Sunday, October 20, 2013

Why Lock Picking Is A Vital Skill

I know, I know, you all have missed greatly reading about my marvelous misadventures but don't worry, today's post will put your weary hearts at ease. Like all eventful things, it involved food.

I had pretty much run out of food last weekend but, car-less and procrastinating individual that I am, it took 5 days of eating nothing but potatoes, short grain rice, and candy until my hunger finally won out to my laziness and I headed to the store last Wednesday evening. Things were going pretty well and even though being car-less you always have to prepare to walk home, which can lead to some fun times (as anyone who's accidentally bought more food than their weak arms can carry can confirm), the strangers of Provo seem to be particularly nice and every so often I do get the offer of a ride home. Today was such a lucky day.  As I got home I was in a pretty good mood. I'd bought the stuff for like 5 different kind of sandwiches, I hadn't had to walk, and I was even considering mentioning how nice people in Utah can be on Twitter. Yes, I do occasionally go through life and think "This would make a good tweet/ Facebook post."(yeah, yeah, this is the "me" generation and everyone is so self absorbed, and the world is going to end and whatever). Generally it's a Facebook post, but recently I've been using Twitter. I've technically had one for a while now since I had to make it for my Intro to Ad class almost two years ago but I've only actually actively been using it since this summer. So far I have a whole 9 followers. I know, pretty sweet right? And three of them are people that I don't even know. I'm not really sure what that means but I'm just going to pretend that it means I'm cool. Anyway, as I was saying before this paragraph got derailed, I was in a pretty good mood until I walked up to the door and realized that it was locked.

As some of you may know, my key was raptured about a month ago. Some people argue that it was simply lost and will one day be found (much like the tribes of Israel), but I don't know, the thing just up and disappeared. I looked everywhere it could have gone but it just vanished. Even though its been a while, I haven't had too much bad  luck with not having a key to my apartment. I've been locked out a few times but usually I just go back up to campus and work in the library for a little while and then come back later. This time though I had a whole backpack full of groceries that I didn't particularly want to leave alone. And I definitely wasn't going to walk with them up the M.C. Escher-esq stairs it takes to get to campus. So I decided to sit outside and wait. After all, it was almost 5:00 (I though, it turns out that I had also forgotten to take my phone with me and I don't have a functioning watch) and someone had to be home soon right?

So I settled down outside my door, broke open some of the sandwich stuff, and waited. Thankfully, I had "my" mp3 player (you may or may not remember that I stole it from Aaron before he left) with me which had The Stories of Tevye the Dairyman, the collection of short stories that Fiddler on the Roof is based off of on it that I had only just started. I was actually somewhat surprised with how closely the stories follow the movie, or at least the romantic aspects of the movie. So far there hasn't been a whole lot of plot with the Tsar but I do still have an hour left to listen to. You know, the entire audio book is only an hour longer than the movie.

Anyway, as I sat listening a few good hearted neighbors did invite me to wait in their living rooms, but I didn't really know any of them particularly well (one of the flaws of having more than one Relief Society in the ward), and I really did expect someone to show up soon. After about two hours, I though that maybe someone was home but had been asleep or listening to music earlier since two of my roommates usually were typically back by now. So adopting the clichest of all cliches (although I've only heard of it actually happening once in real life and that story did not end well), I decided to toss wood chips (there weren't any pebbles around) at the bedroom window. I think I would have felt a lot less dumb if I had been trying to get some cute boy to go on some crazy midnight adventure with me rather than getting someone to let me into my own apartment but,who knows.

After giving up with that, I finally accepted the offer of the next good hearted soul to let me stay inside. By then it was about 7 and everyone had evening classes then which meant that they wouldn't be back until around 9:30 and I was starting to sympathize pretty heavily with the Russian characters I was listening to. Especially Hodel, who if you remember, ended up following Perchik to live in Siberia.

The girl ended up being an ad major and had just gotten into the creative track, which I'm planning on applying for at the end of the semester, so we actually talked about portfolios for a while and how I really need to finish mine. She actually got into the program before taking the prep class for it, which is pretty impressive.  After about half an hour though I figured that I would just give up on my groceries and go up to the library. After all, people had proven to me today that they're typically pretty good and it was cold enough outside that they were basically being refrigerated.

On my way to probably read Battlefield Earth in the library I happened to have the good fortune of running into none other than Tyler Moore (who I feel like I happen to see a lot on the Escher-esq stairs to campus although always headed the opposite direction), who graciously let me seek refuge in his apartment and make fun of his favorite Halloween movie, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Watching it for a second time was still somewhat unfulfilling (seriously, nothing happens in that movie) but it was I'll admit better than the first time I saw it in 4th grade. I suppose that my good natured mockery was fair though because he played the song from Breakfast at Tiffany's on the piano and its been stuck in my head all week. Oh and apparently one of the songs in FMA is also in "Smallville", which is weird since those shows are from different countries. Also, I wish I had practiced the piano every once and while. Then I could get songs stuck in people's heads and more importantly, Cassie wouldn't have driven me insane this summer by playing chopsticks and that one song where you basically just play F#, G#, and A# over and over again on that old out of tune piano at Port Susan because I could have shown her something else.

At 9:30 I finally got inside and was able to start studying for the midterm I had the next day (thankfully it was for Pop Culture). And yes, I did write a tweet, although not my original one. It was actually about how much I was enjoying the fall weather. Yeah that's right, enjoying it. Crazy right? I know I spend a good amount of time whining about U:AFWTD and how ugly it can be compared to home, but it does have a beautiful Autumn season. All of the trees here and the mountains change colors and the leaves fall and it's awesome. It's a "real" fall. Or more real I guess. I've heard that fall is even more "real" on the East Coast. Don't worry though, green is still my favorite color an I'm sure I'll be back to cursing Utah once the winter comes and freezes me to death. Besides, like I said at the beginning of this post, when this appreciation started I had been eating almost as many potatoes as a native Idahoan. And since I've spent the last two Thanksgivings in Idaho it makes sense for there to be a correlation between potatoes and appreciation right? Ok, maybe not. Either way though, I think the moral of this story is obviously that we should all just leave our doors unlocked. Or maybe just that I should give in and buy a new key.

Monday, October 7, 2013

Cartoon

Here's a political cartoon I drew for the same class I wrote the editorial earlier for. It took me longer than I'm willing to admit to draw it and the Chicken wanted to see it so I figured I'd put it on here. If you can't read it, the teacher is saying "Sorry, there's no degree for that. Pick again!" You know one of these days I might actually write something about my life on here.