Bus Philosophies

I was on the public bus a couple weeks ago with some friends and got unwilling engaged in an interesting conversation between my fellow bus riders.  Keep in mind I do not know these people.

So we sit down in the back of the bus, a young woman, early twenties, is sitting next to us, and two men, probably mid-thirties, are sitting across from us.  Now it is the middle of the day, so it is unlikely that either of these two men is intoxicated, not impossible, but unlikely.

Well we sit down midway through a conversation between the two guys, but it didn’t take any of us long to understand the gist of the what was going on. 

The first man was monologue-ing about how if a guy is attracted to or has other intentions for a girl, a friendship couldn’t work.  Now he was being a tad more vulgar than I’m going to be, so for the rest of the conversation just replace “intentions” with either “wants to fuck/bang/have sex with” whichever is your preference.  He used all three. 

Well, he went on to explain that, if you’re a guy, and you want to screw around with a girl a friendship is out of the question.  He validated this by saying he was attracted to a girl he’s not going to care about much else, and therefore it isn’t really a friendship.  He also made a point to say the girls he considered his friend were all ugly. 

At this point my friends and I were all glancing at each other in agreement.  All wanting to say something to argue this guy, but keeping our mouths shut seemed like a better option.

This guy had a very strange labeling system for these girls he seemed to know.  His definition of friend seemed to be what most people would call a “close friend” whereas what most people would define as a friend he called “home girl” or and “associate’, which I can only assume he meant acquaintance since associate sounds more like someone that would help you put a hit out.

After the man had made his point, the girl sitting next to us started making her own points.  She countered that a friendship is fine with whoever you like as long as you don’t act on it.  The man replied that it doesn’t matter because if the guy (or girl I guess) has something else in the back of their mind when there hanging out it’s not a real friendship.

This was rebutted by how a relationship/hook-up can mess up a friendship and some friendships are too valuable to throw away. I’m not sure how this point was matched, but I’m sure it was some similar argument to his previous ones.

This whole interaction got me thinking.  All of us have fallen for a friend at some point or another (generally in middle or high school).  And it seems that there is a big difference in mentality between the genders.  As a girl, I can attempt to speak for my gender and say that we are more logical.  If we fall for a guyfriend we weigh our options.  What are the odds this guy will reject me?  Will he treat me differently if he knows I like him?  How long would a relationship actually last with him? If we screw around can we still be friends? And on and on and on.  We also generally prefer to be chased by men, rather than to go after them ourselves.  So if a guy doesn’t like us enough to ask us out his own damn self it’s probably not worth it.

For guys it’s a whole different game.  I’ve been around enough guys to gather some basic information.  The key thing in this particular situation is that a lot of guys are driven by their genitalia.  I have to ask my male readers: can you yourself be legitimately friends with a girl you are attracted to? Or is the hope in the back of your brain always going to push your actions and reasoning for hanging out with her or listening to her problems?  Personally I would hate to find out a guy friend of mine was just hanging out with me because he wanted to get in my pants.

So does crazy bus philosopher have a point?

I want to ask all of you.  Lots of comments on this one!  Give me your opinion, as a girl/boy can you be friends with someone of the opposite gender if you are attracted to them? 

I Broke My Nose! (A Long Story)

Three weeks ago I was playing ultimate Frisbee with a bunch of my friends at the indoor gym at my school.  If you don’t understand ultimate Frisbee you are not alone.  It’s kind of like soccer in the way that it keeps changing directions and there is far too much running.  It is unlike soccer in the way that Frisbees move really fast and you sometimes have to jump and/or dive to grab the pesky little buggers.  Regardless, I still enjoy playing, it’s a nice pace of exercise and it’s one of the few co-ed sports I play that I don’t get picked last for.  In fact, I get picked right around the middle, which is before a handful of guy players get picked.  

Getting picked before a guy in sports makes me feel awesome.  It makes me feel like Rocky after he ran up all those stairs and was so excited about it for some reason he just started yelling.  As much as I enjoy yelling I don’t.  But I am that excited.

Anyway, after about an hour of playing, my team was in our end zone to score a point.  The space we play in isn’t incredibly large, and with my team trying to score points and the entire defensive team in the same place trying to block us from getting our point, it was rather crowded.

I don’t exactly remember what happened next, but I believe I bent down for some reason.  It’s possible I tripped, but I feel like there really wasn’t a reason at all.  My head now being down further than usual, and me being shorter than most everyone playing anyway, I was now at average elbow-level.  Some one’s elbow jabbed back, hitting me in the nose.  I went down pretty fast after that.  I wasn’t down long, not realizing the severity of my situation.  I figured it was just bruised and probably would have gone back to playing had my nose not started bleeding.  But it did start bleeding.  I still didn’t think anything was seriously wrong.  I have a weird pain tolerance.  I went into the bathroom to wait out the nosebleed. 

It was at this point that I started to freak out a little.  I looked in the grimy mirror above the sink and noticed my nose wasn’t aligned in the center of my face like it was supposed to be.  It was pushed slightly off to the right, and it was swollen.  I went back out with my tough face on and told everyone I thought it may be fractured.  My friend Luke said he would take me to the health service center to get it checked.  After this was a long list of things that delayed me getting my nose fixed.  This list starts with it being winter and me having to put on a large amount of protective clothing so as to not freeze.  It then goes to me and Luke going to get an ice pack from the workers at the Rec Center, and them making me fill out an accident report.  Then after walking to the student health center, we found it had closed an hour earlier.  We then walked to the emergency room, where we proceeded to wait and see an unnecessary amount of people.  All of them kept asking if I had passed out.  This led to me having to figure out whose insurance I was under and leaving numerous messages on my parents phones.   Both of them happened to be busy at this exact time. Luke, being the great friend he is, kept me entertained during most of this by making jokes about Scrubs.

Eventually they told me I would have to check back in to make an appointment to get it fixed.  Over the next couple days I kept trying to call in, but no one ever answered.  They finally called back as I was, literally, on my way to class. They told me I would have to come in that morning.  I had to miss class just so they could ask the same questions the emergency room had, something they defiantly could have done over the phone, earlier in the week.  I finally got my surgery scheduled, but had to find a legal adult who was will to pick up my sedated self from surgery and babysit me for the rest of the day.  I originally intended to have a friend pick me up, but my mom got wind of this and insisted she come up and watch me herself. 

On surgery day I went in at 7:40 in the morning, waited for 2 hours and was finally put under to get my nose pushed back into place.  The doctor had told me the surgery would take about 10 minutes, so I figured I’d be able to make my afternoon classes.  I woke up from surgery after three hours of sleeping at 1 in the afternoon.   The strange thing was that my nose never hurt after surgery.   I was expecting some massive pain because they gave me a bunch of Vicoden and put a cast on it.   I was actually a bit paranoid because my nose wasn’t in some sort of super-pain.

Nothing was wrong with my pain-free nose and I healed up pretty fast and my nose is back to the way it looked before this whole mess happened.

I’m playing Ultimate Frisbee again tomorrow.  I swear to God if I break something else I’m going to falcon punch through a wall…

Things That Make Me Feel Like I Might Have Been Dropped on My Head as a Baby

The other day I walked into the girl’s bathroom in my dorm and headed into the first stall.  This is the fifth time this week I’ve used this stall in particular.  How do I know this? Because every time I walk into this stall there is no toilet paper.  Why there hasn’t been any toilet paper I have no idea.  The staff is in there every morning at the exact time I want to brush my teeth, so it has struck me as odd every time it’s happened.  Regardless, no matter how many times I take note of the lack of toilet paper, the next time I will always forget and feel like an idiot, sitting awkwardly with no real solution to my problem. 

This shame followed me throughout the day and made me relive the plethora of other times I have felt this similar emotion.  This is the first installment of what will probably be a long string of embarrassment. 

Wearing Red Sweatpants:

My high school colors were red and white.  So, being on the dance team we went for some obvious school spirit and got full bright red warm-up suits to wear over our dance outfits before games and competitions. Practical, no?  If I wanted to wear sweats to school or practice no one blinked an eye because EVERYONE wore red. Much too often.  Well now in college I figured it would be smart to bring this comfy and warm pair of sweatpants with me.  I really like these pants. They have pockets.  For whatever reason, it is practically a Holy Grail rarity to find sweatpants with pockets.  This makes no sense to me because sweatpants are baggy and can accommodate more items, but I digress…

First semester of college I was in a physical acting class where we were required to wear clothing we could move in.  It being a cooler day I threw on my red sweatpants for the first time this year in confidence, and biked to class.  This first day I felt nothing but blissful ignorance as I sped down the sidewalk toward the theater building in the sweatpants and a t-shirt.  This feeling was a lie.  A couple weeks later it got colder, too cold to go out and bike without a sweatshirt.  This was a day that the universe decided I was to look my worst no matter how hard I tried to stop it.  I had no clean sweatpants but my bright red ones.  I was too stubborn and new to the college scene to wear a dirty pair.  This limit was tested when I realized I had no sweatshirt that at all matched bright red.  I  decided against wearing the matching warm-up jacket, but had a minor stroke and thought it would be ok to wear a violet sweatshirt as long as both it and the pants matched the t-shirt  I was wearing.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  There I go down the street in a small violet sweatshirt and bright red sweatpants.  Bright isn’t even a worthy adjective. Glowing.  That is more appropriate.  In the gloom of this fall day, the glow of my sweatpants was even more magnified.  It probably looked like I had dipped these pants in some sort of combination of nuclear waste and whatever chemical is used to make red fireworks.  I’m not exaggerating.  I quickly realized how colorblind I must look and shed my sweatshirt the moment I locked up my bike, even before entering the building.  After hiding the shamefully mismatched sweatshirt during lunch with my friends, I had to suck up my pride and wear it all the way back to my room because it had not gotten any warmer.

I will probably never wear these now-deemed ridiculous sweatpants in
public ever again.

If Life Were a Musical: A Realistic Approach

Musicals are everywhere.   They span from the belting notes of the Broadway stage, to the cheery voices of Disney, to the reliable (or at least impending) episode of every sitcom for no reason other then to boost ratings.  In the case of the later, it is usually completely random.  Maybe the main character is in an extended dream sequence, sometimes it’s caused by a school musical that the series never makes reference to ever again, and sometimes it’s even due to hallucinations due to an 104 degree fever or a brain tumor. Seriously.  Regardless of the reasoning, the episode is almost always entirely unrealistic.  The general consensus is that people breaking into a chorus line is ridiculous and makes for great entertainment because it’s not something we see every day.  But is it really that strange?   Now bear with me; what if a musical life was really how we lived today?

From what I remember from my human evolution course, human speech started 100,000ish years ago (Disclaimer: This might be a made up number).  Now, it isn’t definite when music was “invented” but for arguments sake let’s say it was at least a few thousand years after speech began in the human race.  Instead of breaking the two into black and white categories, what if the human race had evolved the two into a grey area?  Allow me to take you back in time; one day, Mr. Cavemister kills a leopard.  He was so excited he let out a loud cry of victory.  I know.  I was there.  All his cave chums were quite the impressed bunch and started to let out their own variety of notes when mere action couldn’t adequately express their joy.  Over thousands of years the same tactic was used to express sadness, anger, and excitement.  Basically any uber-emotion you can think of.  Words were added to make meaning clear.  This progressed along with speech and eventually we come to what would be present day.

Imagine a baby growing up today.  This baby hears his mom and dad bombarding him with “MamaDadaMamaDadaMama” in a desperate ploy to get him to say his first word.  The parents go about their day, chatting in front of the baby.  Suddenly Mom gets a phone call, it’s some good news.  Mom breaks out into song.  Baby learns that this is the normal way to express and communicate.  Baby grows up and interacts with other people.  These people reinforce what baby was taught by his parents.  Growing up we hear how to correctly use inflection, tone, and expression.  Baby learns how to use notes and tunes in the same manner.  It becomes natural to the human race. 

Of course there would be a few things different from the movies.  There would sadly be a scarcity of big show stopping numbers.  I, for one, have never seen a group of people speak for long periods of time using the same words unless it was rehearsed.  A street full of people breaking into the same tune is still, in fact, pretty ridiculous.  And dance? No, probably not.  Musical instruments? As for the solos everyone would be belting out, musical instruments would be unnecessary.  I imagine people singing their solos completely a capella.

Some things that would be the same:

Musicals in the media: Why not? We watch speeches.  We still like dancers and actors.  Just the best of the best would choose it as a career.

Singers and the radio: We read poetry right? Same concept.  The only difference might be that in elementary school kids would learn to read music as well as read books.

Playing instruments: They are still hard to play, you don’t need to read music to make up a tune, but you do need to learn to play an instrument to be productive with it.

How people would respond to everyday conversation:  If you’re used to people singing, you’re not going to call attention to them.  Unless someone is having a vocalized temper tantrum, then maybe…

Think about that for a second.  This is what popped into my head, a man in the middle of a crowded office, wearing a suit, just wailing at the top of his lungs.  He’s singing a hardcore rock number about how he just lost a promotion, playing air guitar, no music, kicking chairs and jumping around in his cubical.

This is the world I want to live in.