Greg Shahade, lunch, inert funk

Dear blog readers,

I'm sorry I haven't been writing. I've been in an inert funk. That's the best way I can describe it. I force myself to work obsessively hard, mostly because my job is incredibly boring otherwise. Then I lie around all evening, reading mostly nonfiction. Occasionally, I have a social encounter, but they mostly seem pointless and unrewarding. I check my email compulsively.

Despite my funk, I have a story to tell you. I've been wanting to tell this story for a long time, but every time I start writing it, I start to have doubts, second thoughts, to feel like maybe it's not that funny or it's going to sound mean, or kind of weirdly Greg-obsessed, so I give up.

This is the story:

Greg often eats at Qdoba, which is a taco/burrito chain a lot like Chipolte. But every time before he goes there, he goes online to random.org and generates three numbers between 1 and 29. He then matches those numbers against a page in his notebook that looks like this:

1-8 shredded beef hard taco

9-15 shredded beef soft taco

16-20 shredded pork hard taco

21-24 shredded pork soft taco

25-26 chicken hard taco

27 chicken soft taco

28 shredded chicken hard taco

29 shredded chicken soft taco

Then when he is at Qdoba, he orders the three indicated tacos and eats them in the same sequence in which the numbers were generated. He does this in order to maintain an optimal level of diversity in his diet, while still accomodating his personal tastes.

That's the end of the story I have been wanting to tell you.

After work on Saturday, I took the Chinese bus to Philly to visit Greg and we go to Qdoba for dinner. As we're walking there, Greg suddenly takes out his glasses, puts them on, and starts staring fixedly at something on or just across the street. It takes me a couple minutes to work out what he's doing. He's forgotten to generate his taco-numbers, so he's staring at the license plates of the passing cars to find them. He has to use moving cars, even though it's much harder to read them, because parked cars near Qdoba might be habitually parked there and thus oversampled.

I felt like this new twist kinda forced my hand, storytelling-wise.

In other news, nationals is coming up, April 3-5. I'm very exciting. We're bringing 59 kids total, I think, and playing in the k-8, k-6, k-9 under 1250, k-8 under 1000, and k-8 under 750. I'm cheerfully optimistic about how they will do-- a lot of them are significantly higher rating than the official March supplement ratings.

It looks like the top teams in the open sections are: (top four scores count)

K-8:

hunter (2086, 1748, 1710, 1734, 1482, 1469, etc.)

texas canyon vista (2026, 1860, 1616, 1608, 1523)

318 (1892, 1876, 1788,1706, 1675, 1660, 1647, 1590, 1457, 1450, 1435, 1424, etc.)

K-6

hunter (1663, 1532, 1496, 1490, 1404, 1377, 1342, 1275, 1216)

VA f001 (1939, 1544, 1575, 1195, 1100)

CA msje (1864, 1814, 1737, 1541)

318 (1607, 1561, 1533, 1478, 1440, 1399, 1381, 1375, 1250)