Some Random, Mr. Stibitz-related things

My carpool always arrives at school several minutes early, which is nice because it gives me a few minutes to go to the tech-center-slash-library to see if anyone interesting is there. Harvey is usually there working on something, and there are always a few other people hanging around. Today I was talking to Him (it might have been about the issue I'm having with "aHarvey;" Harveyists say it to each other, but what should we say to Him? I mean we can't tell Him to go "to Harvey" because He's already at Harvey because He is Harvey. In the end, this issue resulted in a decision to stick with the Martian word for "goodbye") when Mr. Stibitz walked in. He said he had a riddle for me: "Today is three-three-oh-nine. When is the next such 'square root day?'" Before I could finish processing the fact that Mr. Stibitz actually had a riddle, Harvey shouted out, "Well, four-four-sixteen! Then five-five-twenty-five, six-six-thirty-six..." Mr. Stibitz said that since I had failed to answer the riddle, I was disqualified and lost the contest. I protested, but he had already left.

I'm gonna skip the next part for now- I'll come back to it in a paragraph or two. For now, just know that this paragraph ends with me in Mr. Stibitz's room.

Later, still in his room, I asked Mr. Stibitz if he really had made up the 'square-root day' thing, or if he had heard it somewhere. It turns out that that somewhere was on the radio, this morning in the car. Someone mentioned it, and he thought, "This would make a good riddle for Josh." And he insisted that I had failed. My argument was twofold: A) Hearing stuff on the radio and making it into a riddle does NOT count, and B) Obviously, God did not mean for me to solve it, so I could not be blamed. I'm sticking to that argument. (For those of you who will get the reference, we just finished Midaq Alley. I guess it's still in my head. The word for this in English is "brainwashing" and it is spelled b-r-a-i-n-w-a-s-h-i-n-g.)

I followed Mr. Stibitz out of his room into the hallway. I had been talking to him for a while when I got distracted by something in the hallway...I can't remember what it was...and when I looked back he had vanished. Fortunately he's taller than the average student in the hallway, and he was wearing a maroon shirt that stood out fairly well, so I found him a few minutes later. This happened a couple more times, and I asked him if he was trying to escapar. He said no, he just had to find Eric. "Could Eric be more interesting than me?" I asked in Spanish. He said something like "Of course not," (with only the slightest hint of sarcasm, but you know with Mr. Stibitz it's hard to be sure) and disappeared again. The next time I found him, he went into the teacher's office, with a victorious, "Watch this" or something along those lines. Hey, I'm doing my best to remember here, no guarantees, remember?

Now back to the second paragraph. My last class of the day is Germän. The German room has five doors: The main door from the hallway, one of those elementary-school-style bathrooms, two storage closets, and one in the wall it shares with Mr. Stibitz's room. That door almost never gets used. Throughout the class, like usual, we could hear sudden random phrases coming from the next room (usually signaling his having realized the extent of his current tangent, and deciding to get back on task). I decided that after class, since I had to stay after school anyway, I would pop into his room, using the mysterious, rarely-used door, to see what was up. I did so, and he was standing by the main door looking out at his departing students. Perfect! I thought. He'll turn around and wonder how I got here! As it turned out, he figured it out in about three seconds- there's only one other entrance, (or so I thought...read on) and I didn't close the door all the way. Dang. So there I was all impressed with my finding a new way into Mr. Stibitz's room - I had thought myself quite clever for thinking to take the back way - and he went and figured it out. To top it all off, just as I was having the realization that maybe the idea might not have been quite Nobel prize-worthy, the window opened and two freshpeople whom I didn't recognize climbed in from outside. Apparently, they had asked if they could leave through the window at the end of class, but Mr. Stibitz had said no, so they satisfied themselves with coming in the window instead. That was it, I was defeated.