Moving

College students move more than army wives.  Do you realize that you will move at least twice a year for at least the next four years of your life, and possibly many more if you have a hard time finding a job?  Realize it, homey.

Now, you might be like, "Whatever, I live in a dorm room, there isn't that much stuff in here."
Yes, yes there is.
As soon as you move into a dorm room, your stuff stops being a solid and becomes liquid.  However much room you have, that is how much stuff you have - and if you have extra room, then your stuff will expand to fill that space.  If you want proof, open the top drawer of your desk.  Is it so full of stuff that it resembles a tetris board?  Yep, I win.

This means that even though you live in a space smaller than most doghouses, you still own more stuff than a magpie.  Actually, no, that is exactly what you are: a very studious, hipster magpie.  Anyway, when it comes to moving, you have to figure out how to transport all of your krap from college to home and then back to college again.  Here's how to do so.

*Note: I will now assume that you go to an out-of-state school*

Divid your stuff into two teams: Team Staying Here, and Team Going Home.  Team Staying Here consists of all the krap that you don't need/want at home.  Your microwave, fridge, winter wardrobe, dorm furniture, posters, school supplies, books, and garden gnomes are all examples of things that belong to Team Staying Here.  If it helps you, you can think of these Teams as straight and gay, or as Jacob and Edward.  That doesn't help me, but hey, to each his own.

Now take Team Staying Here and find three or four other people who have their own Team Staying Heres.  Pile all of your Teams into one pick-up (it helps if one of the other people has a pick-up) and drive the pick-up to a storage center.  You are all going to split the cost of a pod/storage room/similar storage thing.  Make sure that ALL of your stuff is labeled with your name (maybe you want to mark the floor with painter's tape so it is very clear whose Team is whose).  Pay for the pod up front so that you all pay the same and someone doesn't disappear and never pay their part when school starts in a few months.

Team Going Home should now be packed in rubber maids or sturdy cardboard boxes and, again, labeled with your name.  Make sure that the stuff you are bringing home fits in your car/that you can afford to ship it.  Pack the things that you will need up until the last minute in a suitcase so that you have easy access to them.  Make one final trip to the storage center when you realize that your garden gnomes should really be in Team Going Home because you can't live without them.

Now you are a moving pro.  Look at you, you studious, organized, hipster magpie.  Rock it.

When You Need $$

Mooching money from your parents is a dangerous thing.  Especially if they are already helping you pay tuition or something like that, you may (should) feel like a major freeloader if you ask them for money all the time.  So here are some tricks to getting your parents to help you out without making them feel like they have raised you badly.

- Go shopping when they visit.  We've already been over this but I'll say it again: when your parents are in town, they will be predisposed to spend money on you.  Don't force them to buy you things you don't need, like another pair of jeans or that enormous poster of Thor.  Stick with groceries and shampoo.
- Don't ask for money.  What?  Backwards?  Yes.  It's called reverse psychology.  Call your parents on the phone and spend a good 10 minutes talking about other stuff.  Then, casually mention that you are really stressed out because you have to put in a deposit for your travel abroad next semester and it's going to wipe out your bank account (it helps if it actually will wipe you out).  Then your parents can say "oh, we'll help you with that!" or even better "Oh, we'll pay for that!" SCORE!
- Don't make them pay for little things.  If you call your Daddy every time you decide you need $20, grow up.  Get a job on campus or something, you smelly turnip.  Save your requests for when you actually need money.
- Watch out for sneaky technology.  Most of you have bank accounts that your parents have access to.  Guess what, they can go online and SEE everywhere you spend money, how much you spend, and how often it is.  Your parents are not going to want to buy your books when they see that you spent $246.59 at Hipsters R Us last week.
- Love your parents back.  They know you don't have a lot of money, but you still need to send them cards on holidays/birthdays that you miss.  Call them on those days too.  If you don't want to pay for shipping to send an actual present, but you want to send a present, just order it online and have it delivered to their house.  Tell the parent that it isn't for that it's coming and get him/her to wrap it for you.  Bam!  Lawyered!
- I am really proud of my web browser because it actually recognizes the word "Lawyered" as a thing.  Good job, Chrome!

Now, because you are in college and you don't read the complete text of anything, here is the cliffs notes version of what I said above: (I may or may not have randomly selected words from the above paragraphs and arranged them here in a vaguely logical way.  Results may vary)

- Parents in town?  Buy predisposed groceries, Thor.
- Reverse psychology is like SCORE and wipes you out.
- Grow up, you deadbeat tangelo.
- Technology just bit you in the ass-type-regions
- Send some cards about wrap
- Lawyered is a proud thing!

Look at that, I just saved you time AND money!  That'll be $37.95.

How to NOT Break the Bank at the Grocery Store

Ok, so we all stash snacks in our rooms because sometimes cafeteria food just isn't enough (or is so gross that it actually makes you hungrier than before you ate).  The problem is that you are already spending approximately 1.79 buttloads on your dining plan, so you can't really load up on all the good snacks that you want.  Fortunately, I can get you in and out of the store for less than $15 if you are willing to follow my (crazed) lead.

Step 1: Go to Costco with your parents whenever they come to visit you and/or you go to visit them.  If you aren't flying back, come back with a car full of groceries.  If you are flying back, see if you can talk them into giving you grocery money (more on that later).  While you are at Costco, get:
- Cup of Noodles.  These cost like 30 cents each in bulk and you can have them as a late night snack, a quick lunch, or a portable dinner when you have night classes.
- Protein Bars.  Get something like this that you can throw in your backpack to tide you over until lunch at 1:30 (you wouldn't be in this situation if you had just followed my instructions when I told you how to register for classes).
- Emergency Chocolate.  Find some kind of bark or candy or chocolate-covered something so that you can nurse your 17 page theology essay with some fatty goodness.
- Fizzy Juices or Energy Drinks of some kind.  These are expensive and you can use them as barter later on.  "I'll give you an Izze if you edit my paper" is a very common phrase among us.
- Shampoo, Conditioner, Toothpaste, etc.  Stock up on this krap.

Step 2: Make a Freaking List.  Do not go to the store with only vague dreams about what you will get.  You will end up buying an entire pineapple and then realize that you have no way of slicing or storing it (at which point you will dissect it with a jack knife and force your roommate to eat most of it).  Keep in mind:
- Coffee supplies.  Creamer doesn't expire for like three months, so if you can fit the big jugs in your fridge get those - they're a better deal.  I suggest that you start liking Folger's coffee now because it is only $4 a bag.
- Breakfast Stuph.  If you eat breakfast in the dining hall, good for you.  I never do but sometimes I still want something breakfasty before class.  Generic cereal is good if you have milk.  Microwave oatmeal is good if you have a microwave.  Don't ever get frozen egg sandwiches or anything like that because mini fridge freezers can't keep that frozen.
- Chips.  Those big pre-school sized cartons of goldfish are your friends.  As are giant bags of generic tortilla chips.

Step 3: Stay out of the Clothes Section.  Unless you specifically need a certain kind of clothing, don't even go over there.  Just don't.  Stay in the food section and don't fall for the clearance bins that they put in the no-man's-land between the clothes and the food.  It's a trap!  They are just trying to lure you in and drown you in debt.

Step 4: Get the Cheapest Kind.  Oh, I'm sorry, do you like Sargento cheese better than Silly Moo?  SUCKIT!  Don't even look at the expensive slices!  Just grab your clearance string cheese and try not to wonder why cheese would ever be on clearance.

Step 5: Don't Let the Checkout Line Stuff Call Out to You.  All of that gum and candy and gossip that they keep up by the check-out, yeah, don't even look at it.  Pretend it's an eclipse and that it will burn your eyes.  Just look at your shoes and try to count the number of tiny flecks in the tile under you.  Never mind the weird looks that the cashier gives you when you blindly wave your cash in front of his face - you can't even see those looks so they don't exist.

With any luck, you will come home with a stash of goodies that will last you for a few weeks.  Yes, a FEW weeks.  Don't go to the store every week.  Buy the bigger version of whatever you need because it is usually cheaper than getting two regular sized things.  That way, you can budget about $30 a month for groceries and not feel like you are suffering in any way.  Sort of.

And Then Your Perspective Changes

Apparently, people in college think that having more than three classes in one day is really hard.

What?

You people went to high school, right?  Don't you remember when you had seven classes every day and the homework for those classes was due the next day?  What is wrong with you?

I guess after mere months of having your classes spread out, the idea of attending more than two classes in a row is daunting.  It is not unlike kindergarten where you take a nap in the middle of the day so you don't suffer a nervous breakdown.  So good news!  College is just one big kindergarten.  I am sure that at some point, I will sympathize with people when they complain that they have four classes all on the same day, but right now all I can think about is when I sat in class for seven hours, went to work for five, and then did homework for three EVERY DAY.

Gosh, people, stop being kindergarteners.  Weirdies.

Those Darn AP Books

You are a Peaker.  Therefore, you bought and *maybe* used a bunch of AP books for all of your super hard classes.  Well guess what, you should keep those babies around.  If you feel a great need to sell them, you can, but you will probably wish you hadn't because they are very useful study tools for actual college classes.

These books can provide sample problems to practice with, vocabulary lists, summarized readings, and other such goodies.  Admittedly, some classes will very closely follow the content of the assigned textbook, but still, AP books can save you a lot of work.

Also, consider the fact that some college textbooks may not explain the little details of all of the concepts they cover because they are too hoity toity and advanced to bother with such trivialities.  When this happens, you can use your AP books (or even the actual textbooks from that high school class) to fill in the gaps.  My Spanish textbook this year is useless when it comes to explaining grammatical concepts.  Yes, I know that I have already been taught these things once, and I know that in an ideal world I wouldn't need reminding, but I also know that it is shockingly easy to mix up the pluperfect subjunctive and the past perfect indicative.  Imagine that.

Don't feel like you have to cart all of your high school textbooks and prep books to college with you, but if you know that you will be taking a Calc II class and it has been two years since you took AP Calc, then it might be helpful to have something from that class around to help you out.  You can always use your extra books as brown-nosing fodder by showing up in your Proff's office with an old textbook and asking if the sample problems listed here on this page would be helpful for the upcoming test or if it would be better to look at these over here.  I smell sympathy points!

Four Years

By now we are all used to the whole "spend a succession of years in a category" thing.  Three years in middle school, four in high school, 12 years as a child, eight as a teenager, six years in an insane asylum, etc.  So four years in college seems like the next natural step - except it's not four years.

You need to start thinking about college as eight semesters.  This is a key distinction because each semester is independent of the others.  This isn't like high school where you sign up for classes four times and your classes are a year long and it's all divided up into four neat little segments.  Granted, you will apply for housing four times, and the freshman through senior system works for four years, but pretty much everything else should be considered in terms of semesters.

There are a significant number of greater implications with the whole eight semesters thing, but I am currently eating a banana and it is hard to hold it and type and chew all at the same time so you are just going to have to wait a few posts to find out what they are.  You might possible be waiting forever because this post was boring anyway so chances of me revisiting it are slim.  Bananas ho!

Visiting Campus: Scholarship Competitions

A lot of schools have competitive events where they host a hundred or so students for a weekend and at the end they award one student a scholarship.  These events are like the hunger games, except they don't tell you when you die so you have to just keep on fighting and sucking up and killing people even if you're pretty sure you were brutally murdered in the first six minutes.  This also means that you could very well be killed by someone who is already dead.  Sucks to be you, you just got zombied.

If you attend one of these weekends, keep in mind that they never stop watching you.  From the minute you sign in, they will be taking notes and analyzing your behavior.  Make sure you are always having a friendly, meaningful, and mildly intelligent conversation with someone.  You need to seem like the kind of person who will automatically make the whole campus more happy just by being on it.

Make sure you ask intelligent questions - ones that CAN'T be answered by your event packet or by a basic troll of the website.  Have a list of twenty or so questions that make you seem insightful, curious, open-minded, and/or unique.  For example, at a Christian school, you can ask "In what ways do you include faith in class on a regular basis?"  Ooh, now you have told them that you love Jesus, care about your faith, advocate for yourself, and have the ability to brown-nose.  Everyone needs to learn how to brown-nose at some point.

Wear something distinctive but not weird or edgy - a slouchy beanie, or a brightly colored shirt, or something.  That way, people will remember you more easily.

Do your best to show your leadership skillz but never seem like a dictator.  Yeah, good luck.  You can't ever be sure what these people are looking for, but they don't want a Peeta who just paints himself into a rock for three days.

So, to sum up: try to avoid being zombied, ask good questions, never stop talking to people, wear a hat, be a brown-noser (but subtly enough that they can pretend they don't notice), don't paint yourself into a rock.

Video Tour?

Ok if I walk around campus with a camera and record my strange perspective on the many isms of Whitworth and then post that on this blog, would you: A) watch it?; and B) Enjoy it?; and C) Learn something from it?

Honest opinions people, because if I am going to walk about campus like a fool, I want it to be for a good reason.

Home State Assumptions

Aw snap, apparently people who live in other states don't make any efforts to keep up on the many subtle -isms of Colorado.  How dare they be so presumptuous as to actually expect us to explain ourselves.  So keep in mind that, outside of Colorado, no one knows what you are talking about when you say these things:
- CSAPs
- I 25
- The Mountains (I mean, they'll know that you're talking about mountains but they won't know that you aren't talking about the hills in their state that they think qualify as peaks)
- The Res
- Menchies
- King Soopers (depending on the state)
- Pearl Street/Boulder in general
- Smash Burger
- Casa Bonita

Oh gosh, do you guys remember Casa Bonita?  It was so picking hard to explain how simultaneously amazing and sketchy that place was when I accidentally mentioned it in a conversation.  It went like this:
Friend: Check out that house with all the lights on it!
Me: OMQ! It looks like Casa Bonita!
Friend: "omq"? What the krap is Casa Bonita?
Me: oh... uh... sorry I usually try to spread my strange turns of phrases out but uh...  yeah, Casa Bonita is this restaurant in Colorado where this guy in a gorilla suit jumps off a cliff and ... the food is really awful but ... you know, you still go there because ... this guy in a ... gorilla suit ...
Friend: *blank look*
Me: yeah.

Watch what you say, little Peakers, because these peeps over here might totes goats not understand what you say and that is bad news bears because then you sound like a total Boulderite and you will be like "OMQ, I just fell off the stage".  Or something like that.

Impress Your Profs

We all do this.  Everyone loudly mentions that article from the academic journal that you read when a teacher walks by, or drops hints that you regularly peruse the unassigned chapters of the textbook.  Don't pretend you aren't a cheating little brown-noser.

So here are some ways to impress your profs and/or make them think that you spend your spare time buried in a corner of the library instead of watching back-episodes of Dr. Who for the fifth time.

Carry these things around and leave them out where your profs can see them:
- Walt Whitman poetry collections (your favorite poem is "Eidólons" because before you looked up that word (Greek for apparitions), you imagined all the different things it could mean based on the stanzas and you discovered a bunch of fascinating layers in the poem)
- Books by Jorge Luis Borges (extra points if they are in the original Spanish)
- Essays or books written by your profs (with key passages highlighted, of course)
- The list of fascinating quotes you have encountered in obscure books
- Really beat-up copies of the lesser-known Shakespeare plays

Mention these things when you know your prof can hear you:
- How the ending of Sense and Sensibility is too philosophical and ambiguous for your taste
- How Brian Switek's views on the Orinthomimus are completely unfounded and the Smithsonian magazine should really be peer reviewed
- That you still can't decide whether Lacan, Žižeck, or Freud make more sense when viewed as a whole or if they should be considered separate
- That your copy of the complete works of Rene Descartes should arrive in the mail any day now

Fight on, brave little soldiers, in your never-ending battle to trick your profs into thinking you can't get enough of their subjects.

Dressing Up

I think that this is isolated to Christian colleges (because at other colleges, you can party in jeans).

For some reason, people really love having an excuse to dress up, gather in some random common room, pretend that it is an elegant club, and mingle about for a while in your fancy clothes.  So far this year, we have had the following formal events: East Hall Ball, Baldiwn-Jenkins Mocktails Party (mocktails are cocktails that don't have alcohol in them), The Yule Ball, A Very Hipster Homecoming, and at least three other similar events whose names are totally slipping my mind.  It's almost like we sit around saying "Hey, wouldn't it be great if we all got dressed up?"

So yes, when you come to college, bring some formal wear (gentlemen, if you have a three-piece suit, you will wear it), practice your British accent, and get ready to sulk in the irony of the fact that once the dancing starts, they switch the music from the elegant orchestration of preliminary gathering to the sleazy dance-club music featuring Ke$ha and Beiber.  It's almost like everyone seems to think that unless you can appreciate a song when completely wasted then you cannot ever dance to it, even when sober.  I'm still waiting for the swing-themed party that will actually play swing music and not trick you by playing swing music until everyone starts dancing and then switching to "sexy back".

Fingers crossed.

Colorado's Flag

I have a Colorado flag hanging over my closet.  It is actually a long story about how the closets used to have doors but they sucked and were removed so most people bought curtains to cover their closets but I just really didn't care if people could see my clothes so I didn't but then I got a Colorado flag because it was cool and didn't have anywhere to put it because the walls in my dorm room are plastered with show posters and/or pictures of Thor, so I hung the flag over my closet and pretended that I had intended to do that with it all along.  Yeah.

Anyway, I have always liked the Colorado flag - it's sort of modern arty/graphic designy in a very hipster way.  Our flag beats the krap out of the Washington flag which, creatively, features George Washington's head.  Apparently, however, most people have been assuming that my Colorado flag is some kind of janky, off-color Cubs flag.  This sort of makes sense, ish, but really the comparison is pretty weak.  I mean, sure the Cubs flag has a big red "C" on it with something inside of it and the background is blue, but the Colorado flag totally has a stripe on it.  They only sort of look like 80% the same.

So consider yourself forewarned: if you bring a Colorado flag to college, people might think that you are a Cubs fan with a weird flag.

My 103rd post!

Apparently I am really bad at recognizing milestones.  Not only did I completely ignore my 100th post, but I wasted it on a rush-job post that was just plain annoying.  I wonder what that says about me...

Anyway, I went through the past posts and I think that about 76.4 of them are useful.  Which means that I am performing at 76.4% capacity - and  you know what?  I am completely ok with that!  You guys can deal with a certain amount of krappy posts.

So, yay!  I have 103 posts now!  Top that, you lazy Peakers!

Advicelett #2

When you bring music into the bathroom with you while you shower, the speakers will be louder if you put them inside the (dry) bathtub (if your dorm has one).  Something about the acoustics of small spaces...

Advicelett #1

Save all the envelopes from letters that people send you.  That way you have their address (because keeping the addresses written down in some kind of book designed for such a purpose would be too easy).

Questions?

Questions? Comments? Help me out here, guys because my list of ideas looks like this:
- Ostriches are weird looking
- Being underwater is fun
- Kumquats

Gifting Your College Friends

Let's say that you have some friends who are in college and you are still in high school.  Now, some of these friends write awesome blogs that change your life, and some of them are hoopoes and/or just generally awesome.  Perhaps, you would like to send those friends a gift for a holiday or birthday or just because you love them.  Here are some things that college kids will ALWAYS appreciate.

- Gift cards to restaurants.  Make sure you check to make sure that those restaurants exist near the college, but anything is better than cafeteria food.
-  Strange things.  Furbies, random toys, asian candy, things from craft markets, anything that makes you go "what the - " and will make your person laugh.
- Inside jokes.  If someone were to send me, oh I don't know, a pair of fishnet tights, or a letter written on a paper plate, it would make my day. (Please don't try to send me a cow as white as milk)
- Beans.

*Note: I am, once again, strapped for topics to write about.  Does anyone have questions or comments or ANYTHING that I could somehow scramble together 300 words about?*

Whitworth is Narnia

Don't try to argue.  These pictures prove it all:

 If Narnia had big brick buildings, it would look like this

 If people walked about on sidewalks in Narnia, it would look like this

 If the famous lamppost was secretly outside of my dorm instead of in a clearing in the woods, it would look like this.

Fun Things to do when You are Seated Next to a Stranger on an Airplane

1) Color in a coloring book.
2) Pretend you don't speak English (it helps to read the safety instructions that are written in German).
3) Become entangled in your seatbelt and thrash about trying to get loose.
4) Repeatedly ask to be let out to use the bathroom (but be really sweet and apologetic about it so that they can't hate you).
5) Tell them all about your three kids with three different dads.
6) Stare at your computer/phone/tablet the whole time as if you are playing a game, but never turn it on.
7) Fake Tourets-like twitching the whole time.
8) Ask them increasingly personal questions until they pretend to read a book just to get rid of you.
9) Be very itchy.
10) Open a dozen packages of gummies on your tray table, sort them by color, and then eat them loudly one by one.

The Epitome of College Life

I am going to tell you a story.  All that I will say about it is that it is the perfect example of what it is like to live at college.  Interpret it as you will.

At the beginning of the year, the fourth stall from the left in our dorm bathroom was the "Hottie Potty", meaning that we should post pictures of our favorite male celebrities for our viewing pleasures as we pee.  Yeah, that is the kind of thing that would never ever occur to me (like I want Ryan Gosling to watch me pee).  Anyway, there were about a dozen pictures in there with various comments written on them, like "Beg for it".

About three quarters of the way through the semester, one of the girls on my hall decided that the Hottie Potty was morally unsound.  Her argument was that we wouldn't want the guys to have pictures of super models in their bathroom stalls and expect us to look like that so why should we be able to do the same thing and have it be funny instead of gross.  I happen to agree with her, but I would never care enough to take down the pictures.  So she decided that instead of the Hottie Potty, she would put blank paper or pads of sticky notes in each stall for us to write each other notes on.  So now each stall has a piece of paper with a sappy/stupid prompt on it like "What are you most proud of this semester?" or "What are your goals for college" or "If you could have any exotic animal for a pet, what would it be?". (Incidentally, on that last one, someone wrote "A human" and then someone else wrote "I already have one" and then someone else wrote "Her name is Haley".  Yeah, I'm not quite sure how to take that).

The fourth stall from the left is the one with the pad of sticky notes in it.  At first, people were just writing notes like "You can do it!" (yes, thank you, I know that I can poop), and "You are beautiful" (well, right NOW, not so much), and "God made you just the way you are!" (Really? Why do I need to be reminded that it is God's fault that I have cramps right now?).  But then.  Someone started an epic sticky-note story telling marathon.  Each person added a thought to the story until we ended up with this:
Once upon a time...
There was a duck
Named Frederick
Frederick had a pet
His pet was a duck (which was ironic because Frederick was also a duck)
His pet duck's name was Ben
One day, Frederick and Ben went
To the zoo
They were looking at penguins
"Hey," thought Frederick, "Those penguins look a lot like me"
"Which must mean"
"That we are also penguins and not ducks at all!  Fascinating"
And then there was a loud bang
Which was the sound of Frederick and Ben having a major identity crisis
Then one of the lady penguins
Walked up to the glass and
Flirted the heck out of Frederick and Ben which wasn't creepy because they were penguins too
And so the moral of the story is...
Girls like guys who "suit up!"
The end

I don't know about you, but that is the best story that I have ever heard in my whole life.  10 points to whoever can tell which ones I added (there are 5 of them).  And so was the evolution of our bathroom entertainment system: Goggling Gosling to Sticky Stories.  Make of it what you will.

College Code

Nothing can ever be simple.  That main sidewalk across campus can't just be a sidewalk, it has to be the "hello walk" because "you can't walk down it without saying hello to everyone you know!!!!!".  Ugh.  That's so cheesy that I just want to get some crackers and leave a little trail of crumbs behind me until someone stops me to ask me why I am dropping Ritz on the ground and then I can laugh at them.  Or something.

Anyway, college kids talk in code.  Become familiar with this code - it will save your life.

- The dining hall.  Do not call it the cafeteria or the dining hall.  You must call it by the name of the company that caters it.  I don't know why, but everyone does.  It's "Saga", or "Bon" (short for "Bon Appetite"), or whatever company your school uses.
- The buildings.  Drop the "hall" or "center" or "building" from their name and just call them by whoever they were named after.  "Weyerhouser", "Scotford", "Hendrick".  And make sure that you are pronouncing the name right because "Cowles" sounds like "Coals", not "Cow-ls".
- The classes. Shorten the name to the smallest possible number of syllables, even if some of the classes then sound very similar.  Chemistry 101 is "Chem 1", Probability and Statistics is "Stats", etc.  You should all be used to this by now. (But careful not to drop in any AP references - your history class is not APUSH and cannot be called that because you will get blank stares)
- Professors.  They are Profs.  Many people will call them by their first names, or by nicknames.  To practice this, call Flanhofer "Carla" and then pretend that she didn't smack you.

Then there are the terms that are specific to each college.  Whitworth has many.

- The Pine Tree Curtain.  The barrier between campus and the rest of the world.  There are countless hundred-year-old trees on campus and none in the city.
- Core.  The three big seminar classes that everyone has to take.  They are actually called "Christina Perspectives on Western Civilization".  No one knows why we call them core.
- BJ.  The freshman dorm.  Its real name is Balwin-Jenkins but everyone calls it BJ and no one ever mentions the obvious sexual connotations.
- Bucs.  We are actually the Pirates, but we also go by Bucs but NOT Buccaneers.  I don't know why.
- Back 40.  The 40 acres of land behind campus that we own but can't build on because it is too steeply sloped.  The catalogues like to make this piece of land sound like it has been purposefully preserved for the sake of nature.  It has not.
- The Hub.  The building in the center of campus that houses Saga, the bookstore, the PO, the coffee shop, and student services.  I'm pretty sure that they named it the Hixon-Union Building on purpose so that they could cleverly shorten it and the pretend it was an accident.

Help! I Need a Grabber Quote!

You came to the right place, my friends.  Here, I have compiled the top ten go-to grabber quotes that sound smart but don't really say anything definitive.  Put them here, put them there, you can put them anywhere!

Don't worry, these are all taken completely out of context and of questionable origin.

1) "'Culture' is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without taking them quite seriously.  That is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as 'barbarians', as anti-cultural, as a threat to culture - they dare to take their beliefs seriously." - Slavoj Žižeck (don't you love his name?)

2) "An echo, while implying an enormity of a space, at the same time also defines it, limits it, and even temporarily inhabits it. " - Mark Z Danielewski

3) "Nobody sees any one as her is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage.  They see a whole - they see all sorts of things - they see themselves." - Virginia Woolf

4) "Because time is reversed.  Tock, tick goes the universe and then recovers itself, but it was enough." - Tom Stoppard

5) "I am perhaps not particularly human, but who cares?" - Samuel Beckett

6) "Conceal me what I am, and be my aid / For such disguise as haply shall become / The form of my intent."  - William Shakespeare

7) "They teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us ... The secret is not refusing to look at the written words.  On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear." - Italo Calvino

8) "You cannot imagine how time can be so still.  It hangs.  It weighs,  And yet there is so little of it,  It goes so slowly and yet it is so scarce ... Not to worry.  Brevity is the soul of wit." - Margaret Edson

9) "But even men of the highest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the physical charms of others.  Modern, no less than Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to.  If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable." - Oscar Wilde

10) "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" - Ralph Ellison

Now the true challenge in twisting someone else's words would be to try to work all of these into the same coherent essay.  That would be epic.

Ostriches are Weird Looking

Look at this ostrich.  This thing looks like some sort of velociraptor wearing a fur coat.  Like if velociraptors could be flappers, they would look like ostriches. 

Yeah, that's all I had to say.

Board Games

Everyone loves a good game of Apples to Apples.  Other good games for dorm use include: Quelf, Dixit, Banagrams/scrabble, We Didn't Playtest This At All, and anything that was originally designed for very small children (like Elefun).

For maximum enjoyment of such games
1) Play them either very late at night or when otherwise sleep-deprived.  It's like being drunk but without breaking any laws.
2) Play with the maximum (or more) number of players.
3) Blast music in the background.
4) Tweak the rules to make everything more exciting.  For example: if you lose at WDPTAA, you must stand on your head until you are back it, or feed grapes to the player who killed you, etc.
5) Camp out in the middle of the hall.  Be as in the way as possible and refuse to move to a more appropriate common area.

It also helps if you make the Cheesecake Brownies from my last post and use them as incentives to get people to play with you.  Just sayin'.

Watch Me Make You Fall Off the Diet Wagon

Ok, it is January 11th which means that people are starting to give up on their New Year's diets.  Now, I WILL MAKE IT WORSE!  Oh no, if you haven't already started eating brownies again, start now because there is a recipe in this post! (or two...)

Suffer, puny humans!

Haley's Epic Cheesecake Brownies:
Ingredients: 1 store-bought brownie mix (hah, you thought I was going to make these from scratch!), 1 8 oz package of cream cheese, 1 egg, 1/3 cup powdered sugar (sometimes I make twice as much cream cheese stuff as this and then bake the brownies for a few extra minutes)

Directions: Make the brownie batter as directed on the box (duh).  Beat the egg, cream cheese, and sugar together until your mouth waters into the bowl (this is ok, just don't tell anyone that it happened). Pour the brownie mix into a 9x13 pan and then swirl the cream cheese mixture on top of it.  For extra fun, subtly write a bad word with your swirls and see if anyone notices.  Bake according to the brownie box.

Variation: try using half Nutella half cream cheese (you might have to add some water to get it to the right consistency).  Also, feel free to add 1 cup chocolate chips to the brownie batter.  For festive brownies, put some food coloring in the cream cheese (don't use yellow or they will look like diarrhea pats).

Good luck avoiding the temptation to make this for a friday snack.

3 Hour Classes?!

In Jan Term, your classes are three hours long (but you only have one).  Sitting in one class for three hours might not seem any different from sitting in three classes each for an hour but it definitely is.  You will not do well if you are not prepared - you will be covering about a week's worth of material every day so it is really important to be active and focused for the whole class and not peter out after the first hour.

I would suggest having a mug of coffee or tea with you and having an apple or something to eat during the break (which should happen roughly half-way through the class but some teachers just plow through the whole thing (fools)).  Also, make sure that you have all of your homework and have done all of the reading (which shouldn't be a problem because you are Peakers).  Think long and hard about whether it is worth it to skip before you miss a class (the make-up assignments take hours (how dare those teachers presume that we wouldn't have caught up on our own).  (It might also be a good idea to check your Writer's Handbook (!) to see how often it is appropriate to use parenthetical commentaries in a paragraph before it becomes annoying (I always forget that rule (but that might be because I never read the Writer's Handbook (unlike all of you good Peakers who haven't been sarcastified yet (are there any of you left?)))).

Anyway, you should start exercising your sitting-in-one-place-for-a-long-time muscles now so that you are ready for Jan Term next year.  Maybe you could watch TV for hours at a time... If your mom yells at you, just tell her that I recommended it and I have a 4.0 at a highly regarded university.

Ah Snap, this Post is in Spanish!

Jaja los que no pueden leer en Español van a perder la experiencia de mi cueto original en Español.  Tontos.

Hace mucho tiempo, un avestruz fue adoptado por unos monos morados.  Ellos no tuvieron niños y el avestruz no tuvo padres entonces el acuerdo era perfecto por todos.  El único problema era que habían unos libros que anduvieron hasta los monos y los dijeron que los avestruces no puedan subir los árboles.  - Jadeo! - dijeron los monos - que haremos si nuestra avestruz no puede subir los árboles? - Entonces ellos corrieron al avestruz y lo preguntaron si él pudo subir los árboles.  - Monos tontos! - dijo el avestruz - Claro no necesito subir los árboles, todos los avestruces puedan volar! - Y él voló hasta la cofa del árbol y sonrió.  Los libros estaban enfadados u gritaron al avestruz que los avestruces no puedan volar tampoco  Eso hubiera sido el fin de la termina feliz por el avestruz y su familia de monos morados, pero, afortunadamente ellos repentinamente se pusieron sordos.  Por eso, nadie pudiera oír las gritas de los libros.  Vencidos, los libros devolvieron a la biblioteca y el avestruz y los monos morados vivieron felices en su árbol por siempre.  Fin.

Ahora tu vida es mejor (aunque no hablas Español.  En ese caso, eres triste).

People Are Making Resolutions

Oh New Year's resolutions, I hate you.  You make everyone suddenly decide to go to the gym instead of building snowmen for exercise.  Suddenly, once you hit everyone, my roommate stops accepting that you can burn calories by grape-vine racing to the cafeteria and starts insisting that we actually go to the gym to work out.  Like adults.  Scoff.  I am the Peter Pan of college students - I refuse to grow up because it is much more fun to have a contest to see who can eat the most carrot sticks in 49.63 seconds than to portion them out because we are suddenly trying to be healthy.  No, New Year's resolutions, I do not like you.  You are never fun.  Why can't you ever be something awesome like "I resolve to start a band and learn one new song a week which I will then loudly play in the library just to see what happens"?  Come on, that would be awesome!  But no, everyone has to use you to lose weight or become better people and krap like that.  Who would ever want to become a better person when you could stop being a person all together and just be a Hoopoe instead?  So, New Year's resolutions, I refuse to make you.  Ha!  Suck on that!  I will spend this year continuing to be exactly who I am without any delusional ideas that I might somehow improve my standing in life by making some kind of primitive agreement with myself that I know I will never keep.  Sheesh, New Year's resolutions, don't you know your whole system is flawed?

Jan Term

Jan Term is a growing trend among liberal arts schools who are looking to give you a multi-faceted educational experience (or some krap like that).  The concept is basically that you have three terms: Fall semester where you take 14-16 credits, Jan term where you take 3-5 credits, and Spring semester which is the same as fall semester.  This means that in Jan Term, you take one class but you have it every day for several hours - that way you cover a week's worth of material every day and finish the class in three weeks.

There are several uses to which you can put Jan Term:
1) Take a class you hate.  Get rid of that irksome math credit in three weeks.  You will want to die for three weeks, but then you will be done and won't ever have to worry about that subject that you hate again.
2) Take a class you love.  Decide to have an awesome month and take that art class that you have been dying to take.  Just focus on that for a month so that you can unwind and de-stress for Spring semester,
3) Take a special class.  Travel abroad for a few weeks, or be bussed up to the mountains to snowboard for PE credit every day.  Whatever it is, you can take classes that the traditional semester system wouldn't easily facilitate.
4) Test out your major.  Take some kind of class that focuses intensely on some aspect of your major - if you enjoy studying that subject every day for three hours and get a lot out of it, then you picked a good major.  If you discover that you hate spending three hours a day discussing feminist issues, then maybe gender studies isn't a good major for you. (Hint: gender studies isn't a good major for anyone)

I am using my Jan Term for the fourth reason.  I'm taking an oral intensive Spanish class that involves three hours a day of conversations in Spanish, so that I can see if I really want to major in Spanish.  I know some of you just shuddered but don't stomp on my dreams!  I think this is the best use of your freshman Jan Term - every college student's worst nightmare is to suddenly discover that you hate your major at the end of your junior year.  Don't go there - Jan Term to the rescue!

Ordering Books

If you are a science or math major, budget $200 a class for textbooks.  At least.

Otherwise, the best thing to do is get your books from people on campus who bought them used, took care of them, and want to break even.  You don't have to deal with shipping that way and you can look at the book before you buy it (and possibly smell it to make sure that that brown stain actually is soda).  When this isn't possible, amazon is the best place to go.  If your textbook comes with a CD, you really do have to buy it new because the used ones almost never have working CDs with them and then you are screwed.  Buy them all together so that you can save on shipping.

If you have never ordered things from Amazon before, you want to look for the best condition at the lowest price with the highest customer satisfaction rating.  Do your best to only compromise on one of these things.  "Like New", "Excellent", "Very Good", and "Good" are the only condition ratings that you should accept; never buy from anyone whose rating is less than 90%.  Keep an eye on the shipping charges because sometimes it is cheaper to get things new with free shipping than to buy them used plus four bucks for postage.

If the difference between used and new is less than ten dollars, just buy it new.  You'll be able to get more when you sell it back and you won't have to worry about your book randomly being defective (I had one that had one of those plastic spirals for a spine and some loony had taken the spiral out, rearranged the pages, and put it back together - please people, don't be sadists for crying out loud!)

Sometimes books seem way more expensive than they should be on amazon.  When this happens, go look at textbook trading sites to see if the price is in the right ballpark.

Very occasionally, amazon will make your day by randomly having books for less than a dollar in excellent condition.  If you are feeling particularly sneaky, buy like three of those books and then sell them to other people in your class for 10 bucks.  Feel bad for like 2 seconds and then get free starbucks and toast yourself for beating the system in your own small way.  Conniving people win.

If you are counting pennies to survive (who isn't?), start asking for amazon gift cards for birthday/Christmas instead of letting your aunt pick something and ending up with an ill-fitting pair of gloves again.  If you get two or three of these cards per gift-giving occasion, you might be able to cut your textbook costs in half.  Or you could buy a giant poster that says "Keep Calm and Tardis On" on it.  Your choice.

Tour

Hello New Year!  In honor of the long-awaited arrival of a post-apocoliptic 2013, allow me to show you the amazing features of my blog (just to review).

Flash photography is not permitted, please stay inside the suspiciously urine-colored lines.

To your right is the menu bar.  It has many features that may be useful to you, including: an archive of all my posts ever; a list of posts that other people seem to have read and re-read to the point of embarrassment; an option to learn about yours truly; a fun little tangent fact that almost never changes; and a google+ button that no one has ever pushed (if you are particularly daring, use this button to recommend me to your friends).

In the center of the page is the post box (heh heh) where the posts live.  Each post has a title, a date, some content, and an option to comment at the bottom.  If you feel so inclined, I appreciate your feedback in the comment bar - you do not have to have a blogger account to comment and your comment will appear immediately.  This means that if you are feeling particularly scathing, you can publish rude things there that I will not notice for several days and may never be removed.  How fun!  You can also employ various types of social media to talk about individual posts using the icon buttons underneath the time stamp.

You may also notice that there are books behind you.  Aren't they stacked so neatly-and-yet-haphazardly against their nice blue background?  That is true art, folks.  And how appropriate that I should choose books to decorate my college blog.  I am so clever.

This concludes our tour.  Please deposit your 3D glasses in the bin on the way out so that we can pretend to wash them before we hand them out to the next group of sweaty tourists who come in.  We hope you have enjoyed your stay here and will come again soon!  As always, A Peaker's Survival Guide remains free of charge and immune to any sort of advertisement of any kind.  This post was written on my new iPad Mini, which is such an ease to operate and is not at all similar to a very expensive game boy!

Bye-bye!