Just Sayin'

So, I will be graduating from college one week from today. (Well, I'll be graduating from college provided I don't completely bomb my finals -- fingers crossed). To give some context, I started this blog at approximately the same time I started college, which is completely weird and surreal to think about. Anyway, I would like to say that I've learned some things about life and friendship and what really matters (blah, blah, blah), but I don't think I have. However, I have acquired some useful tips that will help you succeed in college (sort of). Don't Spend All Your Meal Points on Orange Soda and Pudding: Most colleges and universities have some sort of meal program for undergrad students. Penn State has a meal points system, which allows you to buy food and stuff at all the different dining halls, restaurants, and connivence stores on campus. Now, this is both a good thing and a bad thing. You have lots of options; however,  you also have the opportunity to spe...

So, I'm currently taking a class on African Art History and one of the assessments in the class is a quiz on the geography of Africa. Now, I like this class a lot and find it really interesting, but, when I first heard about the quiz, I was a little annoyed. I was like "really? is  this middle school or something? do I really have to do this?" It seemed kind of silly to me because the last time I had to take a geography quiz was 7th grade. It turns out the quiz was necessary. I am profoundly bad at geography. When my professor was explaining the quiz, he said something to the effect of "I find that this quiz is necessary because American students tend to be bad at geography." Now, the idea that Americans are bad at geography a fairly common stereotype that people, particularly Europeans, have about Americans. I've always thought it was a little unfair, but it turns out that it's totally true. I looked at a blank map of Africa to study for the quiz an...

Not too long ago, Jenna Marbles made a video about how she's bad at being an adult . I watched that video and I thought: psh, I'm worse at more things than that! I'm horrible at being an adult! I mean, Jenna Marbles has curtains in her house and more than one plate; she's practically the queen of the grownups! I, on the other hand, am very good at not being an adult. First of all, I'm terrible at making phone calls. Jenna Marbles talked about this too, so I think it might be a generational thing. Whenever I make a phone call, I go through a couple of steps: 1) try to convince someone else to make the call, 2) delay making the call as long as possible, 3) spend at least half and hour mentally preparing to make the call, and 4) actually making the call. Consequently, I'm also really bad at answering the phone. I never answer the phone if it's a number I don't know (which means I miss a lot of important calls) and, half the time, if it's a number I kn...

I don't normally write "serious" blogs, but I feel the need to address the current KDR scandal at Penn State. In case you're unfamiliar with the situation, this article does a pretty good job of explaining everything that's happened; basically, the fraternity Kappa Delta Rho is being investigated after they used a private Facebook page to post nude photos of women who had passed out or were sleeping in their frat house. I only have one thing to say about this: Penn State, I am sick of this . Penn State has a huge problem when it comes to sexual assault and rape. Let me give you some quick facts: in 2012, Penn State had the highest number of reported sexual offenses of any campus in the country (according to The Washington Post); since February of this year, there have been 6 forcible sex offenses reported on campus; and sexual assault cases involving alcohol are often not prosecuted in State College. All of this is completely unacceptable. Penn State is a ...

For an English major, I'm remarkably chill about grammar. I've blogged about this before. I don't really care about spelling and who and whom and things like that, but one thing I really don't care about is subject verb agreement. Lemme explain what I mean: as a chill English major, I feel it is my sworn duty to address the gender neutral pronoun issue in the English language. In case you're unfamiliar with the gender neutral pronoun debacle, it comes down to this: the burrito eater must realize that they will become a burrito . Did you see anything wrong with that sentence? If no, congratulations: you have successfully internalized the descriptive trend towards gender neutral pronouns in English.  If you're a prescriptivist, this makes your brain EXPLODE. Someone with a more prescriptive attitude towards grammar would probably tell you that this sentence is incorrect because "eater" is singular whereas "they" is plural. Technically, the...

So, the other day I went to California Tortilla for the first time. I liked it a lot. Not because of the food -- although the food was pretty good -- because of the diet soda. I'm a person in college who doesn't like coffee, so diet soda is pretty important to me as a source of caffeine. Anyway, you'd think that soda is pretty much the same anywhere you go, but you'd be wrong. That day at California Tortilla I experienced the diet soda miracle. They had this Coke machine with a touch  screen (which is pretty cool to begin with) and all the flavors of soda known to man. Seriously! I saw flavors of soda that I never dreamed existed! They had Vanilla Coke, Lime Coke, Raspberry Coke, Cherry Coke, Cherry Vanilla Coke, and Orange Coke. ORANGE COKE. That's amazing! I've never even heard of Orange Coke. Apparently, it's only been in the US for like six years, maybe less. Before that, you had to go to Russia to get Orange Coke! RUSSIA!  It's not even just Cok...

So...I think it's time to add posters to the official list of things I'm addicted to (if you're just going us, that list also includes eyeshadow, Snapchat, gory vampire fiction, making fun of Voldemort, nail polish, and Justin Timberlake music). Seriously, ever since I moved into my new apartment, I've gone poster crazy. I have over twenty posters in my bedroom alone. That's not normal! And don't even get me started on my expanding collection of living room posters. At some point, something just clicked in my brain and I was like "OMG, I can hang things on my walls."  That was the beginning of the end.  I've gone through over 100 command strips since I moved in. It's gotten to a point where one of my roommates  actually had to say, "I don't want to live in a catalog. There has to be some white space." My response to that was " quoi? " Like, making the apartment look like a giant picture book was sort of my ...

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, I didn't have a Snapchat, and I was okay with that. I was like "Snapchat! What's wrong with these young people and their bamboozling picture taking devices! You kids get off my lawn!" Oh, how young I was (note, this was about 10 months ago). I don't actually remember why I got a Snapchat, but I suspect my friends KLMM and MKPJ had something to do with it. They were probably like, "if you get a Snapchat, your life will be full of unicorns and chocolate and everyone will want to share a Coke with you!" And, like a fool whose name was never on any of those Coke bottles, I believed them. If you've read my first blog, you know that the same logic is responsible for the existence of this blog. Anyway, now I have a Snapchat and everything is AWFUL. I'm addicted to Snapchat. I don't want to Snap. I have to! I have a Snapping dependency problem. Half the time, I don't even know what I'm Snapping...

So, a little while ago, my roommate and I developed something that we feel the world is in desperate need of: a sass odometer. A sass odometer is sort of like a richter scale for sassiness. Simply put, it is a way of ranking sassy comments based on three factors: overall sassiness, sass saturation, and intention to sass. This semester, while some were studying rhetoric and others were studying literature, we were studying sass. We've got sass down to a science. This is because, when you're in college, people will sass you more than they ever have in your entire life. It's four years of constant sass attack! You'll be in the convenience store, just buying a cliff bar, when one of your friends will be like "you're eating a cliff bar...I can't eat those; I'm trying to cut back on calories". BAM! Sass attack! Then, you'll be in the dining hall, eating taco salad for lunch (because you always eat taco salad for lunch), when someone (who...

We have a problem in my apartment. And that problem has one smell: the smell of feet. My roommate has the smelliest feet I have ever encountered in my nineteen and a half years of life. This odor, something akin to dried moose vomit, permeates our apartment, clinging to every surface like a noxious nail fungus of doom .   Now, before you think I'm a foot stabbing, horrible, tell-tale roommate, let me just say that my roommate knows that her feet smell. She's just as horrified by it as I am. We have conversations about it all the time. Some of the most serious conversations that take place in our apartment revolve around foot powder and odor eaters and weather or not you can wash sneakers (for the record, I maintain that you can). It's gotten to the point that, unless it drops below 40 degrees, we leave our window open pretty much all the time. Now, let's just be clear, regardless of what you might think, windy, sunless, rainy 40 degree weather is cold . And in Penn...

So, last night my roommate and I went grocery shopping for the first time in about a month. What were we eating for that month we didn't go grocery shopping you may ask? Mostly Chinese food and chocolate milk. Anyway, someone told us that if you eat Chinese take out more than three times a week, you have a problem, so we decided to go grocery shopping. You know, like grownups. Anyway, when you don't go grocery shopping in a month, the supermarket becomes this magical place where you can find all sorts of exotic foods you didn't even know existed, like lettuce and canned tuna. Because of this, I've decided to write a short play about our experiences in the mystical land of grocery store. You're welcome. *** Scene 1: The Empty Refrigerator Enter two roommates. They are in the kitchen of their apartment, looking in the refrigerator. Roommate 1: How is it possible that we have no food? Roommate 2: We don't have no food. Look, there's some soy sauce.....

So, this semester I decided to take a sociology class. Let me preface this by saying that this is the most ridiculous class I've ever been in, mostly because instead of learning about sociology, our professor just talks about why Jay-Z's lyrics confuse him and gives impromptu lectures on physics. Continuing in that vein, the other day our teacher was trying to make a point about how difficult it is to gather empirical evidence and the way he chose to illustrate this was by asking us a multiple choice question about the moon. Basically he showed us two pictures of the phases of the moon, one with the phases progressing from left to right, then right to left and vice-versa and asked us which one was right. I thought about that for a minute, then answered option C, which was "it doesn't matter". Out of all the ways to illustrate how much people don't pay attention to the world around them, he had to ask about the moon . Facepalm. Now, there's obviously ...

So, I've been to Dairy Queen once this week. For most people, that would be perfectly normal, but for me that is like completely ridiculous. I have a confession to make: I am a Dairy Queen addict. I'm not sure how it all started. I didn't really grow up in a fast food family, so in general, I don't like fast food restaurants, but, for some reason, Dairy Queen has become the place in my friend group. Like, not just a place we go every now and then. We go to Dairy Queen like 3 or 5 times a week. It's an actual problem for me. Like, if I tell my parents I'm going out, they're like 'oh, are you going to Dairy Queen?'. And I'm like 'no...maybe...yes'. It's embarrassing! It's not even that I want the ice cream. There's just no where else to go. It's like 'well we could go bowling, but that's too expensive' or 'we could go to the movies but that's expensive'. Apparently, there's no where better ...

So, as you probably know I am about to finish my first year at college and I have discovered that there is no way to succede with campus meal points. You either run out two weeks before the end of the semester and starve or end up with three hundred dollars worth of meal points to spend in three days before they expire. Unfortuantely, or perhaps fortunately, I ended up with the later. About two weeks ago, I realized that I had to spend about three hundred dollars before I moved out of my dorm. Now, ordinarily, spending three hundred dollars on short notice isn't a problem for me, but there are only so many bottles of Diet Pepsi one can buy before one wants to barf. I really tried my best to spend it. I bought meals for my roommate who was out of meal points, I bought grande frappachinos at Starbucks, I treated my friends to iced coffee, and I bought myself a life supply of easy mac and applesauce cups (of course, since I bought easy mac I also had to buy ketchup because, let...

So, last night, my roommate and I were in CVS and she saw the hair dye section and, out of nowhere, she was like "do you think I should dye my hair black?", to which I responded, "that would look so fetch ". The scary thing is that she said yes. So, what did I do last night? Did I study for my Iberian Civilizations exam? Did I work on my poetry project? Did I do my English reading? Did I get a hop on my math homework? No. I spent like five hours dying my roommate's hair. Isn't it only supposed to take like forty minutes? You ask. Well, reader, I'm glad you asked, because this was not a 'normal' hair dying experience. Let me tell you a little story. So, first things first, when we got back to our dorm, we texted our friend who actually knows something about dying hair. When she came down, the two of us opened the box and put on the gloves and read the instructions and mixed the dye, realized we had no idea what we were doing, and took one...

So, as you all know, today is St. Patrick's Day, which is like the second St. Patrick's Day that Penn State celebrates, after State Patty's day and, actually, as far as most people at PSU are concerned, they're exactly the same. Basically that just means that everyone gets a second chance to wear their green t-shirts and light up shamrock necklaces and burst out into spontaneous bag-piping (which, ironically is more of a Scottish thing) and everyone gets just as drunk as they did before. Anyway, my best friend and I took this opportunity to ride Penn State's white loop last night and observe the festivities. My friend also wrote a blog about this, so check it out if you want ( http://coffeeyogaandlifesothernecessities.blogspot.com ). Consider it a sociological experiment, this is the data we uncovered, in the form of a short play. I call it Friendly Drunks 2: This Bus is in Motion . *** Scene 1: Concerned Drunks My friend and I get on the CATA bus, as we sit d...

As those of you who go to Penn State know, last weekend was State Patty's day. For those of you who do not go to Penn State, State Patty's day is PSU's version of Saint Patty's day which is basically like any other Saturday in a college town (use your imagination) except for everyone wears green. Anyway,  on Saturday night, two of my friends and I were going to a concert so we took the bus across campus. Most of my friends and I do not participate in State Patty's but, it's always great fun to sit quietly on the blue loop and observe the intoxicated. Not that anyone was black out drunk or anything, at least not when we saw them; most people were just buzzed enough to be talkative and quite funny. Without further ado, I present to you a series of vignettes or a very short play, depending on how you want to look at it, entitled Friendly Drunks (based on a true story). *** Scene 1 On a CATA bus. Enter drunk girl, being supported by two friends. Drunk girl...

I am conflicted.  So, today is the anniversary of Joe Paterno's death and I have some stuff to say about him. Well, not him per say, but the way he is remembered. I'm not going to lie; it's sort of disturbing to see what is basically the modern day version of the "hero cult" develop around him. As a native of State College, I feel I am qualified to speak on this. Sure, he was a positive figure in the community and did a lot for Penn State, but I think what we need to remember is that Joe Paterno was fundamentally a human being and therefore, inherently flawed. Let's be clear here, I know that he did a lot for this university and for this community and I thank him for it, but there are other people in Penn State's history who have done equally as much for this university and receive not one tenth of the credit that he receives. Going hand in hand with that, I don't think there has been proper recognition of his humanity. There was a darker side to P...

So, I've been in college for about four semesters now (if you count the Summer Session) and I've taken about six English classes so I think that I'm qualified to assert that no one talks in English class! Now, when I say English class I'm talking about the awkward five to ten minutes when everyone is just sitting in the classroom waiting for the professor to get there. And, in English classes, in that time, from anywhere from five to fifteen minutes, no one says a word. The weird thing is that, I've taken a decent number of non-English classes, and, in those classes, no one can shut up. Take bio for instance, everyone's always making plans for the weekend or talking about last weekend or complaining about their teachers/tests/girlfriends/the price of weed. Even after the professor gets there, they're still talking. In math, I've heard tales of drunken mistakes, recaps of Family Guy episodes, and homework answers being swapped, all while the lecture is...

Every now and then, someone says to me, "you should do a minor in biology or something - you're so good at it." People who say that to me, you know not what you ask. Sure, to the casual observer, it may seem like I understand science. On the outside, it may even seem like I enjoy science, but do not be fooled, on the inside, I'm all like, "phytochrome - you can go die." -_- That was why, when Hurricane Sandy made Penn State cancel classes on Monday I was all like "Bio lab? NOT FRICKIN' TODAY." Yeah, because, while I may be able to identify the pericycle with my eyes closed and recite the photosynthesis equation backwards, if you ask me to make a wet mount slide, I'm like "...huh?". I will answer multiple choice questions until I lose feeling in my fingers, but ask me to set up an experiment and you will get a non-committal shrug. Applying fertilizer? Measuring chemicals? Focusing microscopes? Not. Going. To. Happen.  Clearly...