Thoughts On Finals Week

I guess I could even have titled this, “Thoughts on the Last Two-ish Weeks of School,” but either way my thoughts about it are the same:

It sucks.

I’ll just tell my story, and let you guys relate to any parts that you can.

So, I have an Italian oral final, final exam, chapter test and chapter oral test all due between now and May 10.  Honestly, this isn’t too terrible. I’m decent with Italian, so this isn’t the worst thing in the world.

I have a public relations final exam that will, if the other exams are any indication, probably kick my ass regardless of the amount of studying I do.

I have three final projects due in my editing and design class by Monday: a four-page layout, a single-page feature layout and a short essay on the future of editing.  This is awful.  I have to wake up at 7 am and fact check, spell check and rewrite stories, then lay them out in an appealing fashion.  She’s lucky I can function for that class.

Finally, I have two stories due in two weeks.  Not too bad, but one story is 20 percent of my grade.  Balls.

Add to that I’m trying to also simultaneously figure out where I’m going to live next year, trying to figure out the details of my internship, helping create a budget for an entire campus recreation program on campus and get ready for a study abroad trip to Italy that leaves May 12.  Shit’s crazy.

I am 19 years young, and it feels like I’m taking on more things at one time than I’ll have to do when I’m 29.  I feel like I have about five bosses right now all asking for projects, I’m buying a house, doing expense reports for a company and planning a vacation all at the same time.  There’s a point where it gets to be too much.  I am at that point.

So what do I do? Listen to music, watch the NBA Playoffs and then get over it.  Do what I have to do, and then go Italy.  Not too shabby.

For those of you who are at this point in the post, thank you for reading through my own therapy session.

Best Refereeing Moments

I am a supervisor and referee for the ASU Downtown Phoenix Campus Sports and Recreation, and my job rocks.  I get to watch/officiate intramural games, work with awesome people and I get paid to do it.  I couldn’t ask for more.

Since we are just coming off of the end of the flag football season, and since I was a referee for a majority of the games downtown, I thought I’d share some of my favorite moments while officiating over the past two years.  Some are funny, some are amazing, but all are awesome.

• The Handshake:  This was the very first unsportsmanlike flag I threw, and boy was it a good one.  There were about 3 minutes left in the game, and Team A, who was behind in the game, was driving down the field.  During one play, the receiver for Team A caught the ball, ran down the sideline, slapped the hand of a Team B player away from his flags (which is illegal), and continued to run down to about the 10-yard-line.  I threw a flag for flag guarding, which brought them back to around midfield.  The players for Team A were not happy with me, and let me know about it.  But the game continued, and two plays later Team A threw an interception.  As the captain for Team A watched the defender from Team B run into the endzone and essentially end the game, he walked up to me, extended his hand, grabbed mine and said, “Thank you for blowing the game for us,” as he shook it.  Classic.  I still laugh about that one.
• Everybody loves fights, right?  Apparently a coach of a team did, because he sure did love to start them.  This particular fight stands out because it took place after the game.  The coach (who was in his mid-30′s so I don’t know why he was smack-talking college kids) whose team had won the game, called a player on the losing team a ballerina.  Now, the guy called a ballerina was about 6’4″ and maybe 275 pounds of muscle.  This guy is huge.  The coach … not so much.  So the player goes after the coach, both teams push and shove, and then it’s over.  Nothing too bad.  But I have to mention it because of the look of pure terror on the coach’s face as the truck-of-a-man he called a ballerina came barreling toward him.
• This one is short and sweet.  One of our newer refs took the idea of a spot foul to a whole new level.  He literally threw his flag at the player that committed the penalty.  And he threw it hard.  Got the player right in the ribs.  I had to apologize to the player, but I only could apologize after I stopped laughing.
• Call it karma, but that same referee had a flag throw at him about two weeks later.  He called a penalty on a player and threw his at the spot (not the player, he got better at that).  Well, this player did not appreciate the flag, so he picked it up and chucked it at the referee.  He missed the ref, but managed to get himself a nice unsportsmanlike and was told that he would no longer be playing in this game.
• This actually involves the same Team A as my first memory, but a year later.  It was a semi-final game, and the two teams were incredibly well-matched.  They had gone back and forth the entire game, and now there were about 12 seconds left and Team A was down by 2 points.  They threw a prayer toward the endzone and somehow a Team A receiver came down with it between two defenders.  It was amazing.  Team A won the game and eventually won the Downtown Championship.  But that semi-final game was even better than the championship.  It was the best game I had officiated.  At least until …
• … I had the incredible privilege of officiating the Men’s Championship at the Regional Tournament taking place at ASU Tempe Campus.  It was the best flag football game I’ve ever seen.  The defense was amazing.  One team had motion, split quarterbacks, direct snaps, trick plays … it was amazing.  And the other team was made up of all incredible athletes.  In that game there was a fake fair catch on a punt that was run in for a touchdown (there are no fair catches in flag football, so “waving” or “calling for” a fair catch does not exist), a triple reverse for a touchdown, two amazing catches (one in the endzone), and a total of three touchdowns scored in the final 1:54 of the game (two of those scored in the last 14 seconds).  By far the greatest memory I have.

So there you have it folks.  I hope you enjoyed reading about this as much as I enjoyed living it.  And if you have a moment of your own, feel free to share it!

A Modern Hero: Josiah Viera

There are very few times when something compels you to stop whatever you’re doing, and pay full attention.  Today I had one of those moments.  This is the E:60 story on Josiah Viera, a 6-year-old boy who has a genetic disease called Progeria.  Progeria is incredibly rare (approximately 1 in every 4,000,000 children are born with it) and causes the body to age at an accelerated rate (approximately 10 years for every actual calendar year).  Josiah is expected to live anywhere from 8 to 13 years.  He is currently 6 years old.

But Josiah loves baseball.  He loves everything about it: hitting the ball (pitched, never off the tee), running the bases, and cheering for Ryan Howard and his Philadelphia Phillies.  Despite the pain of his disease and the constant hospital visits, he wants to play baseball every day.

Below is the video package that E:60 put together on Josiah’s amazing story, starting at his birth and going up until he got the chance to meet Ryan Howard and go to a Phillies’ game.  It’s one of the most touching and inspiring things I’ve watched in a long time, and it reminds me of all the hope, faith, and good that people have inside them.  I encourage you to watch the entire video, and then read the story which will be linked after the video.

Here’s a link to the video of Josiah visiting the Phillies:  Josiah Visits the Phillies

The E:60 story “Little Boy Plays With Big Heart” by Ben Houser

Close The Door On AES

An epidemic is spreading my friends.

AES, or Awkward Elevator Syndrome, has moved from a mild nuisance to a full-fledged disease.  The cause, or causes, behind the rapid spread of the disease has not been traced to any one source or cause, but researchers have many theories as to the contributing factors.  The invention of the elevator obviously served as the spark to ignite this wildfire disease.  The Walkman and iPod also shot AES into the upper echelon of diseases, affecting approximately four people for every one person who owned either of the two music players.  The explosion of text messaging sent AES from disease to widespread pandemic, and Internet-enabled phones only compounded the issue.  And with the release of M. Night Shyamalan’s Devil, hope was almost gone for those afflicted with AES.

Three victims of AES

The above picture shows three victims of AES, all showing different symptoms of this terrible disease.  The man in the sport jacket is in the first stages of AES.  His arms have crossed without his even realizing it.  He has leaned back against the wall in what his now infected brain believes to be an “I’m cool, therefore I lean back” pose.  However, it is really a retreat away from social interaction.  Also not his eyes.  He is not looking at the other people in the elevator with him, but instead is looking at which floors are lit up on the elevator key pad near the door.

The woman in the red dress has stage two AES.  Notice again the crossed arms.  At this stage, however, shrinking away from social interaction has been replaced by actively repelling it.  Note how she is holding either a cell phone or MP3 player, and appears to be in the middle of belting out the chorus of Weezer’s “Beverly Hills” as to avoid any and all normal social interaction.  She has spiraled into a dark place, but has not yet reached …

… the third and final stage of AES.  God help those who are at this stage.  The man in the forefront of the picture is one of the unlucky ones.  Notice the slumped shoulders, the arms dropped at his side, and his head drooping.  He is a lost soul, a broken shell of the once vivacious man I’m sure he was before AES.  At this point in the disease there is no helping him.  He dreads the thought of entering an elevator and may even quit his job if he works in a multi-level building; any attempt to make contact with him while in the elevator will be greeted by total silence and complete indifference; and after exiting the elevator, he will most likely curl into the fetal position and sit on the floor.  My friends, that is the face of AES at its worst.

There is little concrete research regarding AES, but we do know this much:

• AES affects 89% of the US population.  It is also widely believed that 100% of the US population knows, or in the most unfortunate of cases had known, someone affected by or infected with AES.
• Studies show that an average college student can lose or not meet 17.7 friends over the course of their four years.
• Early studies and research show that for every minute spent in an awkward elevator situation, a person loses five minutes of their life.

But there is hope.

A group of ASU students have banded together to Close the Door on AES.  These brave students are trying to bring awareness of this disease to the masses and bring social interaction back into elevators.  No more awkward staring at the ceiling; no more texting while in the elevator (you don’t have service anyway, kids); no more AES.  Their dream is to one day have a world full of elevators that look like this …

What a world without AES looks like

You can join the movement to Close the Door on AES by joining the group’s Facebook page.

Together, we can end this terrible disease.

Why Taking a Foreign Language is Cool

Taking a foreign language is cool.  Anyone who says otherwise is either lying, has never taken another language, or is in the middle of writing an essay in another language and hates every language ever created that is not English.  Any other time, they would tell you that being able to speak, read, and understand another language is a unique and exciting experience.

First of all, it’s incredibly beneficial in the professional world to know how to speak another language.  Of course there are the sought-after languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Arabic that can easily land someone a job if they are proficient in them.  In the Southwest, and the United States in general, Spanish is gaining importance.  And French is the second-most spoken language in the world.  But even outside of direct relationships between knowing another language and using that language in your career, knowing a foreign language shows a wider cultural and social understanding.  To learn a language you have to also learn the culture, the idioms, the expressions and the people of the world that speak that language.  Having a wider global understanding is hugely important for a career.

Second, it helps you as a person.  Sure, knowing a language can get you a job, but more importantly it makes you a better person.  Learning about a culture gives you a nice thing to have in life: context.  A context outside of fireworks, cracker jacks, football and Big Macs.  Knowing the world helps you be a better citizen of the world, and learning another language helps immensely in that regard.  And besides, once you learn the language you have an excuse to travel.

Third, it’s just plain fun.  Learning how to say phrases, paragraphs, and even swear words in another language that people around you don’t understand is fun, and often, funny.  I take Italian, and before tests we were taught an idiom “In bocca al lupo!” to which the class would reply, “Crepi!”  This was totally normal in my Italian class.  However, I had some friends from Italian in other classes, and when a test or quiz would be passed out, we would yell, “In bocca al lupo!” much to the surprise and confusion of everyone else in the class.  (For the record, “In bocca al lupo” literally translates to “In the mouth of the wolf,” but essentially means “good luck.”)

Being able to talk to or text people in Italian has been fun for me as well.  It’s like spelling words to your friends around little siblings before they know how to spell.

Me: “Questa classe è molta noiosa, sì?”

Math Professor: “What?”

It’s awesome.  And if you get to know your language professor well, you learn how to swear at people which is always a good time.  Nobody expects to hear “Vaffanculo” in a verbal spat.  You’ll catch them off guard, then go in for the kill shot by saying “Your mind is crippled,” or something like that.

Overall, learning another language is incredibly beneficial.  Whether for jobs, cultural understanding, the sake of traveling or swear words, knowing another language is an excellent life skill.

And with my newly acquired Italian knowledge, the restaurant scene from The Godfather is even cooler.

I'm Going To Make You An Offer

Win.

How to Eat 100 Chicken McNuggets and Not Die

Before

Eating 100 Chicken McNuggets without dying is easy.  Here’s how.

1) Don’t eat 100 Chicken McNuggets.  Just don’t do it.  You’ll die.  I ate 100 Chicken McNuggets by also involving two other people (one of whom was a diabetic and they kick ass at eating a lot of food), so I only ate 25.  The other guy, Charlie, ate 33, and the diabetic guy, Jordan, ate 42.  That’s why none of us is dead.  We want to die, but we aren’t dead.  Anything that goes above 50 nuggets might result in death, or a coma, or something like that.

2) Don’t eat for at least four hours prior to destroying your insides by eating a bunch of processed chicken.  If there is anything, anything at all, in your stomach before the Ronald McDonald supplied onslaught on your intestines it will result in war.  And in that war, you will lose.  And all the food will retreat, if you catch my drift.  Just fast that day, save yourself the trouble.

3) Get a drink.  If you don’t have a drink to help break down the McNuggets your stomach will explode.  Or get cancer.  Coke has roughly the same effect as battery acid, and battery acid is about the only thing that can break down 10+ McNuggets.  Your feeble stomach acids have no chance.  Help them.  There is no shame in that.

4) Find a rhythm.  For me, it was two bites per McNugget.  No more, no less.  Then you’ll get so caught up in the monotony of the ordeal that you’ll lose track of how many you’ve eaten until it’s too late.  It’s the ultimate blitzkrieg on your stomach.  Before you know it, you’ll be on your third box of ten and your stomach will just start to realize you’re trying to kill yourself.  Bam.  Quantity, not quality.  Or sanity.

5) Rest after.  Don’t move.  Don’t.  You’ll immediately fall/sit/lay back down, so don’t even bother getting up to begin with.  Consider it a victory lap of sorts, but without any motion.  This is probably the most obvious of the tips since you’re body will physically prevent you from moving after more than 15 McNuggets, but it’s worth saying.

After

So there you have it. McDonald’s has 20 McNuggets for $5, so go out there, get some buddies and support the evil corporate restaurant chain conglomerate and simultaneously take a few months off your life.  It’ll be a good story.  This is what college is about.  Just don’t die.

Addition: My friend Sara thought it would be a good idea to add the health facts regarding eating 100 Chicken McNuggets.  I agree.  These stats are from the McDonald’s Web site, so you can look for yourself.  These stats are all based on 100 Chicken McNuggets.

• Calories: 4600, 2600 of which are from fat
• Fat: 290 g, 50 g of Saturated Fat (that’s 440% and 250% of the Daily Values, respectively); but no Trans Fat!
• Cholesterol: 700 mg, or 230 % of the Daily Value
• Sodium: 10,000 mg, or 420% of the Daily Value
• Protein: 240 g

I think these stats just solidify my claim made in tip number one.

My XBox 360 Will Be Reincarnated

As many of you read a few days ago, my XBox 360 died.  I received many condolences during this hard time and for that I thank you all.  But now, I have good news: my XBox 360 will live again soon.

As it turns out, my XBox still had a three-year warranty from the last time it got the Red Rings of Death.  It expired October 31.  Boom! What a silver lining that is.  So, I filed a repair request and followed the simple shipping instructions (complete with friendly delivery man), walked to the UPS store, and had them box up my baby to send to Texas.  Microsoft even paid the shipping because hey, Bill Gates is super rich anyway.  Add to that the free repair (because it would be unfair for Microsoft to charge customers to fix what Microsoft screwed up in the first place, that being the world’s worst cooling system for an electronic device), and hopefully I’ll be getting a new Xbox in two weeks, free of charge.

Does it suck to wait that long? Yes.  But kudos to Microsoft for fixing what they broke.  And besides, I now have all sorts of time to play NBA Jam for the Wii.

BOOMSHAKALAKA!

The Essence of NBA Jam: Fire and Dunks

My XBox 360 Died

The Worst Possible Thing to See on Your XBox 360

This is in memory of my XBox 360, deceased at approximately 12:43 a.m. on the morning of October 2, 2010.  After a good, long life, it would appear that my XBox 360 has succumb to a condition known as “The Red Ring of Death.”  Microsoft defines this as a “hardware problem” or a “problem with the power supply” on their Web site.  Lies.  It means my XBox 360 is dead.  Gone.  Kaput.

This cripples my entertainment possibilities.  My room mate and I have no DVD player, so all movies were watched on my XBox.  That’s all over now.  My Netflix account is also more or less donezo.  I’ll suppose I’ll just watch a whole bunch of Weeds.

But movies only scratch the surface.  If you only knew the amount of FIFA 10, Halo: Reach, and Splinter Cell I’ve been playing, you’d realize that a solid four hours a day are gone now.  It’s possible that the amount of epic goals I scored in FIFA, or the amount of Covenant bastards I killed on Reach, or the terrorists I owned as Sam Fisher caused the internal functions of my XBox to melt.  But my guess is more along the lines of shoddy manufacturing practices and a sub-par internal cooling fan system.

It was a good XBox, taken in the prime of its life.  I was about to start on another epic FIFA beatdown rampage with my Mr. Gerald Bourguet, when the game froze.  It had been doing that for almost six months now, but this time simply restarting the system did not bring it back to life.  Instead, I saw the three red lights.  Oh no.  This had happened before, and I knew it was all over.  At least it died a quick death.  Now I’ll be forced to watch Rejected Cartoons instead of kicking ass as Lionel Messi.

Here’s hoping that Microsoft will replace my XBox and give me a new one.  Because if they don’t I’m to yell, kick, throw things, cry, curse, and then finally buy a new XBox.

Either way, I have no XBox for the next two to three weeks.

Damn.

The Drive Back From Epicenter 2010

This is a 3 minute video I made after about 10 hours of sleep for an entire weekend.  I’ll have another post with a video recap, but this is gold, so I have to share it.

Paranormal Activity Ruined My Life

I don’t know how many of you have seen Paranormal Activity, but it’s terrifying.  Those who have seen it know what I’m talking about.  It is the scariest low-budget film I’ve ever seen.  And honestly, there are very few “jumpy-scary” moments.  It’s all just a constant build up of tension and just downright creepy situations.

The premise of the movie is that Katie (Katie Featherston) is being followed by a demon.  She lives with her boyfriend Micah (Micah Sloat) in a two-story house that the demon begins to mess with.  Moving keys, loud thumps, closing doors … the usual ghost stuff.  In order to substantiate the claims of paranormal activity, Micah gets a camera to record what happens during the night to try and catch the demon in the act.  And he does.  Big time.

The more intense the paranormal activity gets, the more freaked out Katie becomes.  She wants two things: a) to get a demonologist to come to the house, and b) Micah to get rid of his camera.  Micah doesn’t take either one of these requests seriously and this causes a lot of fights between the two.  Those fights fuel the demons progress until finally (spoiler alert) Katie gets possessed and kills Micah.

But honestly, that isn’t even the scariest part.  There are three standouts in the creepiness department.  1) One night, Katie gets out of bed and then stands over the bed staring at Micah for three hours.  This is terrifying, mostly because Micah has no idea and just continues to sleep soundly. Call me over-imaginative , but for a solid week after seeing I was terrified of waking up to Katie looming over my bed.  2) This might just be a personal one, but everything happens at around 3 a.m. Why is it creepy? Well, when you’re watching footage from Katie and Micah’s nights, when the time at the bottom of the screen gets close to 3 a.m. you isntantly tense up. It didn’t help for me that the night I watched the movie the first time, at 3 a.m. that morning my room mate’s computer somehow turned on while we were both in our beds. And 3) There’s a lot of silence in this movie.  Silence and darkness.  So when suddenly there is noise, you can’t see where it’s coming from.  So you’ll have a shot of Katie and Micah sleeping, with a door open and only one light on, and hear foot steps coming up unseen stairs.  Not good for my aforementioned overactive imagination.

A still from the trailer for Paranormal Activity 2

Now, the reason I bring up a year-old movie is this: Paranormal Activity 2 comes out October 22.  There is a trailer, and that trailer is pretty scary.  It shows a woman (presumably Katie) in a baby’s room.  Any scary movie involving small children scares me to begin with.  But, if you watch the trailer at Paranormal Activity’s Web site, you’ll get a little extra scariness.  About halfway through the trailer there is a little glitch, and if you look for it you can see a glimpse of a sepia-tone image. If you use the slider to rewind at that point, you can stop it on that image.  And then get the chills.  It’s a picture of a baby, but in a crazy pose with arms outstretched is the shadowy figure of a woman.  Then if, you rewind it enough, the trailer jumps into its own thing and shows you pictures of a baby being cradled by a woman’s hands (again presumably Katie’s).  It’s really creepy, and makes me believe that as much as Paranormal Activity screwed with my sleep cycle, Paranormal Activity 2 will wreck me.  Sleep? I don’t think so.

And yet, the first one was so good that I have to see the second.  Even if it means I don’t sleep for a week.