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.