Miami Student

I can now say that I've driven a round trip of 20 hours just to flip a guy off. This past week I went to protest the inauguration of George W. Bush, making a feverish drive in the dead of night to Washington, D.C., missing two days of class, one day of work, and my own grandfather's open heart surgery to be witness to this madness. I waited in a surging mass of people, both protesters and supporters, for over three hours waiting to be frisked by military personnel. A guy with dreadlocks stood on a concrete barrier screaming into this sea of people, "Sheep! You're all sheep!" A group of protesters came barreling down a side street, taking the police by surprise. They lobbed snowballs and threw their flagsticks into the cops, who responded with pepper spray and billy clubs. It was crazy - sheer, unadulterated madness. …

My housemate Katy and I found ourselves sitting on our living room couch - a large ugly blue array of stained cushions. Half of it is useless: If you sit on the doomed cushions on the right hand side you'll find yourself on the floor. Although I'm sure if you looked under the useless cushions you'd find many strange ideas of filling that endless hole, like the random clothes found that no one claims, the beer tabs that are supposed to go to the Ronald McDonald house, and Cheerios. It's the typical college couch: big, ugly, half functional - something our parents gave us with pity before throwing away. As we sat there watching the Steelers game, we commented on how typical the situation was of college students: we both held our "dinners," in my bowl was noodles topped with butter spray and parmesan cheese (I don't recommend it). Katy's bowl held plain rice. No soy sauce, just plain, tasteless white rice. Our dessert? Graham crackers with peanut butter and marshmallow fluff. This is a typical college meal: cheap, bland, and leaving you wanting something else, what that could be is unclear since our cupboards are constantly empty. We struggled to find a spot on the disgusting dirty coffee table that hasn't seen a dust rag since it was in a responsible adult's house years back. …

Earlier this week, I suspected that my laptop had been infected by some sort of virus, a virus that, sadly, Kroger brand Tussin, the cure-all for every illness, could not fix. My computer had slowed down to the point that it was like Turtle in the old Nintendo "Track & Field" game, and there was no way running on the floor pad with numbers could save it. After doing some investigating, I thought that the problem was in a file named Dr. Watson's Postmortem Debugger. This saddened me, not just because it had damaged my computer, but because Dr. Watson had turned bad guy on me all of a sudden. This wasn't the same Dr. Watson who acted like a boob while Sherlock Holmes found a tiny fingerprint on the floorboard of a hidden attic in a shack fifty miles away that solved the crime. No, this was a much more sinister Dr. Watson. Then, upon further research, I discovered that Dr. Watson's Postmortem Debugger was created to help secure your computer, so it turned out that burning my copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles as vengeance against the good Doctor was a useless act. So, desperately needing a computer because all of our lives seemingly end without having one, I ventured to the computer lab to write up this column. If I try to open up Microsoft Word at home, it closes automatically in five seconds. This proves to be a serious problem for an English major, and gives me one of two choices: either I've got to go running like a madman to find the nearest computer, as I did in this case, or I need to discover an old typewriter, and play the Murder, She Wrote theme song in the background. Didn't you love solving mysteries with Jessica "J.B." Fletcher in a town where the Dr. Watson character was now played by a Sheriff, and you wondered why they were paying him if an elderly woman was solving all the crime? No?! …