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.

More things that I hate when they happen.

Sam made me write this. So this is dedicated to her.

The other day, my roommate, his friend that is a girl that might be his girlfriend but I don't know, and myself were all chillin' in our room. They were doing whatever they do, and I was playing my ukulele. I out my uke down on my bed and went into the hallway to use the water fountain to fill up my Brita pitcher. I came back to find this:

The worst part was, he is way better at uke than I will ever be. Also, he is way better at guitar than most people could ever hope to me. My roommate is an all-around beast at music. He records and junk with his laptop, like profession-level recording. Anyway. I saw him playing my ukulele, which was like him ripping my legs off, beating me to death with them, and then putting them on instead of his legs and proceeding to win the World Cup. There might have been a slight discrepancy between how I acted and how I felt...

No one touches my ukulele but me.

Another thing that I really hate is when people bend over to pick something up and you get a face-full of their ass crack. But what I hate even more is when you are at Walmart and you walk around the corner and see some grouchy old fat lady on a power scooter bending over and showing the entire world her thong. Yes. I said it. Her thong.

I'm not sure what was worse, the fact that we accidentally were forced to lose a part of our souls that day, or the fact that she had more impressive facial hair than me. Pat and I proceeded to weep and try to pluck out our eyeballs with whatever sharp instruments we could find. Turns out there are not a whole lot of those in the Nerf aisle of Walmart.

Please, for the love of all that is fun and wonderful, stop doing things that I hate.

Things that I hate when they happen.

These things all happened between my last post and right now.

1 a) When I am sitting in a lecture hall before class and there are maybe 5 other students in the 250-seat room, and someone sits right next to me.

Now, not only where there like 250 other seats he could have sat in, but when I first walked into the lecture hall, I wanted to go sit in my usual seat (top back corner, extra leg room and no one watches me secretly Facebook). Sadly, I couldn't sit in my normal seat because there was already someone there. Well as soon as I sit down, the guy that was in my spot gets up, comes two rows down and sits right next to me. I wanted to punch him.

1 b) I was standing at the bus stop after class. I was feeling good about catching the bus the first time around (see #2) as there were not many other people at the bus stop with me. All of a sudden, this guy walks by, eyeing me weirdly out of the corner of his eye. He then proceeds to stand right next to me. And not like, "Greetings, stranger. I, too, am waiting for passage upon this vessel, here at a safe distance from you because you could be rabid or perhaps in an angry mood!" No. He stood RIGHT next to me, like the kind of close you stand next to someone you've been friends with for a long time, or perhaps someone you are discreetly trying to drug with roofies.

I did the math. There really is approximately 500 square feet at the bus stop.

2) I wait for the bus at the bus stop. People start crowding up all around me (see #1 b) and I am irritated. I was the first one at the bus stop today, but I definitely wasn't the only one who needed to use the bus.

Since I was the first one at the stop, I am at the back of the mob that has assembled. So when the bus comes, (already packed; everyone inside is standing up) I am the last person in line to get on. But since there were so many fucking idiots pushing and shoving their way ahead of me to get on this one particular god-forsaken bus...

The bus is overflowing with apathetic children and I have to wait for the next one. "It's okay," I think. "This bus came promptly and on time. I'm sure the next one will be just right around the corner!"

Then this happens.

In a fit of murderous rage, I being screaming in my mind at every living thing that comes within 100 yards of me. Douchebag on bike, bigger douchebag on vespa, HUGE gang of douchebags in one of said douchebag's father's Land Rovers, fucking squirrels trying to get food from every goddamn person on the sidewalk. I hate my life.

The plus side is, when the bus DOES come, I am the only person on it. But today there was one super-model-esque girl as well. When the bus stopped at a red light, she strutted to the front of the bus, asked the bus driver to stop at 30th street, then proceeded to sit down and give an extremely sensual hair toss and pouty-model-faced glance around the bus.

So I guess it's not all bad.

It's Friday!

And since nothing interesting happened to me last night, I have nothing to post.

Well... That's not entirely true. There WAS a girl in a power scooter, my friends spinning around until they "got drunk," and I finished The Odyssey.

But nothing worthy of a (politically correct) story. So here's what I am thinking I'll do: I have an entire folder called "random stuff" that's full of random drawings I've done, so when I temporarily run out of post ideas, I'll give you one of those pictures.

I drew a picture of my ukulele. It's sort of an abstract painting that really embodies the emotions I experience when I play/hold/look at it.

Happy Friday.

Story of my life.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I don't have class until 3:30 pm. Which means I have a legitimate excuse to sit in my jammies all day and watch stuff on the internet.

Today, I was watching an episode of Arrested Development on Hulu. I looked at the clock, it was 2:45 and I had yet to shower. I quickly did the math in my mind: 5-15 minutes for a shower and getting dressed + long time/short time on the bus depending which one comes first = probably gunna be late to class. So I did a really fast shower and got dressed and all that junk and I stepped outside. It was 3:00 on the dot.

Now, there are 2 bus loops that go from my dorm to campus. One of them goes all around campus before dropping off right in front of the building I needed to go to. The other drops off maybe 50 yards from the front door and goes right there. I was hoping for bus loop #2, but all that was there was a #1 bus.

I decided to get off at the first stop for bus #1 and walk to my next class.

The problem was that the walk, when standing at the stop I got off at looked a little something like this:

In my mind, this seemed quicker than taking the bus all the way around campus before it delicately dropped me off at my destination with a lollipop or a unicorn or something magical like that. I am so dumb sometimes.

After the long and brutal walk, I had finally made it there... Literally 2 minutes before the same bus that I got off of arrived at the magical stop of childish wonder.

And I was still 15 minutes early for class.

This really happened.

Being a college student, I stay up late doing random crap. Like last night. I was up until about 2 a.m. drawing random stuff I thought of to put on this blog some day. I finally got to sleep, but that didn't last long.

First of all, let me just lay out a floor plan of my dorm room.

So, as you can see, my bed is literally right next to the door. This floor plan is generous and has a space between everything, but in reality, most things overlap. Like the door. When it's open, you can't see my bed because the door completely blocks it. That has led to a lot of funny stories on its own, but those are for other posts.

Anyway, it was about 2:45 in the morning. I had been asleep for maybe half an hour. All of a sudden I heard some knocking on the door. Not like, "LET ME IN BITCHES" kinda knocking, just quiet knocking.

Seeing as how I just woke up, I naturally had an answer for everything.

I pride myself in my half-asleep comments being somewhat intelligible. I thought that, perhaps the combination of A/C and oscillating fans in our room was causing the door to shake a little and it made little tapping noises. Seemed pretty legit. So I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep.

But the knocking just kept getting louder.

Since my oscillating fan theory had just been debunked, I began forming a list of possible causes of the knocking and jiggling of the door handle. I started with least likely and worked up: 3) it could be a drunken idiot on our floor. 2) Serial rapist. 1) The hall monster.

In retrospect, I maybe shouldn't have made the quantum leap from drunken stranger to serial rapist, and I should not have been so nonchalant about the serial rapist either. No, what freaked me out the most was the hall monster, a demonic beast that feasts on the souls of chubby college boys whose beds are too close to the door. That terrified me. So I lied in bed for a few more minutes, trying to drown out the sound of the knocking. Then I thought, "Well shit. Maybe I'm dreaming." But just as soon as that thought came into my mind, the hall monster unleashed a fit of panicked knocking and door handle jiggling. I wanted to cry. Soon, roommate #1 (with his flowing golden locks) got up to see what it was.

He looked through the little peep-hole in our door and said, "It's roommate #2!" and opened the door.

Sure enough. There was roommate #2, clad only in his boxer briefs, standing in a daze out in the hall. He came inside and got back into his bed and the terrible knocking stopped. I finally got to sleep about an hour later, visions of the hall monster still dancing around in my head; he was pissed that he didn't get to devour my soul last night so he's building up his powers to try again twice as hard tonight.

Probably.

But anyway. As soon as I woke up this morning, I thought about what happened last night. And that it did, in fact, really happen. I asked roommate #2 about why he was out in the hall in his underwear at 3 a.m., because he was already asleep in his bed when I went to sleep. He said he didn't know, and after further ponderment (is that a word?) decided he sleepwalked out there. He had no recollection of getting out of bed and walking out into the hall in just his boxers.

College is interesting.

Hula hoops suck.

Tonight, I was helping my buddy Pat do his chemistry homework. Well, no... That's not entirely true. I was  sitting on my bed PRETENDING to help him do his chemistry homework, with the occasional Googling of a chemistry term for him.

I tutor him every Wednesday night because I used to be in AP Chemistry in high school and was so great at it almost all the time!

So anyway, we decided that enough was enough (after we took a Dairy Queen break... More on that some other time) and that we should live the dream we grew up knowing and loving: Going to Walmart late at night when nothing else is open. In Boulder, there are like 7 bagillion things to do at night. But in Parker, where we grew up, there is absolutely nothing open after 9 p.m. except for Walmart and Waffle House. So we drove (and got lost) for about half an hour before we finally found the nearest Walmart. We went inside and spent a solid hour planning out our Nerf arsenal for the next Nerf war. Of course, we didn't buy anything. We're college students, and whatever money I DO have goes to other more important things, like clothes and shoes and pizza at 2 in the morning :)

After a little while of meandering through Walmart, nostalgically re-living our childhood through vintage StarWars LEGO sets they had, we made our way to the "good ol' fashioned old-timey fun!" aisle. The aisle that sells pool noodles, hula hoops, make your own birdhouse kits... You know. The stuff Gramma got you for Christmas when you were 12 because she didn't know what an XBOX was.

It was there that I saw it. The magical hula hoop of DESTINY. This particular hoop was the like Audi R-8 V10 of hula hoops. It had LED lights all around it, so when you were vigorously thrusting your hips to and fro, it would light up like a Pink Floyd laser show and blow everyone's fucking minds.

I remembered the glorious days of third grade when I was a beast at the hula hoop. I was as close as a third grader can get to being pro without getting endorsements and sponsorships and touring the globe cuz I am so talented for a lil' guy. I triumphantly held the hula hoop, feeling the glorious power coursing through my veins. I looked at Pat and said, "Pat. Buckle your mother-loving seatbelt because this shit is about to get REAL." I placed the hula hoop around my waist, ready to shake it like a stripper at happy hour. And the whole thing played out something like this.

I stood there, ashamed and close to weeping. How could I not hula hoop? It's the most simple goddamned thing in the world. Step one: Put it on your waist. Step two: Gyrate like a cheap whore with daddy issues. Step 3: Bask in the glorious cheers and shouts as throngs of scantily-clad women rush around you, begging for your phone number and throwing panties all over you. But for some reason, I couldn't do it. I tried again. Same result. 3 or 4 more tries later, and I had given up. "Pat..." I said, tears welling in my sad little eyes. "Pat, I've failed you... I let you down." He looked me right in the eyes and said, "You know what? I believe that you were once the greatest hula hooper on the playground. You know why? Because so was I." He took the hoop and in a state of pure childish wonder, I stared at him like the first time a girl sees a pony and decides she needs one for every birthday of her young goddamned life.

Pat places that wonderfully beautiful piece of plastic around his waist, steadied his footing, took a deep breath and began to thrust his pelvis around in a motion that can only be described as breathtakingly professional. But after about 3 seconds of that, it became quite apparent that neither one of us still held that glory we once were so proud of in the third grade.

Perhaps we will never know why 18-year-old men can't hula hoop. Maybe it's some sort of fairy magic that wears off after the third grade. Maybe we're just out of shape college kids. Maybe the hula hoops were broken and it wasn't our faults at all. I guess we'll never know why hula hoops suck so much.