The Most Perfect Name in the World

So this last week was finals week. And of course, finals are always taken on Scantrons because 40,000 final exams would take ages to grade if not for these brilliant sheets of bubble paper.

But this bitter rivalry goes back a few months.

It all started with midterms.

I'd used Scantron paper before back in high school, and it wasn't a big deal at all. The scantrons in high school looked something like this:

They were a nice friendly, non-threatening shade of green. They had this nifty feature of a big blank space to put your name, the subject, the date, etc. And then I get to college where the scantrons are more like the SAT. You have to bubble in your ID number, bubble in your name, bubble in your gender, your blood type, your thoughts on the war in Iraq, etc. That's all fine with me, albeit a pain in the ass to have to bubble in everything as well as write it in the corresponding boxes.

The problem is this: My last name is Funderburk. That is 10 letters. These college Scantrons only give me 9 blanks for a last name field.

The first time this happened was during midterms this year. I went to fill out my name and ran into this little predicament. At first, I panicked. "What if I get a 0 because there's no one named 'Funderbur' in the class? What if they throw my test out for being incorrectly labeled? What if I flunk out of college and have to work at McDonald's forever until contracting mad cow disease and dying a painful death?"

Frantically, I tried to think about what to do.

The allotted time for filling out the personal information on the sheet was running out and the exam would start soon. So I just decided to finish filling out my name, just totally disregarding the fact that my last name was incomplete.

That's when I realized I have the most perfect name in the world.

The first letter of my first name is the same as the last letter of my last name. This must be what it's like to be a crossword. This is how Edison must've felt when he made the first lightbulb. This is was glory feels like.

And now every time I take a Scantron test in college, I feel like the coolest guy in the whole room.

OH GOD I'M SO SORRY

It's been well over a month since I last posted...

When I realized this earlier tonight, my face looked a little something like this.

I'M SO SORRY WONDERFUL LOYAL FOLLOWERS. I swear I have a good excuse this time.
November was all about working hard before break. We got a week of for Thanksgiving, and of course all of our midterms and papers had to be in before then. So I spent a lot of time studying and writing papers and stuff. And then we had 3 weeks of school left. So I literally wrote 3 papers, studied hard for 2 finals, turned in said papers, and took said finals. That whole process ended this last week. The best part is that I was awake for several days at a time, sleeping once every two or three days or so. I ended up getting about 18 hours total of sleep last week. The average day consisted of studying, writing, hanging out with friends, and LOTS of cigarettes and caffeinated beverages. In fact, this is the first day I've actually had a beverage other than energy drinks and coffee. And coffee energy drinks (the best). Also, since I was pumping my body full of ungodly amounts of nicotine, caffeine, tuarine, guarine, and all sorts of other -ine's, all of which are apparently appetite suppressants, I went a whole week with eating roughly one meal if I was lucky. So this was me.

There are a lot of benches outside my dorm. I spent most of my free time on them, contemplating such taxing questions that only make sense to people as sleep-deprived as I was. For example, "Who was music?" and "What is air?"

Needless to say, those thoughts ended quickly because the other cool thing about being sleep-deprived is that you can't focus on anything for more than like 10 minutes tops.

Well anyway... When I WASN'T working, studying, or not sleeping... I got a chance to hang out with some friends. We went up to the star on Flagstaff up in Boulder.

Every holiday season, Boulder puts a big star up on Flagstaff... Mountain? Hill? Whatever it is. The whole thing is situated sort of like this:

There's a road (I couldn't think of the word "road" earlier when I was drawing this...) that goes most of the way to the star on top, but the rest of the way is about 100 feet at a 45 degree angle upwards from the parking lot. So that climb... Sucked. Hard.

But the view from the top was amazing. Unfortunately, all I got was a cellphone picture from the top. It looks something like this.

That's just an artist's rendering of the photo I took from the star on Flagstaff.

If you are in Boulder in the next few weeks, I highly recommend going up to the star and watching the sun rise. It's most definitely worth the hellish climb.

Anyway. I'm gunna go to sleep now. But rest easy, loyal fans. Now that I'm on break, I'll be posting with more regularity.

Except not this weekend. I'm going to Chicago with Joey. So I'll probably have a great post on Monday about our adventures in Chicago. WOO.

Why I haven't posted in almost a month

Yes, the date of my last post was October 5th. Yes, today is November 3rd.

The reason I haven't posted in almost a month is because I have gone through some pretty dramatic changes in my life.

When I first started this blog, I was here:

I was sitting easy at being enrolled in 12 hours but only attending 9 of them per week (because the last 3 are for a class that started mid-October because it is two 3-hour lectures a week).

So after that wonderful sugar-coated, restful, stress-free honeymoon phase of college was brutally destroyed, raped, and otherwise disfigured by midterms, papers, tests, reading, quizzes, and various other  forms of legal torture, I was left somewhere like this:

Even right now, I'm sitting in my bed running solely on 5 hours of sleep and a shot of DayQuil. Presumably, my super awesome study habits led to me getting an average of 4 hours of sleep every night for the last 3 weeks. There was even one night where I didn't sleep at all; I was up until 3am writing a paper (and let me tell you, I wrote the FUCK out of that paper. BEST. PAPER. EVER. I even submitted it to the Honors Journal to (hopefully) be published this spring) and THEN I got to do the rest of my homework, which consisted of reading roughly 1/4 of Dante's Inferno and some other stuff that I don't even remember doing because those 36 hours are a blur.

Also, I've been experiencing bouts of this (with more and more frequency as the school year continues):

And that's how college is slowly killing me.

The Fire Alarm

I know, I know... It's been a while since I posted. But I've been super busy with school work lately. Even now, I'm totally procrastinating reading the first book of The Aeneid.

Anyway.

A few weeks ago, I was taking a nap in my room after a particularly strenuous day of school. It was probably the most wonderful nap I've taken in my life (well... at the time it was, anyway).

I went to sleep at about 3:30pm and set my alarm for 7 (it was Wednesday and Pat was coming over to do chemistry homework). At about 6:15, I suddenly woke up because I had a weird dream. In the dream, air raid sirens were sounding, bombs started dropping, it was a full-scale terrorist attack on my dorm. No joke (this part legitimately made me cry in my dream...), a 747 airplane crashed into my residence tower. So I woke up to escape this terrible terrible nightmare. However, I quickly came to realize that the air raid sirens were not coming from my dream, but from outside my door in the hallway. Along with the terrible droning alarm, a man's voice was booming, "THE FIRE ALARM HAS BEEN ACTIVATED. PLEASE EXIT THE BUILDING SAFELY AND ORDERLY THROUGH THE NEAREST EXIT."

So I hesitantly got up out of bed, put on a sweatshirt, grabbed my room key, and started heading toward the stairs. They taught us at orientation, plus it's obvious common knowledge that the elevators don't work when the fire alarm is pulled. So, of course, I had to take the stairs.

Did I mention I live on the 13TH MOTHER FUCKING FLOOR of my tower?

So I had to walk 13 flights of stairs (which took close to 15 minutes. If there really was a fire, I would be better off going back to bed and burning alive) and out into the POURING RAIN. So here I am, half awake, angry as all hell, and generally pissed at life. We all stood around for about 10 minutes before they gave us the O.K. to head back up. From the minute I opened the stairwell door, I started making the most unfortunate face, and it stayed that way for a while because as soon as I got back to my room and crawled back into bed to try and sleep a little more before Pat showed up, my stupid phone alarm went off to remind me of how hard my life sucked and that it was already 7:00.

And my face stayed that way for another 2 days.

It has been a few days since I've posted...

But I promise I haven't forgotten. It's been a crazy busy week at school, and life is crazy sometimes. So hopefully this weekend will provide me with some good down-time to finish the post I have been working on for a few days now.

Don't worry, this isn't like every other project I ever start where for the first few days I post like crazy and then I slowly just forget about it. Ohhhh no. Not this one.

Stay tuned, my loyal subscribers. A post is on the way!

No pictures?!

It's currently 1 a.m. and I am probably keeping my roommates up, but I was lying in bed when I had this sudden realization:

Plato = platonic love.
Pythagorus = Pythagorean theorem.
Homer = Homeric simile.

Then I started thinking about the ancient Greek Hippocrates, and what he was responsible for discovering.

Except the problem was, I thought his name was spelled "Hypocrites" (pronounced hip-PAH-crit-ease, in case you were struggling). This made me come to the conclusion that he was responsible for hypocrisy, and that at some point in time, there was a guy who went around consistently saying that things were wrong and then going ahead and doing them anyway. He probably had no friends and was a real jerk.

So I got out of bed and hopped on the internet and Googled "hypocrites" thinking I'd get the Wikipedia page of some ancient Greek douche bag. I just kept getting dictionary definitions for the word. In my half-sleep, I failed to realize that hypocrites is the plural of one single hypocrite, and that it was leading me nowhere. So I Googled "hipocrites", thinking that maybe he spelled his name differently in ancient Greek. Thanks to Google Instant Search, I came up with the wikipedia page for Hippocrates, the Greek guy whose name I was thinking all along, just spelling wrong. And then I was like, "OHHHHH like Hippocratic Oath? Like a doctor?" And sure enough, Hippocrates was a doctor who did a bunch of cool shit. I guess. I didn't actually read the page, just skimmed until I saw "doctor" and then admired the drawing of the bust that is based on his head and shoulders.

Hippocrates = Hippocratic Oath.

Makes a lot more sense than Hypocrites.

But I still think that Hypocrites would have been a huuuuuuuuge douche bag.

The Legend of Black Bob

Today, I unearthed what is possibly the greatest legend in the history of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

I was hanging out with my friend Meghan at the little pond by her dorm. There were ducks and we decided to be super cool and go get bread from her dorm to feed them with.

We were having a jolly time feeding the ducks and some stupid mean geese that came over (we were playing duck, duck, goose... get it!?) for like 15 minutes when Meghan ran out of bread. We each had 2 pieces. So she started sharing mine. I had only been using little pieces to try and train this one particular duck to catch when I threw the bread to him (and she was SO close to getting it, too...). Then we realized that the little fish that eat your spit (we spent a good half hour spitting into the pond like a month ago and watching the little fish eat it) also liked bread.

After throwing a few crumbs to the fishies, we heard this severely starting noise that sounded like someone had just jumped into the pond right underneath the bridge we were standing on, which of course is preposterous because there are about 3 inches between the water and the bottom of the bridge. Needless to say, we were both scared shitless.

We looked into the water to see what had caused this noise. We couldn't see anything besides the little tiny fishies that were there before. So we dropped our one remaining crumb down into the pond to try and stir some sort of response. It went something like this.

"HOLY MOTHER OF CHRIST!" I exclaimed. "THAT'S BLACK BOB! I'VE ONLY HEARD LEGENDS, BUT HERE HE IS!! IN THE FLESH! Er... SCALES!"

"Black Bob?" Meghan asked. "What the hell is Black Bob?"

"THAT." I said, pointing to the ominous shadow swimming in the murky waters below us. Black Bob is a giant (maybe 2 feet long) catfish that lives in the pond. I had only heard legends about him, but here he was, eating our humble bready offerings. He gets his name from the distinctive black color of his dorsal fin, the last thing you see before he devours your ever-loving soul.

We were a little freaked at first, but once we identified the sound, we were overjoyed and ran back to her room, giggling and cheering and shouting profanities about how cool Black Bob was. We got the rest of the loaf of bread from her room and spent the next 30 minutes feeding the ducks and the geese and the fish, but most importantly, nourishing the tired, hungry soul of the legendary Black Bob.

And that's what I do on Monday nights. Also, I built a Star Wars Lego set today. So. Happy Monday, everyone.