya and she winked at me and swished off around the last few shapes like she was skiing in the Olympics. But while I was watching her I wasn't looking where I was going and ran right into a big knobby purple star shape. Ow. It knocked the wind out of me and I landed on my butt. But what was worse was that I couldn't get it out of my mind after that. Literally. It was stuck there.

For the whole rest of the day it stayed stuck in my head and it was really bugging me. So I went to visit @Caroliner Rainbow in her van. She wasn't in class today. She misses at least a day a week and I worry about her. But she fixed me a cup of her special tea and asked me questions till the shape came right out of my head and lay there on the blankets on the floor of the van, shivering.

I'm going to be gone for a while. I'll be in a deep meditative state, allowing my astral projection(s) to work on my Runic Mathic project, AP study programs, final test study guides, and my Dangerous Shapes speech/poster. Why do teachers always assign posters? Maybe they collect them like trading cards. Or maybe they pull from it the ambiance of whatever emotions you were feeling while making the poster. I've heard rumors that the freshman Astrology teacher has a room filled with bottled sentiments, collected from all the tests and homework turned into him over his three centuries teaching at Psyhigh. I wonder what he uses them for?

Anyway, yeah, I'm disconnecting from reality for a bit. I'm even putting some protective wards and such on my dorm room door to keep people from barging in and disrupting my focus. A lot of upperclassmen on my floor are doing similar things this year. I used to think people who did this stuff were crazy -- why would you want to lock yourself up when the weather is just starting to get nice again? Well, now I understand. Take it from me, innocent underclassmen: enjoy your time. You'll miss the days when the end of the school year was just a couple of tests and then watching a movie. Some day you'll understand why kids like Almira snap.

(Speaking of which, I advise everyone steer clear of Green House 12 for today. School security is still trying to contain Almira's "little melt down".)

Teachers are cruel beings sometimes. I only have a week of classes left, yet my Dangerous Shapes teacher is insisting on assigning us yet another project. She assures us this will be the last one, but I don't believe it. Honestly the only thing more deceptive than her is the Trapezoidal Prism. If you see that thing scooting about the back of a room, be wary of everything. It likes to shift things around, changing centers of balance, alignments, political views, and the like. Once the Trapezoidal Prism arrives, you won't leave that place without at LEAST five "Unexpected Unexplainables" happening, as Lady HuuuuuniiiiIIII likes to call them.

The project is we have to make a rocket for rocket launches on Wednesday. I don't even get why we're doing this. We launched rockets earlier this year, with great success. The Cloud Domain is still paying tribute to the school administration out of fear of the Dangerously Shaped Missiles we shot into their rebelling territory. In fact, one group of clouds still aren't raining quite right. You know the one, where it always starts/stops precipitating about ten minutes after the rest of the sky. I know it's causing havoc on the extremely delicate Cloud Domain socioeconomics, but it's rather pretty to see that little inconsistency of nature.

Maybe Lady HuuuuuniiiiIIII is trying to create another one of those irregularities. Or maybe she's trying to intimidate the Cloud Domain into letting her resume her research of the formation and behavior of cloud shapes. All I know is that this project is worth a solid 50 points of our grade, so I better find a way to do well on it. I've never been very good at "hands-on" projects -- but I'll certainly try. I've been playing with the idea of using some of my meditation cocoon remnants in the design somehow. It probably has some properties to it that would really give my rocket a boost. And there's plenty of strands from others' cocoons still blowing around the dorms, getting caught in vents and forming ominous clumps in the corner of the stair well. I guess kids on my floor are great at making these things, but awful at cleaning them up. Pro-tip to future upperclassmen: lint rollers are great at getting the strands out of fabrics, but for wallpaper or plaster you'll need to use a vinegar-based salve. Otherwise it'll stain, and within two weeks your room will be condemned, due to all the suppressed angst and stress that starts oozing out from within. I guess that's just what happens when walls can talk. They're so relieved they SCREAM.