Friday, September 25, 2009

Full disclosure and social awkwardness

To be in full disclosure, I have no clue what this blog will entail. We can infer from the history of blogging combined with my own personality it has the potential to be taken just about anywhere. So, the title of this small endeavor of mine fits quite well - buckle up. After I exclaimed one evening "Buckle up!" before starting on a tangent laden monologue, Sara Jaeger thought it would make a good title. Thanks Sara.

So I feel it's only fitting that I start with a completely random, absolutely unrelated story about myself. While killing time before a walk this afternoon I entertained my roommate with this one, and so readers, I share it with you.

*please envision your own Wayne's World fade out hand gestures here*

It was the beginning of my freshman year at Mizzou, and homecoming was in the air. Having been in a sorority at the time, this meant outside of classes, eating, sleeping, and keeping up some standard of personal hygiene, I needed to be spending the rest of my time pomping...but not in a hazing sort of way.

(For those of you unfamiliar with pomping...do you remember in, say preschool or kindergarten ever doing an art project involving wrapping small squares of tissue paper around a pencil, dipping the tissue in elmer's glue and then sticking the tissue on paper to create 3D designs? If you do, take that art project and multiply it by approximately sixteen 4x8 particle boards put together by about 200 college students into one huge 2-story picture.)

To get this feat done, we all had x number of hours we needed to pomp each week. Looking back, it was probably a good thing I didn't stick with the sorority thing the full 4 years. I just didn't get it. Unbeknownst to me, pomping was a social activity, whereas I saw it as a "get 'er done" sort of activity. So when I had a few hours to kill after my 8am class, well that seemed like a great time to pomp to me!

To get the full effect of this story I implore you to picture an 18 year old me, showing up at the door of a fraternity at 9am with a grin saying "Hi, I'm here to pomp"...by myself...for a couple of hours...with nothing but CMT to keep me company. Since I wasn't even going to attempt to change the channel on a TV the size of a Ford Focus, in order to entertain myself I invented a game that morning called "Name that Country Star". As a new music video came on I would try to guess the name of the country star singing. Since I hadn't really gotten into country at this point in time in my life I had to resort to guessing "Willie Nelson!" anytime a male singer came on. I was wrong for a solid 40 minutes or so, until Willie Nelson actually came on...and boy was I excited! Because that's the day I finally learned what the dude looked like. He's he one with the braids.

And so now, many years later, when I hear country music I've never heard before I remember that game I came up with a long, long time ago. And that's what brought up the story this afternoon with my roommate. I had no idea Rascal Flatts sang that backwards country song song! Catchy.

And that's the way it is.

3 comments:

  1. Um, yes, please! I want more! Can't wait for more stories like this!

    ReplyDelete
  2. you have the BEST stories! consider me buckled up and ready for the ride :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. gee -- pomping sounds fun. ;-) like the blog!

    ReplyDelete