When You Get To My Door, Tell Them Boris Sent You

Happy Halloweekend to everyone!  I love Halloween.  I guess you could call me a Halloween-aholic.  If you come to my room in the month of October you will see the walls decorated with spiders, skulls, and witches, my desk piled with candy and cookies, and light-up plastic pumpkins all over the place.  My room is basically equivalent to that house you drive by with the four gnomes, seven fountains, and three lion statues in the front yard, and you think to yourself, "how tacky."  But I love Halloween.

This obsession started at a young age, probably just because I liked candy.  However, I'm more inclined to think it was because I liked dressing up and being the center of attention...not that that's changed.  I actually wore gold sparkly shoes and a I'M #1 button to my pre-school graduation.  I was a pretty big deal.  Clearly, getting to wear pretty dresses and being sparkly were my top goals in life since the age of five.

I started out as being a bunny, and this phase lasted a short seven years.  Always the same costume, I actually didn't grow until junior high.  After the bunny years I became obsessed with Disney princesses.  Disney princesses embodied everything my little mind had envisioned for my life:  a handsome prince, ponies, elegant balls, pretty dresses, magic, and animal friends.  Not to mention the fact that I thought I actually was a princess who had been taken away from her magical kingdom to be kept safe from the evil queen.  I also had animal friends, they were imaginary raccoons.  I nursed them back to health after they fell through my window.  Over the course of several years, I went through every Disney princess.  I even dressed as Mulan one year because when I was younger I was Asian an empowered, independent woman.  After the princess years came the scary years.  The years of witches, ghosts, and devils.  Theses were not so notable because I was going through puberty and was awkward and just wanted to be "cool".

Now that I'm in college, Halloween is an excuse to dress up as anything with little clothing.  This is really a shame.  I feel like Lindsay Lohan in "Mean Girls" when she showed up at the Halloween party as a dead bride and everyone else was dressed as slutty animals.

I was thinking this year about being a slutty barn.  I would dress as a barn and when you opened the barn doors I would be naked and covered in hay.  However that required too much effort.  So then I thought about being a slutty lobster by being a lobster without the shell, but no one would get that.  I thought about being a slutty tree, where throughout the course of the night I'd lose all of my leaves.  I can't quite figure out the logistics of that one though.

Anyway, Happy Halloweekend everyone!  See you all at Old Kenyon tonight, I'll be the slutty piece of carpet.

If you didn't get the title of this post, you clearly need to get more in the spirit.  Now, do the mash.

 

Oh Mis Moscas, Donde Estan Mis Pantalones!?

Life is hard for a Kenyon College student.  Okay, not really.  It's actually pretty easy, but since we all like to complain:   

1.  My Pandora stations are all in Spanish.  Not the music, just the commercials and the writing.  I don't speak Spanish, I never have.  I just woke up one day over the summer and Pandora was all in Spanish, and it's never changed back.  However, when I worked at Pizza Schmizza I did pick up some Spanish slang.  Archie would always say "Oh mis gatos!"  Which actually translates to "Oh my cats!"  I think it means something like "Oh my gosh!" but as many memes and youtube videos have taught me: everything's funnier with a cat.  Sadly, Pandora isn't on my level yet.  Oh mis gatos...

2.  Everyone on campus is complaining about the ladybugs that have infiltrated their rooms.  I would love to have ladybugs in my room!  Instead I have giant horse flies buzzing around; and because I am a woman I am very scared of insects and because I am a college student I don't want to go out and buy fly repellant.  I compromise by spraying the flies with hairspray until they can't move and then sucking them up in my vacuum where they slowly die of asphyxiation.  Some people play sports to get out their aggression, I kill flies. 

3.  Now that I have a single, I no longer wear pants in my room.  This would not be a problem except since I'm pretty sure my suite-mate doesn't want to see me in my underwear, I am becoming a hermit.  A pantsless hermit.  My typical inner monologue is as such, "Hey, I'm really hungry.  Ooooh look!  Popcorn!  I'll just go microwave this and...oh wait...the microwave is in the suite.  Oh well, I'll just watch another episode of Bones."

4.  I do not appreciate the canceling of Phling.  I have some very nice dresses that I never get the opportunity to wear out here in the cornfields, and now the administration is taking away the only chance I have.  So, who wants to volunteer?  I'll be in my room.

5.  Why did the Dairy Queen in Mount Vernon have to close!?  It's not like it has any real competition, and a girl needs her Blizzards.  They even flipped them upside down before they gave them to you, which I have always wanted to do but was too scared.  

6.  Gourdzilla is going to be given away as a prize to the winner of a pumpkin-carving contest.  However, you don't actually get to keep Gourdzilla, you have to carve it.  I can only assume it's because they don't want to have to move it again.  Second place gets 50 dollars.  Anyone else going for second place?  I personally think a better use of Gourdzilla would be to drop him off the top of Peirce and let us all place bets on where the farthest piece of The Zilla will land.

7.  I bought some small pumpkins from Walmart about a week ago so that I could festively decorate my room for Halloween.  They molded within the week and stuck to my wood shelf.  Not only have I learned never to buy pumpkins from Walmart but I'm afraid that my shelves are infused with mold and I'll get fined at the end of the year.

That is all, I'll leave you with your thoughts and some gatos.

To Abroad Or Not To Abroad

For the past two weeks my entire existence has centered around going abroad.  Although, here at Kenyon we don't like to discount the many opportunities in the United States so we call it OCS (off campus study) which I think is stupid and prefer to call OCSTRESS.  I was super excited about going abroad before the first meeting, where I learned that applying for programs was going to be like applying for college but with fewer options.  This made me want to curl up in a fetal position on a kitchen floor and ask my mom to buy me coloring books.  Which may or may not have been the way I spent my winter break senior year of high school.

However, after going to the OCSTRESS information fair I do have a rather romanticized idea of what it would be like to study abroad.  I blame the pamphlets that are telling me things like "you can stroll through Covent Gardens on your way to the theatre for rehearsal"  I mean COME ON!  That sounds so cool!  Not to mention that they spell theater in the pretentious "re" way like I imagine people in London do, so they can say it like "the-ah-trr." I can just picture myself in a peacoat and knit cap, strolling through the gardens on a blustery autumn day after an afternoon in the pub with my mates.  Also, all my internal dialogue is in a british accent now.  In preparation.  Granted I may want to go to Scotland instead of London, in which case I really should ask my mom to send me the dialect tapes we bought when my high school did Brigadoon.

Speaking of plays, KCDC's next play is Hamlet and along with every other female drama student at Kenyon, I'm drooling over the prospect of auditioning for Ophelia.  This means I spent two hours in the library yesterday trying to get a copy of the audition "packet" and I am not ashamed of this.  I reached level 7 in brick breaker, which is a new record for me.  I say "packet" because it was 80 pages.  When I read the email saying there was a "packet" at the circulation desk of scenes to prepare, I imagined maybe 12 pages.  Nope.  But I'll be damned if I didn't spend my given hour with the Great Hamlet Audition Novel copying every page.  However, I forgot to staple it all together before I left, and I now have 80 loose pages of iambic pentameter strewn across my Caples suite.  Woops.

My boyfriend has decided I should audition Hamlet because I'm crazy enough to play any character.  I'm not sure if I should be insulted or complimented by this, because I'm pretty sure he's basing his opinion off the time I threw a quart of melted Ben and Jerry's ice cream at him in the heat of an argument.  Maybe not my finest moment, but calm has never looked good on me.  Another reason I'm a drama major and not too good at physics.

 

Undercover at THE NAZ

After attending Kenyon for a full year and almost a half, I came to the realization that I had never actually seen a student from Mount Vernon Nazarene University, or as we affectionately call it, The Naz....until last week.  I was having a fine dining experience at Ruby Tuesday's, when I saw one.

SIDENOTE: Ruby Tuesday's cheesy garlic biscuits are TO DIE FOR.  I plan on taking over the Caples kitchen for weeks until I discover the secret recipe.

I will enslave this man and force him to bake me cheesy biscuits

Yes, a real student from The Naz.  I could tell because this specimen was wearing a sweatshirt from the university and looked like she had crawled out of a cornfield.  It was at this point when I realized that not only was this the first bonafide student I had ever seen, but that despite all of the signs pointing to The Naz, I had never actually seen any evidence that it existed.  I was now determined to find the fabled university, no matter how far into rural Ohio I had to venture.  Luckily, my boyfriend was equally curious, and we took off to search for the Promise Land.

After about ten minutes of driving through Mount Vernon we saw a church.  After passing this church we saw...a university!  But it was not just any day at The Naz, oh no, we happened to stumble upon SonFest (Son, like God...not sun, like the planet).  SonFest appears to be somewhat like our Sendoff, only it happens at the beginning of their school year, there are more small children, and there's no alcohol (The Naz is a dry campus, who knew!?).  My boyfriend and I thought we would just crash the carnival, listen to one of the Jesus bands performing, grab a cotton candy and head out.  However, apparently you had to pay something like 20 dollars for a ticket, so we decided to just walk around campus instead.  I even adopted the codename Delilah in hopes that The Plain White T's would serenade me I could stay undercover.  Here are our findings:

The Bookstore:  Very small, and all the books (novels included) were about religion.  My personal favorite was the section devoted to dating while staying abstinent, and getting others to join you in this venture.  

The Student Lounge:  My only note about this is why don't we have a legit student lounge??  

The Academic Buildings:  The academic buildings at The Naz are reminiscent of your high school science corridors.  They are completely linoleum, cold, and avoided like the plague.  Also, courses like Home Ec. are still taught The Naz, along with courses that we could only assume were something along the lines of "how to be a good mother".  This makes sense since there is a preschool on campus.  A preschool!  For children!  Like the children of the students!  This is confusing though because there is a strict curfew in place for all students and you can't spend in the night in another student's room (however you CAN be signed out for the weekend...whoopee!).  Sex and dancing are also outlawed.  Like BYU for the uncoordinated.  Or high school.

 My previous ideas of The Naz were blown out of the water.  Still sore about not being able to get into SonFest, my boyfriend and I high-tailed it for the car and I am so happy to be back on a campus where I can stay out past midnight and wear clothes that show my shoulders.