Halloween Costumes

For someone like me, this week has been a special kind of wonderful. I am the type of person who lives for holidays. I thrive on them! I plan my entire year around the last few month of the year. My main focus is always Christmas, because Christmas is by the most wonderful, magical, perfect time of year, but I love all holidays in general. However, on a much sadder not, we have all officially reached the age where it is inappropriate and just a little weird to knock on people’s doors for free candy.

With Halloween being on Thursday, all of the girls on my floor (and I am sure on all college campuses in the United States of America) are scurrying to find decent Halloween costumes. While most girls take the overly used, clichéd approach of being a bunny, cat, or something else that you can wear heels and animal ears (see Mean Girls, Legally Blonde, or really any other movie where girls dress up for Halloween), my floor is trying, in a somewhat failed attempt to be creative. The whole idea of being creative is a good one. And it probably would have worked much better if they had started to plan a little earlier than a day before Halloween. So far, all they have been able to come up with is The stages of Miley Cyrus’s career or Disney princesses. Not exactly the most creative of outfits. They have each been able to come up with single person costumes, though, so at least they’ll have something. Everyone except for my roommate, that is. So if anyone has easy, quick ideas for her, that would be great.

Lucky for me, my mom mailed me all of my costume type stuff from home, so I am set! Halloween is the perfect time to embrace the weirdness, because just about everything on Halloween is weird. So go out, dress up, and be weird.

A Stressed Out Dinosaur

Well, it’s about that time of year. We have just passed the halfway mark of the semester and stress has become a well-known, unwelcome staple in all of our day to day lives. School is hard. It also seems like many of us are just now realizing that we can not actually just coast through easily, the way we did in high school. Because of all the stress that we are under, we have taken to certain, shall we say, coping mechanisms. Some of these coping mechanisms are, to say the least, weird.

About a week ago, I came back to my room after dinner and found my roommate have a complete and total mental breakdown. When I entered the room, she was lying on the floor sobbing. A little background is that she hates her major (biology) and does not want to do it anymore, but at the same time, she has no idea what she actually wants to do. The uncertainty of her future led her to sort of go a little crazy. No matter how much we all tried to convince her that it is not a big deal for a first semester college freshman to not know exactly what they want to do for the rest of their lives, she would not calm down for several hours. This resulted in my entire floor crammed into my teeny tiny little room trying to comfort her.

After she finally calmed down, things started to get a little weird. As some sort of weird, mildly uncomfortable coping mechanism, she started “dinosaur-ing.” This entailed her putting her entire head, minus her face, into her sweatshirt and walking around, flailing her arms and making what she thinks are dinosaur noises at people. Needless to say, they were a little freaked out. She also drank began drinking ridiculous amounts of apple cider straight from the container.

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I, on the other hand, took a different approach to dealing with my stress. Instead of tackling my workload, like a normal person, I resorted to making dozens of paper snowflakes… I have no theory for why I found this strangely comforting. But for some reason, when I was done I felt far more relaxed than before. Also, I understand that it is not close enough to Christmas for me to be making paper snowflakes, but I do what I want. It is never too early to start celebrating Christmas.

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So tell me, how do you handle stress? Got any good coping mechanisms that I can recommend to my roommate? Got any funny stories or weird coping mechanisms?

Pumpkin Carving and Traditions from Home

For this passion blog entry, I am going to talk about something a little different. This is less about the weird things that my floor do and more about traditions and missing home, maybe, just a little.

There are all kinds of fun random activities that happen every day at Penn State. It is nearly impossible for there to be a night where there is nothing going on. Some of these activities, I admit, are kind of lame and boring. But others are actually a lot of fun. Sometimes it just depends on who you are doing these activities with, and maybe what they remind you of or what they make you think of.

I do not know if any of you read the stall stories, but if you do, you may have noticed that there were free pumpkins in the arboretum a few days ago. I did not have a chance to go get a pumpkin. However, my RA, Christine, did! So the other night she invited us all to come help her carve it. And because everyone on my floor absolutely loves Christine, of course we went! It was so much fun!

It was one of those activities that really reminded me of home. Every year, since long before I can remember, my mom and I have always, without fail, carved a pumpkin together for Halloween. It is just a silly little tradition that never seemed to mean very much to either of us. It seemed more like something that we just did because it was Halloween and that is just what people do on Halloween.

But carving a pumpkin this year, for the first time without my mom, was an entirely different experience.  Up until this point, I have not felt homesick even a little bit. I adjusted pretty quickly to life away from NOVA (Northern Virginia to people who are not from there). Carving a pumpkin without my mom for the first time was when I realized that maybe I missed something from home. I guess it is merely another thing that we all have to adjust to- the possibility of missing out on certain things that we have always done with our families.

photo-1 Our pumpkin!!!!

Jokes

They say laughter is the best medicine and the girls on my floor are doing their best to make that true. As we have, I am sure that many of you have put up white boards on your room doors. Even if you do not have one, I am sure that someone on your floor does. Some of my favorite things from the minds of the people on my floor are the many jokes that we all put up on each other’s doors. Each and every day, without fail, there is a new joke on everyone’s door. Now, we totally understand that most of these jokes are actually horrible, but we love them anyways. They are “punny”.

So these jokes range from extremely funny to really terrible puns that are funny because they are so bad. But they are a great and easy way to brighten everyone’s day. Back when we first started putting up the jokes, one of the girls on my floor told me that she was having a really bad day. She said that when she got home from class and saw the joke that I had written, she felt a little better. I love that! Any way that I can find to help someone’s day get a little better, I will do!

For a while, someone tried to start a word of the day on everyone’s door but those were not popularly received. Apparently, no one likes to learn. Which, I guess I understand.

So here, for your entertainment, are some of the jokes that can be found on the doors of 7th floor Tener:

Why did the melons have a wedding?    *Because they cantaloupe

What do nosey peppers do?    *They get jalapeno business

Where do boats go when they get sick?     *The dock-tor

What kind of computer sings?      *A-Dell

 

Hint: It helps if you say the punch lines out loud.

My Roommate Won’t Stop Watching Breaking Bad…

Raise your hand if you have Netflix. Now, raise your hand if you have ever gone on Netflix, expecting to watch a movie or maybe an episode or two of your favorite series. You were just planning on letting off some steam, taking a brief break from the mountains of schoolwork you have piling up because you keep procrastinating. Then, somehow, you found a new series and for some ineffable reason decided that it was a good idea to try to finish all 8 seasons in a week. This is a very real problem that many Netflix subscribers struggle with, especially those of the college student variety.

College is nothing like high school. Suddenly, we all find ourselves with hours upon hours of free time. And we have to fill it somehow, right? Netflix, I have come to learn very quickly, is an incredibly dangerous thing. I am not entirely sure that a college student with free time should be aloud to have the password to a Netflix account. My roommate is a prime example of why maybe mixing a Netflix account and hours of free time is not the best idea.

My roommate will not stop watching Breaking Bad. It has gotten to the point where I am actually shocked when I get home after class and she is not learning the ups and downs of cooking meth. Yes, I know that the series has ended. But she started years late so she is only on season 4. So close… Every night, like clockwork, I can guarantee that she is falling asleep to Breaking Bad. On Thursdays, she only has two classes so she will watch about 5 hours. My favorite part of the binge watching is that she is still doing really well in school. I do not know when she gets her schoolwork done, but props to her.

Another funny thing about it is that I have already watched and finished the series. So I am regularly bombarded with questions to explain things and begging for spoilers. I refuse to give her anything because I know that all will be explained. Also, she would probably get angry if I actually did spoil things. Finally, for those of you who watched the show, how bout that ending?!?!?!?!?!

IMG_3356(Emily, just doing her thing.)

*After seeing this post, she said, “Its not that bad. There are worse things I could be doing, like actual crystal meth.” *

Woo Girls

For those of you who do not know what a woo girl is, please see this clip from CBS’s television show, How I Met Your Mother. (Sorry for the terrible quality).

So basically it is a girl, who when in the presence boys and other woo girls, likes to scream and get excited about every little thing, however un-woo-worthy it is.  Never in my life have I ever been a woo girl. And I have not ever been close friends with any woo girls, either. I had plenty of friends at home who were girls, but none of them had the woo girl attitude. This is yet another thing that I have encountered in college that caught me by surprise and mildly off-guard.

So having been an avid How I Met Your Mother watcher, I was familiar with the concept of what a woo girl was. Even in high school, I knew that they were around, I encountered them occasionally in the hallways, or maybe I even witnessed wooing at a party. But I never spent time with any on a daily basis. Now, I live with and spend time daily with about 6 or 7 woo girls.

Okay, so maybe they are not as bad as the How I Met Your Mother woo girls. Perhaps I am being slightly dramatic. I personally have just never seen the appeal in wooing at everything that happens. In total honesty again, I am a little confused by it. Does the wooing actually make the fun thing more fun? This is just not something that I am accustomed to.

The funny thing about it is that when I asked about the wooing, they all laughed because they know that they are woo girl and they actually do not want to be woo girls either. They say they do it as a joke and because it is funny but truthfully, they cannot stop. Every time they woo, they stop and yell at the group for wooing. So to me, wooing is weird. It is a whole new concept that I am getting used to. But as I will in everything, I am here to embrace the weirdness.

photo(The girls on my floor, all but two, a woo girl)

 

New Things

For my passion blog I will be writing about a mix of people and experiences as a freshman in college. Mainly it will be about the people who live on my floor, the things we all do and say together, and even maybe conversations about they’re thoughts on college. Already, we have all become somewhat like a family. I think it is probably one of the benefits of being in one of the smaller tower dorms- there are fewer people and we are living in closer proximity to each other so pretty quickly we were all forced to bond. Luckily, we all get along and have a lot in common. So here goes…

I for one have never heard someone use the word “yinzers”. That is not a word that was in my vocabulary before I became a freshman at Penn State. I have now met at least 3 people who say the word “yinzers”, which according to one of my new floor friends, a very proud Pittsburgh girl, it means something along the lines of “you all”. Having never known anyone from the south, my roommate had never heard anyone say “y’all” before meeting me. Almost an entire month into school, she still gets a kick every time I say it. And I still get a kick whenever she says the word “wicked” in place of “really” or “very” to describe something. (ex: “wicked awesome”)

This is one of the many things that I have come to love about college. The world has immediately become bigger in just a few short weeks. There are so many new things that I have never come across before college. Every day I feel like I learn something new from the people that I live with. I can already hear and see myself picking up some of their mannerisms and habits. I occasionally catch myself saying things like “wicked”. I am pretty sure that it is going to be hard to avoid adapting these new ways. But I am learning to embrace the things that a month ago would have seemed weird. I personally am looking forward to it- a slight culture shock and a chance to truly learn to embrace the weirdness.