BINGO was his name-o.

You know how before you enter into high school or college they always tell you that once you find your niche things will fall into place, well after searching long and hard, I think I've found my niche... among the over 65 crowd. I came home this weekend to attend a conference at AOL on Friday, but afterwards I headed to the Fairfax Fire Station, for what I thought was going to be a good old fashioned game of bingo. Little did I know that I was entering the most intensely competitive bingo arena known to man. My mom and I walked in the room and right off the bat it was obvious that we were the new kids in town. Everyone already had their seats and were all set up with good luck charms and colorful dabbers surrounding them. (A dabber is the ink blotter that you use to mark your bingo cards, just to catch you up on the lingo). Once we got our cards we squeezed in across from this one guy that had 18 bingo cards laying out in front of him... we figured he knew what he was doing. Basically this guy was checking his 18 cards and my 6 cards in about a 15 second time span. I feel like thats something that should go on your resume. Anyway, the night was a blast.

I'm starting to think my life deserves its own MTV reality tv show.

Closet freak.

Ok, so I've been MIA for the past few weeks. I can't tell you exactly what I've been doing in all that time, but I can tell you where I've been for the past hour and the answer is: my closet. My public speaking class has driven me to the brink of CRAZY. I awoke around 7:30 this morning only to take my position inside my closet and rehearse my speech as if I was in front of a huge auditorium. This new practicing location stems partly from the fact that I feel bad for my roomates who have to endure the endless repetition of the same material. The only problem with this is that it's hard to gauge an audience's response by looking at a colorful array of long sleeved shirts and sweaters. I can only hope my audience tomorrow will be as bright and cheery.

The "Perfectly Good" Chair

My favorite memory of the weekend:
We are walking my brother back to his dorm after church this morning. We get to the door and sitting outside to the left of the door is an upside down chair. We all are commenting on the oddity of the situation. From what we could tell, it was a "perfectly good" chair. It didn't look broken. There wasn't any sign of the chair missing legs. Nothing appeared wrong other than the fact that it was outside and it was upside down. My mom, walks up to the "perfectly good chair" and flips it over so that only she can see the chair's seat. She immediately drops the chair back to its upside down position. "What's wrong?" I asked. My mom replies with a disgusted look on her face, "There is shit all over that chair."

Laughter ensues between me and my brother for the next 10 minutes. My mom spent those 10 minutes scrubbing her hands. I told my mom if she had taken the LSAT she would have seen the logical flaw in the situation. Who would put a "perfectly good" chair outside for no apparent reason? I think I might submit this scenario to the LSAC for consideration when they go to create future test questions.

The LSAT on me.

All in all it was quite a hilarious weekend. Well, as hilarious as a weekend can get that involves taking the LSAT. I basically didn't sleep at all on Friday night, partly because of my mom's snoring and partly because the thought "You're taking the freaking LSAT tomorrow." kept running through my head. Anyway, after a restless night, I awoke early, choked down some breakfast and headed to the W&L campus. I arrived, carrying my clear regulation ziploc bag filled with my most worldly posessions: waterbottle, #2 pencils, pencil sharpener, nature valley granola bar, tissues, tissues, and some extra tissues. I showed up to the building indicated on my admission ticket [I had scoped out the rooms the day before] and on the front door is a huge sign that says "LSAT relocated. Please head to the Science Building." GREAT! Where the heck is the Science Building? What if the rooms are horrible? Basically, I'm freaking out. After a momentary lapse, I spot a trail of other ziploc bag carrying people headed away from the building. I trailed them and found the new location. After going inside, I endured about 30 minutes of just sitting around waiting to be fingerprinted and registered. In the meantime, I easedropped on the girls sitting across from me. They both looked, well like inside people. You know, the ones who sit in the library with minimal socialization. [I realize this description also fits me, however the next detail will set us apart.] Their conversation really got juicy when they figured out that they both go to all women's colleges! This is when I tuned out. It was too much for me to handle. Finally they started letting people enter and divided us up into classrooms. My room wasn't too shabby. Everything was great other than the weird chairs that were oddly connected to the desk and swiveled on an arc. Throughout the teset I found myself drifting farther and farther away from the desk. Anyway, after the inital shock of "You may now begin." wore off, I began to appreciate the humor of the whole situation. I mean, honestly, we were all sitting there in that human torture chamber for about 6 hours. The only thing getting me through was this one guy, estimated age: 26, who kept trying to talk to this girl behind him during the breaks. She would give him that, 'are you really talking to me' look, and he never caught on. At one point he even told this joke that made me laugh out loud [obviously giving away the fact that I was blatently ease dropping]. The joke goes a little something like this:

One day a duck walks into a hardware store and askes the hardware store manager, "Hey, do you have any grapes?" And the hardware store guy says, "No we don't have any grapes! This is a hardware store." So the duck goes home. The next day the duck shows up again and asks the manager, "Do you have any grapes?" And the manager says, "No! This is a hardware store we don't have grapes. If you come in and ask me that one more time I'm going to nail your feet to the floor." So the duck goes home. The next day the duck comes back to the hardware store and asks the manager, "Do you have any nails?" The hardware store manager replies, "Nope, we just sold out about 5 mintues ago." The duck says, "Great. Do you have any grapes?"

Needless to say, I survived the LSAT.

Are you smiling at ME?

Today I was walking home from class and I had a moment where I felt all my faith in the world had been renewed. There was this person walking towards me with a huge grin on their face. I mean, they were smiling, AT me. Trust me, I did the glance from side to side to see if there was anyone else at whom this wide toothy grin could be aimed at, and no one else was there. I had no idea who this person was or why they decided to share their smile, but I thought to myself- how great.

Since I've been at UVA, I've always felt that there is specific "eye-contact" protocol that must be followed when coming upon someone walking your way. You have 2 options: 1) Avoid eye contact as much as humanly possible, but if a glance is necessary- try to time it so that you and the other person don't look at the same time OR 2) Look them square in the eye to intimdate them from the start so they feel the need to look away, which then leaves you free to look wherever you want, while the other person's view is limited to the sidewalk.

So anyway, back to Smilie. Just as I'm starting to feel that there are genuinely nice people still out there, the person slides a flyer into my hand as they passed me. Sly. Here I was thinking someone was smiling at me, and they were really just trying to lure me in so they could hand me a sheet with their stance on abortion. In hindsight this situation probably would not have even resulted if my initial stare had been more intimidating... time to brush up on my skills.

INTJ. hey.

What do I have in common with Hannibal, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Jefferson, JFK, and Woodrow Wilson?
EVERYTHING.

According to my public speaking book, entitled "Artful Persuasion: How to command attention, change minds, and influence people," my Myers-Briggs personality is in the running with this fine bunch. We are all introverted, intuitive, thinkers, and judgers. Personally I found it hilarious that good ole' TJ is an INTJ. And who knew that Myers and Briggs were mother and daughter? CRAZY. I wonder if they had very similar personality types, which in turn allowed them to spend a LOT of quality time together talking about personalities?

I bet my teacher would be quite excited if he found out these are the things I reflect about at 2:14 AM when sleep becomes tiresome.

Creatives must go insane.

Do you ever wish all your grades were determined by your mother? I know I do. Before I turn in this first ad assignment to my professor, I'm giving myself an A for effort...