Lost Causes

            St. Jude is probably the saint I pray to the most, because he is the patron saint of lost causes.  Every time I lose something, I say a prayer to St. Anthony to find it, and St. Jude for my hopeless memory.  Unfortunately, I didn’t think to pray to St. Jude about my bet. 

I mentioned in a previous post that I had a bet going with my roommate that involved no fast food and no eating past 10:00.  But who thinks about fast food at 9:00 am?  Not me, which is why I didn’t realize the McDonalds hash brown I ate with a visiting friend before I left town counted as fast food until after I ate it.  Figures.  If I had known I was going to lose, I would have at least gone for something better than a hash brown.  My consequence involved not eating after 8:00 pm for a whole weekend and—the reason I’m telling this story—admitting to my adoring public that I lost the bet.  That was a point my roommate particularly insisted on, so there it is, I’m a slight lost cause when it comes to remembering the bet. 

However, as the picture shows, clearly I have had some recent (and unusual) experience with fast food.  Sam and I decided that it would be a good idea to take a holiday break to get some Taco Bell and Burger King on Halloween…which actually didn’t happen until the next night, so it was more like an All Saints Day fast food celebration.  Right around midnight.  This pretty much meant that our homework was a lost cause (St. Jude, a little help with that Art and Literature presentation would be nice…).  Since this was the case, we figured we would go all out with our night of taking a break, which meant watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, our favorite show of the moment.  Unfortunately, all our roommates were asleep or about to go to sleep in various locations around the house, so we needed a place to go that had access to an outlet and was far enough away from them not to wake them up.  One of our favorite scenes in Grey’s Anatomy involves Meredith and Christina (the two main characters) sitting fully clothed in the bathtub and on the bathroom floor talking about life.  Sam and I have always joked about doing this, which is how we ended up in a bathtub in the middle of the night eating fast food.  Sometimes you just have to give up of being a mature, productive college student as a lost cause for a night (but not every night!), and embrace the wonderful, stress-relieving feeling of doing something totally ridiculous.  St. Jude, we might be lost causes every now and then, but we celebrated your day in style. 

           

Would You Like to Know Your Fortune, Little Girl?

I have been saving this post for a time when I could get ahold of the pictures that go with it, so enjoy this Halloween throwback: 

           I am petrified of Haunted Houses.  I am a Social Mentor, and one of our events is taking the freshmen to a Haunted House.  Every year I stand at the very back of the line for the bus in the hopes that there won’t be enough room for me to go (I love Social Mentors, but I cannot handle Haunted Houses), and it finally worked this year!  In past years I have had to go through the entire event with my face buried in someone’s back, which is just asking for your legs to be fake chain sawed.  But since I did not have to go to the event, I thought that I had dodged my haunted house bullet for this year.  Not the case.    

Our community center always hosts a Safe Trick-or-Treat event for families in the neighborhood, and the event includes booths with games and prizes as well as a haunted house populated with student volunteers.  Without asking me first and only three days before the event, my roommate Samantha signed up our RAKERS club to host a room in the Haunted House this year, foiling me in my attempt to avoid haunted houses.  But I figured I’d give it a try.  After debating possible themes for our room, we decided on a mishmash of literary characters, house of wax statues, and a creepy fortune teller/voodoo woman who would do most of the talking.  I, who hate haunted houses, was to be the fortune teller.  Let’s remember that I am also short and not at all scary-looking, so I had no idea how I was going to frighten anybody. 

            But frighten people I did.  After a few rounds of being unable to contain my giggles at the thought of me being scary and the sight of my friend Isy (dressed as Poe) carrying a raven and asking people in a creepy voice if they wanted to pet his bird, I finally hit my stride.  I was waving my arms around in the strobe lights and telling dark fortunes right and left.  By the end of the night I was even able to join Samantha in shrieking “STAY, STAY WITH US!!” at frightened kids (terrible, I know) without worrying that my voice was too Minnie Mouseish to be scary.  Who knew I had it in me?  But we made one heck of a room, and even though I hate haunted houses I love Halloween, so getting into the spirit by embracing my inner fortune teller/voodoo woman made this my favorite Halloween experience at Rockhurst. 

Operation Saturday           

            I apologize for not posting in a while, but life at the Rock has been getting busier as the semester progresses.  Case in point: Saturday.  My Saturday began with me to pulling on an old pair of jeans and a bandana for phase one of my completely booked Saturday: the honeysuckle battle.  This took place in some woods off the side of the road (my roommate Samantha is continually shocked by my total lack of directional sense, and that vague description is an excellent example) through the KC Wildlands program.  Several of my Alpha Sigma Alpha sisters and myself had signed up to spend our morning clipping/ripping/hacking honeysuckle to clear the way for an environmental group to do some burning in the woods, which would clear the way for natural prairie grasses to grow there.  If I wasn’t awake when I got there, I certainly was after a few hours of climbing hills and trails with my clippers on a chilly Fall morning.  But it was beautiful there.  And the best part of the experience was getting to visit areas that had already been cleared to see what the end result of our labors would eventually look like.  Samantha and I decided then and there that we wanted to live in the woods.  Or at the very least go back soon to do some hiking.  But my tightly scheduled day was not over, and I had to reluctantly leave the woods for phase two: the tea party.

            The event was called “Afternoon Tea with the English Club,” and somehow I ended up in charge of planning it.  The tea was hosted by Dr. Miller, an English professor, and the guests included English students and professors.  The tea was very “civilized” as Dr. Miller likes to say, and we had a good time sipping tea and sampling all the interesting dishes (cucumber sandwiches, Russian tea cakes, my semi-burnt gooey butter cake).  High points included hearing submissions from our impromptu writing contest (the winner’s featured a fake Works Cited page full of fabricated sources about ghosts), seeing Mitchell King’s spot-on impression of Dr. Arthur (don’t worry, Dr. Arthur was there to witness it and laugh too), and observing the many wonder’s of Dr. Miller’s house (i.e. a mummified ibis).  After clearing dishes and forcing people to take home leftovers, it was on to phase three: Black Tie. 

            Black Tie is one of Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity’s dances, and I was especially excited because several of my sorority sisters and two of my roommates had also been asked.  So I rushed home to put on my dancing shoes (metaphorically, that is, I can’t dance in heels to save my life) and head out to that.  It was a great night, and a perfect way to end a busy Saturday.  I was absolutely exhausted on Sunday, but there is something satisfying about navigating a day so full of diverse activities.  I got to enjoy service, dirt, and fresh air in the morning; civilized, literary company in the afternoon; and some dancing and socializing at night.  One of Rockhurst’s core values is Cura Personalis, which means “care of the whole person,” and even though Saturday was crazy, that’s what it felt like.  A little bit of everything you need in life.