Moving on up to the Undergrounds

January 26th, 2013

Deep beneath the icy pavement of Purdue’s campus, lies a sprawling underground Catacomb full of carrels, computer station and Asians.

I work there now.

Yep, my exemplary performance (I didn’t screw anything up.) last semester paid off and now I get to work in the Undergraduate library at the IT desk. Helping meatheads with their meathead problems only now I do it as one of three similar Internet denizens staffing the desk.

I’m competent so long as they don’t ask me anything about computers. Everything else I know: where’s the nearest vending machine, whether or not we have mouse pads (We don’t.) and what time the library closes (because that’s when my shift ends.) Anything involving me setting up laptops to print or connecting MacBooks to Wifi involved me looking up stuff in the Knowledge Base (Powered by Google!) for tutorials and guides. Other than that, there’s lolcats and lolcat enthusiasts. Also, lanyards.

Homeflight

January 18th, 2013

My time home was brief. I purposefully chose to stay at Purdue to log some hours in the lab to offset the season’s higher-than-normal train fares and save a little for myself. Once I actually arrived home there was a lot of the familiar eating without doing any dishes, video games and cleaning my room.

This visit had slightly more gravitas than normal due to the fact that I won’t be returning until I move out of my apartment. I don’t yet know where I’ll be stationed for summer, whether it be in Arlington Heights, Indiana or savannah, but it’s time now for me to put away childish things. I had to get rid of my back issues of Popular Science, (paper) dictionaries, and myriad young adult novels. Oh, well. I could only read Beverly Cleary so many times. Why the purge? I need to return a bookshelf I borrowed. It’s not like I live there after all.

coffeemate

I was also reminded how horrifying my family could be.

What’s this? Just regular coffee creamer, right? Something you groggily reach for every morning to give that steamy, flirtatious, profound cup some mellower softer tones?

Wrong move, coffee snob!
ahhh, wtf is that?

That, my friends, is this.

Basically the Vietnamese answer to Italian dressing, it regularly drowns salad, noodles and spring rolls alike with its spicy, sugary, fishiness.

It is a horrifying thing to confuse and it’s not just confined to coffee creamer either. Depending on which family member’s house you’re at, it could occupy an old bottle of orange juice, V8 or VitaminWater. Thus, it is why I never drink orange soda out of bottles. I’ve been burned (at least, my tongue has) too many times by my mom’s deceptive seasoning-beverage receptable discordance. On a partially related note, I also no longer drink Mountain Dew on family road trips.

Because it might be pee.