A Student's Guide to a Party

Well you’ve graduated high school, and in the Fall you will be entering college. Are you prepared?  Partying at a college level is all about balance. Parties are the balance of funds, the balance of fun, and the balance of friends, or the FFF as we like to call it. Partying at a college level is not like partying in your parent’s basement.  It is a means for students to escape the everyday drag of essays, classes, school board committees, and jobs.   Thursday comes and students feel they have the right to let down their hair and run throughout campus. 

The School officials seem to agree. The enforcement is relaxed to the point where they are not trying to catch drunks, but making sure that the drunks are in safe conditions.  

How do you start off your night?

Snowglobe Effect

I woke up on my couch, the streetlight outside my window washed a dim light from behind the window curtain. How did I get here? Last thing I remember was being lost in Franconia Notch, curled up in a ball in the woods as the snow drifted onto me like a blanket. My apartment was hazy and my head felt groggy as I scanned the bare white walls around the living room of my apartment. The only thing that hung was the dusty mirror above the television. To my left was the stairway leading up to my bedroom, the green carpet falling over the stairs looked so beautiful to me, it was the first time I had noticed this in all the months I’ve lived here. I could hear the electronic music flowing down the stairs from the third floor as the bass dropped into a dirty breakdown. The haze began to clear as I brought my eyes back across the room and saw something strange. The digital clock read all eights across it. I shrugged it off thinking the cable must be out. “Great service Time Warner” I said under my breath as I scanned my eyes and saw my roommates door on the right shut. Suddenly I heard a loud bang come from within the room. I stood up and sat back down as my knees buckled out from under me, man did I feel like shit.

Sheriff Beans

Sheriff Beans

Now there's a legend that I've heard about that came from the wild west. It was a hero among the villains that wore a sheriff's vest. With a smile like Clint Eastwood's he stopped crime by any means. This my friend is the legend of the mighty Sheriff Beans.

Left Handed Bandit

It was a cold January night as detective Price and I were in the office filing away cases. The bourbon was on top of the mahogany desk in our musty third floor office on the corner of fifth and thirty second street. The room was dusted with the smell of stale cigarettes and a cheap cologne.

Pineapples

i like pineapples pineapples are good. pineapples are exotic and i am white so i like pineapples because they are not white. i like chinese food even though it has been white-ified. chinese food is good. i like italian food too even though it is not real. these different things are fun because they are not white. white is boring. white is familiar. i have eaten up white things up for a very long time. that is why i like non-white things. i think non-white things are better because they like to consider things differently. they are group-oriented a lot of the time. that is what is so great about these exotic non-white things. i like papaya and durian even though durian smells bad. the worst thing is that they are hard to get good. good exotic things that are a little bit white are not hard to get. that is nice because they are things that might scare others who do not accept non-white things as easily as me. my father is non-white.

my mother is white but her old family members that do not live are non-white. she is very white. my whole life was mostly white except for sometimes when my father included us in non-white activities. especially the non-white holidays. those were the best. i wonder what it is like to grow up in a non-white place. non-white places seem so vibrant even though people live there and people are still bad. bad people can be non-white but they usually go bad when they meet white-ified people. sometimes they meet-non-white people who are white.

i really do like pineapples. they come from places where is is hot. non-white people harvest lots of them for us people who live faraway in white places. these white places were stolen from non-whites. being white is boring. being non-white is exotic.

Faux

Set in a counseling office:


I'm mostly confused by my relationship with others. I spend most of my time loathing them, you know? Like, every single action is some reviling contradiction and indication of the intrinsic and frequently denied hypocrisy of human nature!

There are so many brands of lies and short life stories that people feed themselves and desperately impress upon others. It makes me want to vomit, it does. Sometimes I do. Usually in the bathroom after lunch. That's when the unpleasantness is most atrocious. I can smell it, you know? Some people are drenched in it, truly foul.

And then they start talking. The gall. They tell me, "I've been cutting down on the bad foods and dieting and exercising! I've been eating the reduced sugar Philadelphia cheesecakes and drinking the zero calorie Red Bull. Oh, oh, oh, sure, fine, you're still an imbecile. And they think they're exercising! It's humiliating, to even consider that, that they approach physical situations like that without any prior knowledge. They spend forty repetitions lifting fifteen pounds. If they were any more vacant I'd suspect that they might stop breathing.

But I crave company and I can't seem to fill the void. The soul gnawing emptiness that is accompanied by a lack of some faux imitation of authentic friends.

The Lobster Dinner

It was mid afternoon when Frank arrived at the Shallow Oyster. He sat at his regular two-person table right by the window so that he could look outside while enjoying his food. He would usually stare out the window and watch the seagulls soar through the air and swoop down in a ravenous decent in order to scoop up the smallest amount of food they could find. This was normally his favorite day. Every week he would look forward to this one day, this one moment, where he would go to his favorite restaurant and sit at his favorite checkered clothe table eating his favorite food. However, Frank knew that he wouldn’t be enjoying his meal very much today. In fact, he was dreading his favorite day.

The Scar

Based off of a somewhat true story.

The Lighter

It wasn't so much the cigars he was interested in (though they interested him) but the beautiful lighter that had been handed down to his father that lit the cigars. Through the window for years he had seen his father light his massive cigars with the device, cigars that would burn for hours and hours as his father listlessly watched dusk fade into night. At a certain point his father took notice of his son's head peaking over the window sill to watch him. One day, breaking from the tradition, his father asked him to come sit out on the deck with him. His young mind jumped through the possibilities of what this meant.

The Sickness

This is what happens when you get the sickness.

Graduating into Graduate School

  
Isn't it great to be a young 20 something with the whole world in front of you?

  That's what they keep telling me. Mostly I am freaking out on a daily basis, drinking a lot of coffee and staring at open, empty word documents. And spending hours on Tumblr, convinced that I am doing "research" and this will all help my writing. Well, you probably aren't surprised, but it hasn't.

     Apparently, I am experiencing a very common phenomenon often called "senioritis", a mash up of words that make it sound like a harmless ailment. The suffix "-itis" comes from the greek word meaning "inflamation". I would not say that my "senior-ness" is being inflamed.

     I'm fairly positive they could have found a better word to describe the mind-numbingly terrified feeling I get everytime I open my application to the University of Oregon's creative writing program. I'm pretty sure there is another word to decribe the way that I break down in tears when I've heard the question "Oh, English major, huh? What are you going to do with that?" too many times in one day.

"...desirous of everything of everything at the same time..."

    “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time...”

-Kerouac

     Eve picked her way through the meadow, feeling the long grasses brush against her legs. The sun hung low over the field and occasionally she would raise her face to its kiss and smile. The air was smoother than usual somehow. There was something very different about the way the air moved around her. It simultaneously made her want to dance through the long plush grass and hide somewhere in the dark, cool depths of the earth, where she could never be found. She followed the floating scent of gently decomposing fruit, that sweet, spicy musk that emanated from the bases of the fruit trees. She didn’t realize where she was headed until she was standing in front of it.