The World Is A Really Stupid Place

Loony Lions

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 18:45:50 GMT

I went to a small suburban private high school which graduated less than 150 kids. I then moved on to college, the small local commuter campus of the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, which was not much of a drastic change in size or population. So anyone can imagine how completely out of my element I was when I accepted a friend’s invitation to attend a Penn State football game at the main campus of Penn State University. Anyone, that is, but me. Silly me, I thought I could handle it.

I am not a sports fan. I know absolutely nothing about football. And by nothing, I do quite literally mean NOTHING. I can’t follow the game. I don’t know the rules. I can’t comprehend the plays. I can barely figure out which team is winning at any given time. I certainly know nothing of the “bowls” for which teams seem so desperate to qualify, and the Big Ten to me sounds vaguely like a burger. I’m not sure why.

However, knowing all this about myself, I somehow got the idea into my head that there was some sort of place for me in the student section at this particular game.

Upon arrival at the campus, I began to sense that I was in a little over my head when the walk from my friend’s townhouse to the stadium took just short of forty-five minutes. I’m used to UPJ, which I can jog lazily around in half that time.

As we neared the stadium, huge groups of people dressed extravagantly in Penn State attire (which included wigs and full body paint in many cases) surged through the streets, chanting and shrieking like deranged hyenas. “We ARE!” bellowed a group on one side of the street. “PENN STATE!!!” roared the other side in response.

“WE ARE!!!”

“PENN STATE!!!!!”

“WE ARE!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“PENN STATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“THANK YOU!!!!!!!”

“You’re welcome!” replied a few witty souls. This exact scenario was played out at least six more times as we made our way to the stadium.

Inside, the sheer number of people astounded me. We were packed in like white and blue sardines, everyone shuffling, stepping on each other, yelling at the tops of their lungs. More than half of the students were visibly intoxicated. A few clearly insane male fans lurched by. They were shirtless in the forty-something degree weather, but had painted their torsos white. Each sported a blue letter to spell out ‘Penn State’ squarely in the center of his naked white chest. Unfortunately, they looked a bit too drunk to be able to order themselves and properly spell out the words when the time came.

We passed a hot dog vendor who was gleefully spouting out expletives against Michigan as part of his sales patter. Someone threw a button at me which read, “It’s 10/14/06 And Michigan Still Sucks.”

So I guessed we were playing Michigan.

We found our seats and squeezed in as best we could. I could barely move there were so many people, pressed on all sides of me like fleshy bookends. The smell of beer and greasy food was overwhelming. And it only took me a moment to realize that somehow, out of all the souls in that stadium, the most annoying of all had been positioned directly in front of and behind me.

“We own the Wolverines!” The guy behind me cried out. “We own the Wolverines! We-!” he suddenly pitched forward and slammed his meaty hands onto my shoulders for balance. I immediately crumpled under this onslaught of weight and would certainly have fallen to the cheesy-fry littered ground if the bulk of the enormous man in front of me had not been in my path.

“Whoa, hey!” said fat man ejaculated, turning slightly and grasping one of my flailing arms. “Looks like someone got the party started early.”

Flustered, I thanked him and straightened myself again. The jerk behind me had fallen, laughing maniacally, into the arms of his female companion. She calmly sipped a beer as her glassy, frigid eyes dared me to say anything.

Okay, I knew when to keep my mouth shut. Instead I attempted to peer through the gaps in the crowd in front of me to catch a glimpse of the field as the Blue Band marched grandly onto the field. As a sign of respect, the band began by playing Michigan’s fight song. But I never heard a note of it. Nothing but a deafening din of guttural “booooooooooooooo’s” from the innumerable Penn State fans.

Sportsmanlike.

Suddenly, everyone around me was going crazy. Screaming, pointing, hysterical. I turned to my friend. “What’s going on?” I asked, alarmed.

“There’s a guy in a Michigan sweatshirt coming up the center aisle,” he explained, before he dissolved into a crazed display of manic Michigan-bashing along with the others.

“Get out of here! Get out of here!” The idiot behind me had settled into a panting furious chant. His bellowing voice beat like a sledgehammer into my skull, and it didn’t help that his girlfriend had taken up the chant in her own shrill and considerably drunken voice. I couldn’t remember ever having wanted a weapon so badly.

I guess the Michigan guy made it. I couldn’t really see much. For all I know he was torn apart by bloodthirsty Nittany cult people, and is now on a missing person’s list somewhere in New Jersey.

Well, the game started and guess who scored? That’s right, folks. Michigan. The score was now 7-0, and all the Penn State lunatics were livid. They stirred up a few more Penn State chants, and when these apparently ceased to be satisfying, they settled for simply shrieking in prolonged psychotic rage. Every few minutes a collective warcry would rise from all around the stadium. It was not a word, not even an exclamation, simply a long throaty “AHHHHHHHHHHHH!” which sounded as savage as something straight out of Lord of the Flies. I began looking apprehensively around for signs of someone holding a stick with the stray Michigan fan’s head on it. Such a discovery would not have surprised me in the least at that point.

The game went on. To amuse themselves while they waited for something to happen, the cheering fans began throwing things. Naturally, what could be more soothing to one’s nerves or more helpful to the beloved team down there on the field than tossing random objects in every direction and yelling gleefully? I can’t even graze the sheer number of bizarre things which flew past me during this time period. Among them were several beach balls, a naked blow-up doll, chain belts, plastic bottles, Legos, pom-poms, peanuts, garbage, a few small humans (crowd-surfing is not an accurate description, these people were flying) and innumerable puffy marshmallows. Apparently the marshmallow throwing was some sort of established tradition. It seems to me too odd of a coincidence for so many people to just conveniently show up with multiple bags of marshmallows. Unless the crowd hypnosis began hours before the game and a wave of people swept from the Penn State campus and invaded every nearby grocery store to clear the shelves of marshmallows. Hey, it wouldn’t have been the weirdest thing to happen that day. Not by any stretch.

And then, Penn State scored! Oh, the chaos! Abruptly, the sound was like that of a comet smashing into the stadium. The fans were braying and gobbling and jumping up and down as though they’d absolutely gone round the bend. The whole stadium was shaking. I feared for my life as I rocked precariously on the quivering bleacher. Inevitably, the fool behind me tumbled forward again. This time at the precise moment I collided with Bob’s Big Boy in front of me, he was shoved backward by a large group of his moshing friends, uttering deranged laughter all the while. I was finished. I tumbled to the filthy ground, Drunken Moron and a considerable part of Triple B’s generous hindquarters landing on top of me.

My friend helped me to my feet after everything had calmed down a little bit. “Are you okay?” he asked.

I wanted to scream, are you kidding me? I just landed on a ground which by the looks of things is currently hosting more disease and unthinkable grime than the very slimiest pit of the nether world, had a blithering idiot with a blood alcohol level hovering somewhere around a 10 and a man who easily weighs more than the island of Tahiti plop down on my 93-pound body and squelch me further into said muck, not to mention the pounding headache I have from you crazy animals, and you want to know if I’m OKAY????!!!!!

Instead, I breezily replied, “I’m fine.” What else could I do? It’s not like we were getting out of there.

Well, from what I could tell after that, Penn State started screwing up. Someone got hurt who was apparently of great importance and the team began to make foolish errors. First the fans gibbered in anger, then they lapsed into groans, and finally they became mostly quiet. I began to secretly root for Michigan simply because I was so glad to be temporarily safe from the verbal and physical assaults of these inhuman twits.

Ah, but it was too good to last. Something promising happened and everyone was right back to their joyful rioting, even though the score on the scoreboard had not changed. “Yes! YES! YES!!!!” screamed the birdlike man standing next to Captain Beergut in front of me. His eyes were squeezed shut with gratitude, and he seemed very near the point of religious ecstasy.

Drunken Moron behind me had apparently also decided the rapture was upon us, as he leaped abruptly into the air and squealed with delight. His landing was anything but smooth, and a few minutes later he was sitting on the bleacher, doubled at the waist and vomiting impressively while his girlfriend smacked him repeatedly on the back and snapped at him to hurry up, he was missing it!

Captain BG made a point of slapping everyone around him five, including me. He seemed to have forgotten that he’d nearly sat me to death.

But alas, their glory was short-lived. For soon after Michigan scored once more, and the game was won. I grinned inside, though on the outside I donned the appropriate look of grim, funereal sorrow which everyone else had adopted. As we slowly began to fight our way out through the dense, drunk, and wailing crowd, I caught one last glimpse of Intoxicated Creep-holding his girlfriend’s hair back while she threw up in almost the same spot as he.

Ah, soulmates.

Needless to say, this experience has not turned me into a sports fan. Nor has it given me the burning desire to attend a larger university. I left the stadium that night with a pounding headache, sore limbs, a bruised hip, and an unexplainably strong craving for a burger and some extra-fluffy marshmallows.

Go Penn State. Because I won’t be going again.

Close Quarters

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 18:40:48 GMT

It’s that time of year. Leaves are falling, colors are changing, kids are going back to school-and all the college freshman are learning to cope with dorm life, whether they like it or not.

Few things in our society are more bizarre than dorm life, if one really cares to take a good look at it. Let’s take a group of completely diverse, stressed-out kids, fresh out of high school, shove them in twos, threes, or even fours into rooms half the size of most of their home bedroom closets, pack all their stuff in there with them, and say, “Okay, there you go. You’re on your own.”

As a commuter at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, I have mercifully escaped the dorm experience, for now anyway. But my curiosity about this strange new world with which so many of my peers are dealing on a daily basis fueled me to head up to UPJ one Saturday with my little black notebook and a veritable hay truck of questions for those fortunate dorm residents.

I made my way to the Student Union where many such residents were lounging, playing pool and ping pong, eating, or attempting to do some homework. Attempting being the key word. I dodged flying projectile ping pong balls and made my way to the tables where a few of these studious souls were hunkered over laptops and papers, brows knit in concentration, exhorting a Herculean effort to block out the chaos around them. And chaos it was. Calls and catcalls rebounded in time with the clacking of billiard balls, belches were grandly emitted and exclaimed over, half-gnawed food sailed through the air. I took a seat at a round table with one other occupant, a young man dutifully typing away on a laptop which appeared to be about the size of my thumb nail, completely oblivious of the chewed-up mustard-covered pizza slice reposing in the center of the table.

I waited until he appeared to be at a stopping point, then inquired if I could ask him a few questions for a paper I was writing. He shrugged and mumbled, “I guess.” About the most enthusiastic agreement one can expect from a college student.

First, I established that he was indeed a freshman and lived in a dorm. Then I got right to the point. “What do you think of dorm life?”

He needed no further prodding. “It’s horrible,” he moaned. “Our whole dorm smells like feet. The whole thing. Not just my room. The whole thing. It smelled like that the first day. I mean, how much promise is there when you walk in the first day and the whole hall smells like feet?”

I agreed that it wasn’t much.

“And then there’s my roommate,” he continued, covering his face in agony. “He was that kid that every guy in the room looked at on orientation day and thought, ‘Please, not me.’ And who got stuck with him? Me, of course. This kid thinks he’s Dracula or something. Black nail polish, makeup, weird piercings...everything. He always wears these skin tight leopard pants. I’m not even kidding. And handcuffs on the belt. Handcuffs! He carries handcuffs around with him all the time.”

“There’s no room,” mused the blonde girl I talked to next. She and her blonde friend were waiting for their turn at the ping-pong table. “I brought a ton of stuff with me and ended up taking most of it home the next weekend cause there was just nowhere to put it. And I hate sleeping in bunk beds.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste. “It makes me feel like a little kid at summer camp.”

“Plus, everything is so dirty.” Her friend chimed in. “All you can ever smell is Febreze. People spray Febreze constantly. They’re trying to cover up all the gross smells but it doesn’t work. The smells like combine forces. Makes me want to puke.”

“The bathrooms are disgusting,” said a boy with long black hair around a mouthful of blueberry muffin. “You should see the showers. There is absolutely no room, and people leave their junk lying around on the shower floor. Gunky old razors and big slippery bottles of crap-you could kill yourself in there. Plus the curtain doesn’t work and the bathroom floods every time someone takes a shower. And the guys next door to us, the ones we have to share the bathroom with? Satan himself personally sat down and created those two. He had to have. He said to himself, ‘Hey, I think I’ll make the two worst possible people anyone could ever share a bathroom with, then stick them in a UPJ dorm and see what happens!’ They never knock. I’ve been walked in on while I was on the toilet like eighteen times. And they never flush either. I don’t even want to know what their karma looks like right now.”

“Our R.D. is evil,” groaned another girl. “She’s so mean. She yells at us to be quiet all the time, even when no one’s talking. We could all be dead and she’d come bursting out of her stupid suite, all wrapped up in her freaky green bath robe at like eight-thirty in the evening, screaming for all of us to shut up or she’ll write a noise violation and then we’ll be sorry.”

“Studying is impossible,” a skinny redhead told me shyly. “Everyone’s so loud. They blast music on these souped-up computer stereos and play electric guitar and just basically run around screaming. Some of them party every night. Weekend, school night, they don’t care. They’re at school for the party. They’re majoring in beer.”

“There’s nothing to eat,” said a heavily-tattooed blond boy after some thought. “Since we get our meals at the caf it’s not like we ever have leftovers. And no one ever feels like going shopping. We basically live off the Easy Mac and Roman Noodles our parents bring us. If we find out someone in our hall has like Pop Tarts or cookies or something, all of a sudden he’s everybody’s best friend. But if he falls asleep or leaves his room open, look out. People will kill each other for a sugar fix in a college dorm.”

One boy had a slightly more positive outlook. “It’s such a crazy environment that everyone just goes kind of crazy,” he explained. “It’s like we’re little kids again. We have Nerf gun wars and play stupid video games and watch cartoons. It’s kind of fun, in like a really sickly nostalgic way. Still, I’d kill to sleep in my own bed without five million other people around. And my roommate needs to be in a mental asylum. He talks to himself all the time, and he talks to like his pencils and his food and stuff. Hey, don’t use my name in here, huh? I don’t want him to kill me. He’s totally capable of it...”

Technolo-what?

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 18:22:53 GMT

I am not a stereotype. I am however nineteen, a recent high school graduate, and a music lover. According to my mother, these factors make me a member of the “I-Pod generation,” meaning the generation of young people who understand useless, complicated technology better than they understand long division. I would have to disagree with her.

Yes, I am dimly aware that people around my age have begun purchasing tiny flat boxes, complete with earphones, which can hold somewhere around 784,596 songs (and that’s the capacity of the smallest model of course, the one which is the size of an average person’s pinky nail) called “I-Pods”. In addition to music, these magic boxes can hold games, videos, electronic Cliff notes, and any other downloadable feature imaginable. They can also, I’m told, send out satellite radar to pick up and decode messages from purple people inhabiting the Korplox galaxy in outer space.

Okay, I made that part up. Right now, the extent of the radar beam’s power is giving me the speed of every passing car on Route 219. But Korplox communication is in the imminent future. Technology just has to make that next leap forward, and it’s coming closer every day! Recently, I went along with a friend when he was I-Pod shopping. We went to Circuit City, and within four nanoseconds of walking in the door were accosted by an eager salesman named Steve. “May I help you?” Steve asked, pushing his glasses up his nose.

Upon hearing that my friend was looking for the right I-Pod, Steve puffed importantly and led us to the display. “Around how many megabytes of memory were you looking to have?” he asked casually.

My friend promptly responded with a definite, “Uhhhh.”

Steve looked impatient. “I don’t really know much about this stuff,” my friend admitted weakly. Steve eyed him with disdain while I looked around dizzily and tried to remember exactly when my graphing calculator had developed game capabilities.

I must admit I found it hard to keep a straight face as Steve began his litany, pontificating about the different features of the gizmos with sleepy-eyed, monotone arrogance. The one with 48 mega-giga-bubas of memory sounded good to me, but apparently I was wrong. At Steve’s urging, my friend purchased one with a much greater capacity. I don’t know why any of us need a little square slab with enough space to store the Library of Congress’s content on our persons at all times anyway. But apparently we do.

I’m not saying technology is bad. But when I borrow someone’s cellular phone and have difficulty figuring out how to make a call, well, just maybe the advances have gotten a little out of hand. I start dialing my home number. I press 2 and a picture pops up. I try to go back, and the phone is demanding a PIN code. So I attempt to turn it off. It does nothing except beep indignantly, screen unchanged. I can’t be sure, but I believe it’s laughing at me.

I recently purchased a cell phone. After poring over the Bible-sized instruction manual for about four hours, I triumphantly announced that I had figured out how to activate it. (I could have done it about two hours sooner, but I realized I had been reading the Spanish portion of the manual. Apparently a language I do not speak makes almost as much sense to me as English cellphone-ese.) I thought my phone was incredibly technologically advanced. It has an alarm, a tip calculator, a regular calculator, a camera, a unit convertor, a thing to get me coffee, etc. The fact that I had no idea how to use any of these features was of no consequence. They were there, and that could mean only one thing. My phone was cool!

Naturally, when I ran into an old friend the following day, I promptly began showing off the phone. “It even has a camera,” I bragged pompously.

“Does it have video?”

“Well, no...”

He gestured for it. “These pictures aren’t very clear,” he said skeptically. “How many megapixels does it have?”

I thought pixels had something to do with computer monitors. That’s what I was told in HTML class. I was at a loss for words.

My friend gave me a sympathetic glance as he handed it back. “My phone has a 1.3 megapixel resolution,” he said haughtily. “It can hold two minutes of video. It also has high speed data, streaming TV, Bluetooth, and an MP3 player.”

I still have no idea what Bluetooth is (though it sounds like a pirate’s gum disease) but I know what an MP3 player is. An I-Pod! Evidently all forms of technology are slowly combining forces and leaving me behind in the dust. Pretty soon, I won’t even be able to listen to music because I won’t know how to turn on the radio. I’ll have to come up with simpler ways to entertain myself.

I-Pod generation, indeed. Don’t kid yourself. There are plenty of us out there who have less of an idea of what’s going on with technology than our grandmothers. (I’m pretty sure my grandmother’s been using an I-Pod to store audible cookie recipes. I saw the earphones poking out from behind the toaster.)

But I’m not upset. I’m convinced that my life will still be rich and fulfilling without technology. I’ll have much more time to devote to reading and writing. And brushing my teeth. I wouldn’t want to get Bluetooth.