I love genuinely innocent “boys will be boys.” Just saw a guy come out of a frat house to poke a pair of jeans they’d left outside - they were frozen solid, and as soon as he confirmed that, like twenty more boys came rushing out of the house going “YOOOOOOOOOO”
I heard grunting outside my window the other night and there were four boys struggling to push this giant snowball (like 7 foot diameter) down the sidewalk.
I once lost my keys at a frat house.
My drunk ass had actually walked home without them, pounded on my apartment door, gotten let in by my rightfully-disgruntled roommate, and proceeded to pass out on the couch. Apparently I puked in the toilet before passing out. I do not remember this part.
The next morning, I schlepped back to the frat house. I stood there, right in front of the front door. This was a novel experience for me. I’d never been at a frat house in broad daylight before.
A boy, presumably, of the house, asked me what I was doing.
“I lost my keys in here last night,” I called back. “I was seeing if I could go in and look for them?”
He opened the door and gestured for me to come in.
“Go wherever you want.”
I’d never seen a frat house post-party before. Wandering up the stairs and through the halls, I was surrounded by hungover and still-drunk frat boys stumbling around in their socks and sandals and gym shorts, seeking out food and showers like moths to a porch light. A few of them threw puzzled glances my way. I’m sure they thought I was some post-bacchanalia hallucination.
I entered one room where a boy was drunkenly watching some Old Yeller-esque movie on a tiny TV in the corner of his room from his bed.
“Do you like dog movies?” he asked, voice all mumbly from grogginess and also from the fact that his face was squished against his pillow and half-buried by his blanket.
I told him I did.
He mumbled again, pleased, and asked what I was doing. I told him I was looking for my keys.
“Sorry, I haven’t seen any keys around here.”
I didn’t doubt him.
Twenty minutes had passed. I’d searched just about every bedroom and nuclear-waste-dump-site of a bathroom in that house. I’d given up on ever finding my keys and was prepared to beg my roommates’ forgiveness and get a new set copied.
As I stood there in the hallway, silently bewailing my predicament, a particularly-burly frat boy approached me.
“You need help with something?”
“I lost my keys here last night and I can’t find them, I’ve looked everywhere.”
“What do they look like? I’ll put it into the group chat.” He was already pulling out his phone.
No one ever checks a group chat, I thought, but what the hell. It was worth a shot. “Um, it’s just a ring of keys. The keychain is a pink plastic cat, though, like yea big. Like bright pink, you can’t miss it.”
He nodded, presumably typing this description faithfully into the group chat.
“Alright, I sent the message out. Good luck.”
And with that, he turned and left.
A few moments later, I heard a distant thundering. It was coming from upstairs, and it was getting louder and louder. One assumes that how I felt in that moment was how Simba felt seeing the wildebeest stampede through the ravine as a horde of large young men all thundered down the stairs, making a beeling for me.
“Someone tell the girl!” One of them shouted, faceless in the mob. “Girl! Hey, GIRL!!! We found your keys, girl!!!”
They circled around me. I hadn’t felt that small since I was maybe eleven years old. One of them split himself off from the crowd.
“Are these -” he pulled out a ring of keys from his pocket, “your keys?”
And lo, there was the distinctive bright millennial pink cat keychain dangling off the ring.
“Yes,” I whispered. “Oh my god, yes.”
“EYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!”
The cheer went up.
Turns out he found them in the bathroom upstairs. I thanked them again profusely. There was a scattered round of “no problems” and then, just as suddenly as they descended, they all dispersed, like ships in the night.
Bugs Bunny accidentally transformed the word nimrod into a synonym for idiot because nobody got a joke where he sarcastically compared Elmer Fudd to the Biblical figure Nimrod, a mighty hunter.
Etymology is ridiculous and terrifying sometimes
Bugs Bunny is more powerful than God
He also solidified the idea of rabbits loving carrots when carrots actually carry very little nutritional value for rabbits. The funniest part of that is that the original joke was a reference to a Clark Gable film where Gable munches on a carrot, it was never meant to imply that rabbits love carrots. The Clark Gable reference would’ve been obvious to audiences in the 40s but it has been pretty much lost to time.
Bugs Bunny has too much power and should be feared.
i think a big thing that disconcerts adults about learning new skills is that learning as an adult means you are very aware of how bad you are at the beginning in a way children aren’t.
i picked up the saxophone when i was 11 and played until i was about 17. by the end of it i was first chair in our highest ensemble, a district honor band player, etc. but at the beginning – and this is important – i was bad. for the first year or so, i had no rhythm, i couldn’t make my tongue line up with my fingers, i was consistently sharp, etc. etc. other kids actually made fun of me for my lack of skill.
but 11 year old me didn’t care. 11 year old me practiced, but she also thought that being able to play the pink panther made her incredible (i shudder in retrospect). i mean, i was aware i wasn’t a master, but my skill level didn’t deter me from wailing out those notes in a way that i’m sure had my band director questioning his career decisions.
right now, i’m trying to pick up the guitar. it’s a very different instrument from the saxophone, and i struggle a lot with things like strumming patterns and barre chords. and sometimes i don’t want to play, because i know i’m bad at guitar. and sometimes i beat myself up when stumbling through a poor acoustic rendition of Everybody Wants to Rule the World because it’s not how i want it to sound. and it’s made even more frustrating because i can navigate the saxophone so smoothly.
but then i remember that i have to think like a kid. i might not be the best at guitar by any stretch of the imagination, but every little bit of progress is still progress. humility is a big part of learning, but if you treat a practice session like your own private concert, it becomes so much more fun, even if you’re bad like i am. when you’re first picking up a skill, whether it be an instrument, or a language, or a fine art, no one is expecting you to be the yo yo ma of that thing. forget about how little you know about the skill and think instead about how much you have to learn – that’s fun! do your best!!
i find that as you get older, people think that you have less of an excuse to be bad at things, no matter when you started learning them
but after you get good suddenly people start praising you for “being ahead of the curve”
the instant you can start divesting yourself from this horrid world of expectation, the easier it becomes to try any new thing
Guys this is so important!! Give yourselves some slack and just keep on trucking! Just focus on yourself and be proud of what you have achieved so far. Even if what you achieved is a little thing, little pieces pile up eventually to something big! You’re doing great, keep it up :D
i pulled up this video on youtube that was like 8 hours of birds for cats to watch and i sat my cat in front of it and i didnt think shed be interested cuz she never watches tv or anything but she is Hypnotized
