{"id":554,"date":"2008-08-20T18:37:16","date_gmt":"2008-08-20T22:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/?p=554"},"modified":"2014-04-07T09:23:22","modified_gmt":"2014-04-07T14:23:22","slug":"soap-and-unicorns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/?p=554","title":{"rendered":"Soap and Unicorns"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Oh, yes, I&#8217;m busy, but I&#8217;m still blogging. I&#8217;ll keep posting, even if I have to hunt down Dan Pfeiffer and feast upon his internal organs for mana.<\/p>\n<p>Harrison Hall is just like a big hotel. The shower controls are some sort of recursive cipher, the front desk can do just about <u>anything<\/u> for you, and there&#8217;s a grand piano in the lounge. Except that the ice machine works and the hallway smells like sweat and Axe and Xbox. (Incidentally, the girls&#8217; wing smells like soap and daisies and unicorns.)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m beginning to live in constant fear that I&#8217;m picking up my roommate&#8217;s accent. Not that I have anything against accents, I just don&#8217;t want him to think I&#8217;m mocking him. He&#8217;s from a small town in southern Indiana. The accent is subtle and only noticeable on the ends of words. Though most other people don&#8217;t have any.<\/p>\n<p>Stuff has different names here. Like &#8220;Cornhole&#8221; is basically Baggos.  Frolf is &#8220;Disc Golf&#8221;. Pop is still pop, though. (Except to the guy from New Jersey.)<\/p>\n<p>Boiler Gold Rush is the orientation program for freshman. Step one is for them to strap a colored bracelet onto you (They sneaked up on me while I was signing something.) that decides where and when you eat and what activities you do. (Like prison, except that they keep us out late.) It&#8217;s surprisingly tough plastic that&#8217;s not supposed to come off, even in the shower.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m in a group with about 15 other people. Most are from small towns. One from Mexico, one from Warsaw and the others from places with Native American sounding names that I can&#8217;t remember but that are also small towns in Indiana. And everyone but me knows how to play &#8220;Euchre&#8221; which I think is a card game Yahoo! invented. I&#8217;ve been taken under their wing as a trainee and say things like, &#8220;Are there ones?&#8221; and &#8220;I have a four of, uh, clovers?&#8221; I&#8217;ve already mastered some kind of rat screw game involving cell phones and Tootsie Rolls.<\/p>\n<p>Every night there&#8217;s buses that go from campus to the local superstores to drum up business and gouge all <strike>ignorant and naive college students<\/strike> freshmen. I&#8217;m there for free stuff. But the bus stop near my dorm was mobbed with hundreds of cheapos. Getting on was insane. There was more civility at D-Day, more order on the decks of the Titanic, more college students than I&#8217;ve ever seen attending an actual class. I&#8217;ve done Target, Meijer runs and the Best Buy run is on Thursday. I&#8217;ve got three bags of free stuff and 95 cents worth of thumbtacks and it only took me 97 cumulative minutes of waiting and I didn&#8217;t get back to my room until 1 AM on either night, but I got a <em>free water bottle<\/em> and some of that new portable Axe. You know, the one from the commercials where it  dissolves some girl&#8217;s clothes? All that I can imagine that doing is dramatically increase the rates of sexual assault in this country, but I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ll find some use for it.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of getting stuff free, there was also a business fair in the Armory. (Yes, we have an armory building apparently. I know, I know, red states.) Basically a bunch of businesses and clubs and churches advertising. Most had free stuff.<br \/>\nA<\/p>\n<form><\/form>\n<form action=\"\"><select name=\"\"><option>recruiter<\/option><option>Apple CEO<\/option><option>snowboarder<\/option><option>Southern Baptist<\/option><\/select><\/form>\n<p> wearing<\/p>\n<form action=\"\"><select name=\"\"><option>a suit of armor<\/option><option>camo fatigues<\/option><option>a paper hat<\/option><option>a priest&#8217;s robe<\/option><option>a space suit<\/option><\/select><\/form>\n<p> gave me <\/p>\n<form action=\"\"><select name=\"\"><option>a popsicle<\/option><option>half a sandwich<\/option><option>a goldfish<\/option><option>a frisbee<\/option><option>coffee mug<\/option><\/select><\/form>\n<p>Free pizza from several different restaurants. Free Jimmy John&#8217;s, DQ, and Starbuck&#8217;s samples. Ironically, Circle K gave out live goldfish, while the Nature conservation committee gave out plastic magnets.<\/p>\n<p>I think my week can be summarized fairly succinctly.<\/p>\n<p>Tommy: Morning. Does something smell like vomit to you?<br \/>\nAlex: (shrugs) College.<\/p>\n<p>Yeah&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oh, yes, I&#8217;m busy, but I&#8217;m still blogging. I&#8217;ll keep posting, even if I have to hunt down Dan Pfeiffer and feast upon his internal organs for mana. Harrison Hall is just like a big hotel. The shower controls are some sort of recursive cipher, the front desk can do just about anything for you, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=554"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3680,"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions\/3680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommy.lardbucket.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}