New Heights of Crazy

It has been tense around my house the past few days.  A different kind of tension than usual. Sports tension.

Over the weekend my DBU Patriots played in the NCAA regionals. This is a big deal because DBU was an independent and it’s very rare for independents to get a chance to play in the regionals.  They won the Fort Worth regional and are headed to a Super Regional! I’m not even sure what a Super Regional is, but I know that I’m excited about it.

So, as we say at DBU, Get Your Guns Up! (I’m not entirely sure why we say that, I think it has something to do with our mascot being the Patriot and all I know is we make the cutest little hand sign when we say it.  Can you tell this tradition started at the end of my college career and I was too old to be cool enough to get it?)

Coincidentally, any time I see or hear Patriot over and over I think back to my freshman year of college when the DBU choir had to sing at this HUGE, fancy banquet held at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas where we had to perform a little ditty called “The Patriot’s Voice”.  The fact that I could not find a sample of it anywhere on the internets should tell you just how great it was.  All I remember is the beginning which went something like this: “Hear the voice of the Patriot singing” sung in unison.  We had a dramatic reenactment to accompany our song- which, of course, included powdered wigs.

I digress.

Also, the Mavs.

My Mavericks have played several games in the past week which have each given me at least 7 minutes of intense nerves.  I have literally begun to believe that I have some sort of power over the outcome of the game.  I have a lucky shirt, I sit in my lucky spot on the couch and when it gets down to clutch time I have a well-worn path around the living room.  Crazy.  How is my shirt going to help the Mavs win? I mean, it isn’t even blue.  I tweeted tonight that my nerves were on the same level as if a tornado were bearing down on me while snakes slithered at my feet and someone eats a huge bowl of jello in my presence.

If you know me at all, you know that the fact I even typed that j-word is seriously saying something.

It says something because I can't even bring myself to say that word out loud in real life.

Really, it just says something about just how crazy I was to begin with.  Before all the sports-related-crazy.

Ariel’s Bad Hair Day

My freshman year of college could very easily been known as “the year of the amateur hairdo”. 

My dorm room was the 18-year-old version of a perpetual beauty shop. 

We were forever cutting and coloring and crimping one another’s hair (If I ever had a male reader it’s safe to assume I just lost him with that sentence).  It was an interesting time, when our new found freedom combined with our frugal spending habits combined to make some of us a little shall-we-say ‘loose’ in our styling standards.  Some of us (read: ME) began to think a little too highly of our styling skills.  I may or may not have believed myself to be the Ken Paves of my dorm hallway.

It all began when my friend Jennifer ask me to cut her hair on a rainy Sunday afternoon.  Her previous cut had grown out and it was time for a change.  I first made her swear that she would not cut me out of her life if I failed and then proceeded to cut her hair.  It turned out I could cut in a semi-straight line and instantly became the Vidal Sassoon of room 315.

Unfortunately, as my client-base increased so did the need for me to have actual hair dressing skills.  Late one Monday night my friend Katy came home from Target with a beautiful box of auburn hair dye.  We all ‘oohed and aaahed’ over how beautiful she was sure to be once her hair was dyed and I began the process of coloring her hair.  We went through all the steps, waited the prescribed amount and then she went to wash it out.  I headed over to her room when I heard the hair-dryer blowing and nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.

Katy’s hair had turned Little Mermaid orange.

It was too late that night to run out and buy more hair dye so Katy was forced to live with it for a day.  Even though she was not to happy with me, she was still speaking to me.  I’ll never forget the hat she was forced to wear for the next day.  It was like a fisherman’s hat, with a brim, so she could show as little hair as possible, and she had two little braided pig tails peeking out from under it.  I’ll also never forget going to our college group later that night and our college minister took one look at Katy’s new magenta locks and said “Who did that to you?!?”.

After we told him that I (the John Frieda wanna-be) had performed the dye job, he asked Katy: “and you’re still speaking to her????”

We went straight to a Target and bought a new bottle of hair color.  Katy even trusted me enough to perform the new dye job (under the watchful eye of our friends).  Although I have rarely been as nervous as I was trying to fix her hair we did end up getting it back to a color found on planet earth, a very pretty brown color.

I am happy to report that Katy still speaks to me.  Even to this day.

Or, at least, she did before she read this friendly little reminder.

Man Cannot Live on Coupons Alone

I have an endless supply of hilarious stories from my college days.  Let’s face the facts, you get enough teenagers around one another and you are sure to find a plethora of funny stories due to the impaired judgment caused by youthful ignorance.  Case and point:

(Yes. That is my friend Sarah. 

And, yes. She is dressed like an Oompa Loompa.

And, yes.  She is a Doctor now.

And, yes.  Clearly I am a master photographer.)

Anyway, back to the story at hand.  At some point during our sophomore year there was some event that the university was sponsoring, and being the upstanding students that we were, Katy was left in charge of a HUGE stack of coupons to hand out to the events attendees.  The coupons were to our favorite Mexican restaurant- Don Pablo’s.

Don Pablo’s (or as we called it, Donny P’s) was our favorite for 3 very important reasons:

1. Location (it was absolutely the closest we could get to food that was not cafeteria food.  Very important… or as my friend Donny P would say “mui importante”)

2. The chips and queso.

3. The chips and salsa.

So, the stack of coupons Katy was supposed to hand out never seemed to make it into the hands of our fellow students.  All of the coupons were for FREE Chips, Queso and Salsa.  Imagine, if you will, a stack of over 200 coupons for free food.  Then imagine, you were a poor, hungry college student, with poor, hungry college student friends. 

Two words: Perfect Storm.

It would have been embarrassing, if we had any pride to begin with.  But did I mention the poor and hungry part?  We would often go to Don Pablo’s and use 2 or 3 coupons per meal.  But, our favorite thing was to call in an order of chips and queso then when we showed up we would hand over a trusty coupon and take our meal home with us.  When we got to our dorm, and people saw the Donny P’s bag being carried in, our room would turn into the college equivalent of a shark’s feeding frenzy.  People went crazy for the chips and queso.

We began to notice a problem when we realized that we were using our coupons 2 or 3 times a week.  It was getting more and more humiliating to order up some chips and queso that many times a week and never pay any money.  Not for a coke or for an enchilada or anything.

Eventually, the day came when our coupons were all used up and it was a sad, sad moment in time.  Like the end of an era…

(Also known as the beginning of being an adult and paying for stuff.)