Muffin in the Sky

This is the legend of Muffin.

It's not a long story, but it is a strange one.

The week my roommates and I moved into 1217, the week before classes started last semester, we received a gift from a girls' apartment in an adjacent building. It was a plate of six banana muffins, one for each of us. Five of us ate one, but Carson did not. We don't know why he didn't eat it; he claims to this day it didn't occur to him that it was his, but we aren't here to speculate. The point is, the muffin sat uneaten on the counter for two weeks.

When we checked on it to see if it had gone bad, we discovered the muffin had become extremely hard, like a cinder block. We showed it to Carson to see what he had done (jokingly, of course), and in so doing we saw fit to smack him with the muffin. When we did, I swear the thing made a resonating sound like a bell. and it bounced down to the table unharmed.

After observing its peculiar stability, the rest of us saw fit to do something more fun with the muffin. Three of us, along with a friend from another dorm, suspended the muffin from a small hook on the ceiling in the center of the living room, directly above a tipped-over chair and a note reading "Carson, you left me alone for two weeks. Why couldn't you let me die?"

Muffin's current state

We had a good laugh over that, and we thought that might be the end of the story, but there was more to come. We put the chair back at the table and disposed of the note, but the muffin stayed there, hanging from its scotch tape noose. After a couple more weeks, that wasn't good enough for us anymore, so I updated the suspension to a single sewing thread, which is nearly invisible in certain lighting and allows the muffin to turn lazily with the air currents.

Since it is now April, Muffin has been hanging there for eight months. Yes, eight months. He is still as hard as stone and shows no signs of decay, so we've endeavored to leave him there, declaring him our seventh roommate. I'm not sure if that's a greater testament to Muffin's wondrous qualities or our own unsurpassed weirdness, so I'll let you judge. In the meantime, we've been discussing strategies to preserve Muffin's legacy, appointing me to keep him safe and perhaps someday cast him in an acrylic block to keep for posterity. I suppose, in the end, diamonds are not forever. Muffins are forever.

Hic Manebimus Optime!

What Would You Do For $2250?

This is the story of how I wound up registered for social dance. First of all, I'd like to apologize for once again not posting on Friday, but I was lifeguarding a swim meet for a massive chunk of the day and didn't have enough time to make it happen. (I'll also point out that it was very strange for me not to be in the pool at this meet, but at least this way I get paid.)

Before we begin, I feel I must establish how much I dislike dancing. Which is quite a bit. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the only thing on this earth that makes me more uncomfortable than dancing is tomatoes. No, I will not explain my irrational loathing of tomatoes. Just use your imagination.

Now for the real story. One of the scholarships I'm on track to receive (amounting to about $2250 for this year) requires that I provide proof of registration in at least 15 credits of classes for my first semester. That doesn't seem too bad, or so I thought. At the time I learned of this requirement, I was registered for 14 credits, meaning I needed one more credit.

This is where things get complicated. In order to come up with one more credit, I would need to add a class, preferably one I might enjoy or that could fill a graduation requirement. I had one plan to add two student activities classes (that's code for fun classes), which are half a credit each. Unfortunately, freshmen register last, and literally all of the options I was remotely interested in already had very long waiting lists. End of Plan A.

Plan B: add a cool class, where I might actually learn something useful to my career aspirations without burying myself in homework. One in particular was Innovation Boot Camp, a one-credit class that only meets twice. That's it. Twice. I would be done before my other classes even got rolling, and the class description sounded right up my alley, including developing creative reasoning and inventing skills. I was ready to register for it...until I realized it was a 300-level class. Regardless of how hard it actually is, I don't think I want to be in it with a bunch of juniors and seniors who actually know what they're doing. I had similar results with the entrepreneurship lecture series class. End of Plan B.

Plan C: take an Honors program class. These classes fill two requirements, since they're essentially cognates of two subjects. I wanted to take one on the philosophy of mortality, because it sounded much better than a repeat of my high school biology class for the same requirement. Sadly, it conflicted with other classes in my schedule, some of which had no other sections available. End of Plan C.

Plan D: music! Music 101, or Music Appreciation as we call it at home, is a three-credit class that involves listening to lots of music, learning about different time periods in music history and some basics of musical genres. It wouldn't be anything I didn't learn in my years of piano theory or French horn, so it should be just a nice, easy opportunity to listen to music. And if I thought my schedule was too overloaded, I could postpone my Intro to Honors course (two credits) and still have the 15 I need for my scholarship. Sound too good to be true? It is. That class was full too. End of Plan D.

Plan E: take a writing class? I want to pursue a creative writing minor later in my collegiate education, and several writing classes would grant me useful knowledge as I edit my first novel and embark on several others. Guess what? They all have prerequisites, which as a freshman I haven't yet filled. I'll be back, cool writing classes. Just you wait.

This leaves us with Plan F. Have you guessed what it is? It's social dance. One credit. There's a reason why the men's sections of social dance never fill up. Why's that? Because most of us guys have a natural and instinctive fear of social dance. That's what it boils down to. We fear it. Being a swimmer doesn't help much, as our kind is notoriously uncoordinated in all things that involve being...on...land. Dancing takes place on land. That's bad.

But here I am. Having exhausted all alternatives, I am enrolled in social dance. Hooray for scholarship requirements. Of course, I suppose there are worse ways to get $2250.

Hic Manebimus Optime!