Today, we are all Hokies.
I never thought such an incident would hit so close to home. It may as well have been the University of Virginia. I can’t even begin to imagine the anger and pain of the students, faculty, staff, and their families.
Conjured Activism
conquering the world one oxymoron at a timeArchive for April, 2007
myspace is invading my life
I rarely ever mindlessly watch TV, but figured tonight was as good of a night to start as any. I’m mostly emailing and reading blogs on my computer, but a movie trailer commercial caught my eye. I was even more shocked when at the end of it, instead of a website, it listed a myspace site.
Remember when movie trailers didn’t even have websites attached to them? When did that start? I want to say mid to late 90s; I always wondered when they would run out of domain names because the movie websites kept getting longer and longer. So now maybe they did run out of domain names and decided to go with myspace instead.
I don’t like this trend, mostly because I don’t like myspace.
some people have all the luck
A college friend of mine is the luckiest person I know. It’s as if he has a four-leaf clover in his pocket every day of the week (remember that Futurama episode of Fry’s 4-leaf clover?). Here are three examples of why my friend Paul is the luckiest person I know.
- Once upon a time, Paul and I took a trip to Europe together during the summer. Before the school year ended, the local Peace Frogs store sponsored a “European Backpacking Trip” seminar for students and advertised the event by saying that they would be raffling off a First Class 2-month Eurail pass. Paul decided at the last minute that he would go to this seminar and check out the happenings for the both of us. He ended up winning the raffle for the Eurail pass in the popularly-attended seminar.
- Every year, the Engineering Student Council sponsors E-week (engineers-week) with games and food and prizes. One of the games featured an iPod as the first-place prize. I had class, so I told the guy I was dating at the time to go play the game and potentially win me an iPod. Paul somehow found out about this game and decided to also go for shits & giggles. Paul ended up winning the silly little game of chance and subsequently the iPod.
- Yesterday, Paul told me that he won another iPod, a silver nano. It was some kind of meeting for school, and he decided to go at the last minute. When he showed up, he realized that there was a raffle for an iPod nano, so he entered the raffle (I mean, why not?). Well, he won.
So my question is, how does one person get so lucky? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. It’s not like a skill that you practice, like piano, whereby you can get better. It’s an intangible chance that shouldn’t differ from person to person. So how is it that my friend Paul has all the luck?
More importantly, what is the mechanism for this so that I can either learn from him, or take some of his luck?
at least somebody’s having fun
My parents went to Las Vegas today. At some point over the last 2 or 3 years, they realized that it was futile to hold out on vacations in order to coordinate with my schedule and take family trips together. So on a whim, they decided to take a mini-vacation out west, specifically Las Vegas. Pretty cute, huh?
Except my mom lost her wallet along the way… completely gone (stolen perhaps?). Luckily for her, she never puts anything useful in her wallet anyways because she depends on my dad to have money, credit cards, passport, gift cards, all the important stuff one normally keeps in one’s wallet. The only thing she had in there was her driver’s license.
Having recently requested a replacement after losing my own driver’s license, I became the front-line consultant. My dad gave me all of her information earlier tonight, and I very quickly submitted a duplicate license request for my mom just now. Then I called my dad to tell him that I’ve put in the request, and that more likely than not by the time they get home early next week, her new license will have already arrived in the mailbox.
He sounded unusually giddy when I told him this. Then he told me that they were currently drinking beers. Apparently they got thirsty, and waters cost $6.50 a glass whereas beers are only $2. So naturally, they went for the beer.
That’s Vegas for ya … I hope they have a fun time out there :)
coincidences in a small world
The scholarship I had at Virginia is very good about keeping alumni involved and informed as to the happenings of the program. Today, I received mail listing the high school seniors who were recently named Scholars after a grueling weekend of exams, dinners, and interviews. As I always do, I scan the list for other South Carolinians because there never were many of us at Virginia. Sure enough, there was a guy from Greenville, SC. He goes to Christ Church Episcopal School.
The name of the school sounded eerily familiar, which is strange indeed because why would I have ever heard of Christ Church Episcopal School in Greenville? I know no private schools; I’m not religious; Greenville, SC is clear across on the other side of the state from Charleston … why was this name so familiar to me?
Then I realized that CCES was where Dr. Cox went to be Headmaster after he left the president’s job at SCGSSM. Such a small world…
This then reminded me of a recent encounter where I met someone random at a party, and it turned out that he was college friends with a high school friend of mine. Really, we ARE all connected in strangely familiar ways.