Just Because

Once upon a time, there lived a woman named Julia Grover and a man named Rupert Follehomme. Julia was a computer scientist who had been raised by her loving grandparents after her parents died in a tragic incident involving a trumpeter swan and a jet-ski. Rupert was a madman who had once controlled an evil society. Through a chaotic and confusing series of events, Julia and Rupert met. They knew from the moment that they set eyes on one another that they were soul mates. Julia even forgave Rupert for murdering her grandfather.

Many years later...

Julia and Rupert have had a son. His name is Eugene. He is now eighteen.* Eugene is driving drunk and hits his parents as they frolic down the street hand in hand. Julia dies, and Rupert joins MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving). He convinces Rick Astley to join MADD as well.

Then a meteor hits the earth and the dinosaurs return. Humans die by dino or meteor, go to live with Hitler in the center of the earth, or join Eugene in trying to repopulate the world. Eugene realizes the futility of his goal and instead plots to overthrow Hitler. Just in time, the Brigators show up from the past and help him defeat Hitler. After his victory, Eugene sets up a new order in the center of the earth, and everyone lives happily ever after, including the small clan of civilized sasquatches that they allow to take up residence in their subterranean world.


*Everything after this point is verbatim what I originally wrote down from our ramblings except for the fact that Julia and Rupert now have names.

Adventures in Rural Indiana

Once upon a time (by which I mean more than a month ago by now), four brave adventurers set out on what was destined to become a memorable journey filled with curious sights and experiences...

Here's what I remember about the Indiana trip that Anna/Betsy, Seth, Josh, and I took a few weeks ago. The events within each paragraph are probably not in the proper order, but all the events in one paragraph followed those in the preceding paragraph and came before the ones in the next.

This particular telling of the tales of that day will start with my brief exploration of the UC campus led by Josh. Among other things, I got to see the office of Mr. Man (I'm wanting to say his name was Man D. Kwon, but I don't know if I'm remembering that correctly), some telescopes atop the astronomy and physics buildings, interesting architecture, and the unnatural community of dorms in which my guide lives. The trees were unnaturally straight (even the redbud!) and still had an unusual percentage of their leaves, and the grass was eerily green. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to visit the wizard's tower.

After we picked up Seth and Anna/Betsy, we left UC and got on the highway. The grass beside one of the earlier highways was strewn with garbage galore. It was depressing. I avoided looking at it. We passed one of those houses with horrible kitschy lawn ornaments covering the front yard. At one point, Seth spotted what appeared to be a real monkey sitting on a picnic table. Throughout the trip we played roadkill bingo. Or at least I did. I saw (and circled in red pen, incidentally) a squirrel, a rabbit, a tire, a groundhog, a dog, a raccoon, a cat, and several mysterious masses of mangled flesh in addition to smelling a dead skunk.

Once we got to downtown Anderson, the real adventures started. Downtown Anderson was a very shady place. It even has a Shadyside Memorial Park, which I will get to in a moment. The GPS led us astray, and told us to turn onto this ultra shady back street. It was mildly frightening. When we tried to get off of that street, we nearly had a nasty run-in with a huge pick-up truck. Apparently he didn't have a stop sign. We decided to stop to ask for directions, so we pulled into Shadyside Memorial Park. At the entrance there were these horrid little stone pillar things. They tried to look nice, but they failed miserably. It made me sad to look at them, so I turned away. Nobody was in the park... except for some guy sitting in his car in the parking lot near the playground. Drug dealer? Pedophile? Who knows. All I know is that he fit very well into the general mood of downtown Anderson. We were supposed to be going north, but evidently we were going south. I didn't know that. Normally, the GPS shows the car driving towards to top of the screen. At the top of the screen was North Anderson, so I assumed that we were going north. However, if I had looked at the little car, I would have realized that it was driving towards the bottom of the screen, meaning that we were going south. It took me a while to notice that, so I kept objecting every time Josh tried to turn around. I'm not sure how much time my confusion added to the trip. We didn't reset the GPS with the new directions, so it kept on telling us to make a u-turn.

The return trip provided even more excitement. We became lost again. The GPS's directions had us driving in the middle of nowhere for quite some time. Maybe it wanted revenge for all the times we refused to make a u-turn, despite its protests. Most of the time, we were on hilly roads barely wide enough for two cars to pass abreast. As we crested each hill, we feared that we would find another car about to collide with us. Fortunately, there were no accidents. In fact, we rarely saw any signs of real civilization whatsoever. It was kind of creepy. Due to excessive exhaustion combined with the most caffeine I've ever consumed in a day, I was slap-happy the entire time. It made the drive even more interesting for me. At one point, I burst out laughing and finally managed to communicate that I was amused by the fact that we hadn't driven on a lined road in a long time. Normally, that wouldn't have been that funny, but caffeine + fatigue = all sorts of interesting thoughts. Throughout the landscape dotted with lonely buildings and grotesque, leafless trees were little cement monoliths of mystery. They were all over the place, and we couldn't figure out what on earth they might be. There was also an old, mostly destroyed tower-ish structure. I don't remember what it was, or if we found out what it was at all. For part of the countryside ride, we listened to Captain Beefheart. I tried brainstorming for an essay while it was playing. That didn't go as well as it could have. Thank goodness Josh stopped it somewhere near track 13. I can only take so much Beefheart. We stopped for a bathroom break as soon as we saw signs of civilization. Raleigh, IN, was hardly civilization, but it was something. The greasy diner place we stopped at was interesting. They sold cans of beans. They sold other things too, but I only remember the cans of beans. There was a layer of grease on the countertop. Betsy/Anna was the only one brave enough to use the bathroom hidden away in the furnace room. As we left, we heard the locals chuckling. They were probably laughing at us city folk, and I don't blame them. We stopped again later in Metamora at the Hav-A-Bite, and that was a much nicer experience. Well, maybe not for Seth, but he said he felt much better after throwing up. Next to the bathrooms was a poster of the "little houses of Metamora." The distinguishing feature of the town was Mt. Metamora. Mt. Metamora was a large hill with a small building of mystery perching atop it. The building had a cross on the side, so maybe it was a church or a monastery of some sort. The hill was covered in dead grass with a few gnarled trees. Someone suggested that it may have been a landfill at one point. Relatively close to the time we finally made it back to the highway, there was a railroad along the road and a canal next to that. It made me smile. We were driving alongside the evolution of technology. After a while, we got on the highway. At some point during the trip back home, we saw a yard with live llamas in it. I have no idea where this fits in with the chronology of events. That's all.

Concert Week

Concert week technically started on Thursday the 4th and won't end until Thursday the 18th, but seven of the ten concerts fit between Monday the 8th and Friday the 12th, so I'm considering that week to be concert week.

The first concert was the elementary instrumental concert. Heather played in the fourth grade orchestra (the first group), and Allison played in the sixth grade band (the last group), so we got the joy of staying for the entire concert. Before the concert, I got to help tune the seventy-some stringed instruments in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade orchestras. I'll admit, I wasn't all that concerned with absolute perfection. Their instruments go out of tune quickly, and they can't play in tune to begin with, so I figured I wouldn't be adding a whole lot of pain to the listening experience by letting a few of the instruments remain slightly out of tune. The fourth-graders weren't supposed to get to use their bows, but my sister brought hers out anyway and had to be sent back to put it away. The fourth and fifth grade orchestras performed at the expected skill level, but the 9-member sixth grade orchestra should have been much better. The fifth grade band played as expected, but the sixth grade band played exceptionally well. They were actually pleasant to listen to for the most part.

On the Monday of the main concert week, we got to hear the fifth and sixth grade voices of Whitaker along with the Whitaker percussion ensemble. The songs were surprisingly un-hokey, considering the director. He's really quite a character. I don't know how else to describe him. You should see how high he crosses his lowercase t's (I'm not sure if I wrote that properly, but I'm sure that you all get the idea). As usual, the percussion ensemble played painfully repetitive songs that lasted somewhere between five and ten minutes each.

I guess it's typical for local churches and other groups to ask the high school's audition choir (Chorale) to come and sing around Christmastime. This year we're singing at two or three churches and an assisted living home, along with our annual concerts for the senior citizens of the community and the middle and high school students. Our first in a long series of concerts came on Tuesday during school. We drove over to St. Paul's Church of Christ in North College Hill to play for a group of elderly women. I called them the Widow Brigade in my head. Our first song didn't go so well, but the others went just fine. Our last song was a version of the "Ave Maria" that is evidently sung at many funerals. It actually caused several of the old women to cry. In the last song, my friend Eddie and I sing a tenor solo as a duet. He never wanted to sing it in the first place, but I think our conductor felt bad about giving both tenor solos to girls, so he had Eddie and I sing the lower one together. Since he had never intended to try out for the solo, he didn't know the words until today. The fact that he had no idea what he was singing would always make me a nervous wreck during rehearsals, so I'm glad he fixed it in time for our first concert. I felt that we did well, and several of the Chorale members told us that our balance and blend was excellent. Hurrah! I have one last thing to mention about the kind old ladies: one of them looked a little spacey and was wearing a pair of reindeer antlers tied on top of her head with a large bow under her chin. We had a hard time looking in her direction with a straight face.

Tuesday night was the high school and middle school instrumental concert. Before the concert, we did some last minute practicing. A week before, we had started looking at a variation of Greensleeves, and it wasn't coming together well at all. She told us to pull out the song, and I raised my hand and politely asked if she really thought we were prepared to perform the song. She completely blew up and yelled something about how we never listen to her or do anything she says. So we played through the last section of the song. The ending part is just the traditional Greensleeves. When we were done, she told us that we would just be playing the ending since that was the only part we could play even moderately well. I know that she's been under a lot of stress these past few weeks, but I don't still don't feel that she was justified in biting my head off. The concert started out with the jazz band, and they were excellent (as usual). They were followed by the middle school orchestra. They were not excellent. Between the middle and high school orchestras, I played a piece in a quintet with two violins, a cello, and a harp. It went pretty well...except for the fact that the first violin can't count to save her life. She came in a beat late on one of her entrances and bungled things up. She always misses that part. You'd think that she would hear that something wasn't fitting together correctly, but she never seems to notice. Until this year, she's been a soloist taking private lessons. She can't play with groups very well, but she doesn't seem to notice that. The high school orchestra did okay. We always do a lot better during actual performances than we do during practices. The high school band was wonderful like they always are. For the finale, we had the high school orchestra cram on stage with the full high school band to play a song together. The orchestra has 27 people, and the band has 70-something. And we were behind them. The cellos had a mic, but that was it. Evidently, it sounded fantastic, but I have to wonder if the strings were heard.


Wednesday evening we went to the third and fourth grade chorus concert at my old elementary school. The director has been rotating through the same set of songs since Dan was in third grade. This year she actually added a new one. We were shocked.


The final official concert was Thursday night's high school choir concert. Between choirs, we have solos or ensembles. For this concert, almost all of them were fantastic. The first one was horrible, but it just made the others look even better. Adam Weber sang "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch," and he has the perfect voice and attitude for that song. It may have been my favorite of the solos. Chorale went last, and all of our songs went pretty well. The audience about died laughing during "Fruitcake," and we got a standing ovation after "Ave Maria." Both Sean and Dan (the opening soloists) and Eddie and I (the second set of soloists) blended better than we had for any previous rehearsal, and Victoria finally fixed the pronunciation on her solo. I love singing that song. I love singing in Latin in general. It fits my tone very well. If I sing a senior solo, it will probably be something in Latin.

On Friday during the day, the high school choruses sang a condensed version of Thursday's concert in the morning for the middle school and our community's senior citizens. We had to cut one of our songs, we never felt as comfortable with that one as we did with the others. In the afternoon, we sang for the high school, but the principal took away ten minutes of our concert time, so we had to skip "Ave Maria." It's somewhere between seven and eight minutes long, and our conductor didn't think that very many of the students would have the attention span to sit through it. He may have been right, but I still really wish that we could have sung it for everyone.

I have two more chorale concerts this week, but they aren't likely to be very eventful. If something exciting happens, I'll make a comment.

My Groovy Purse Pins

I was writing an article for my school's literary magazine (which is really just a collection of odd surveys, thoughts, lists, and articles written by myself and some friends of mine) when I realized that it would do just as well as a blog post. I know I've been silent for several weeks, but I've been rather busy. I currently have four other posts in progress, and I hope to publish them over winter break.

My Groovy Purse Pins
by: gwendolyn maple

Most people in our high school have seen my fabulous purse at least once. You may even have taken the time to look at the pins covering it. But you may find yourself wondering… what do they all mean? The time has come to answer that question.*

• pirate flag: Do any of you remember the boat project from seventh grade? I worked with Christina McGuire, Courtney Dennis, and Sara Crowell to make The Black Pearl. The Jolly Roger on my purse once flew proudly from the main mast of our little boat.
  
• “dots” label: I love Dots . I don’t actually like eating them all that much (they get stuck to one’s teeth), but I like some of the flavors and I like looking at them. They have nice colors and shapes.
  
• orange duct tape with writing: It says “Hey Band! Watch out for my flag!” and was given to me by Megan Menke during band camp 2006.
  
• blue-scale: There really is nothing more to this strip from a paint sample other than the fact that it looked lovely.
  
• Halloween doughnut: My youngest sister gave me a sticker with a Krispy Kreme doughnut dressed up as a cowboy saying “Howdy goblins!” The letters and parts of the doughnut glow in the dark.
  
• Purdue ticket stub: My family generally tries to go to a Purdue football game every year. Both my parents went there (along with countless other relatives), and I plan to go there as well. I feel the need to emphasize that I’m not planning to attend Purdue just because my relatives have. The school fits me very well.
  
• dutchman scrap: Dutchmanning is a set-building trick in which tape or glue-soaked canvas is laid over seams between flats to conceal the cracks between them. In Cinderella, the 2005 musical, we used canvas to dutchman, and I filched a piece that I had painted to look like wood.
  
• sparkly smiling clover pin: Hopefully that was self-explanatory. I am proud of my Irish heritage. Along with my German, British, Scottish, French, and Native American heritage. I’m a mutt, and this pin shows a part of my mixed ancestry.
  
• cutie tangerine sticker: There are these delicious little tangerines (or maybe they’re actually clementines) called “cuties.” They have little stickers on them that say things like “cutie” or “I’m a cutie” or “kiss a cutie.” The one on my purse says “I’m a cutie.”
  
• shapes sticker: I found my old purse from seventh and eighth grade, and – lo and behold – there were stickers all over the underside of the closing flap. I found where it all began. One of the stickers said “I learned my shapes.”
  
• Grool/Gruel: We never decided how to spell her name, but Grool/Gruel is a drawing created by myself and several others (I know I’ll miss some people if I try to remember everyone) in tenth grade English class. We were bored, so Megan Menke started to draw a girl, and she passed it to someone else to add something. They passed it to the next person and so on. She wound up being quite interesting, but I don’t have room to describe her here.
  
• security sticker: I save the stickers that come on the inside of watches and some other pieces of merchandise. I assume they’re supposed to set off an alarm if you steal them. I think they look nifty. The one that is currently on my purse is bright blue and transparent.
  
• tree-hugger pin: It says “hug a tree” and depicts a panda climbing some bamboo. It came to me from Target via a friend of mine. Hurrah for Target!
  
• no hunger: At the Community Service Leadership Conference this year, the Freestore Food Bank was handing out pins that had the word hunger encircled and crossed out in red.
  
• Dove chocolate wrapper: Whenever I’m having a crappy day, I find at my elbow a piece of Dove chocolate (courtesy of Courtney) with a pleasant word inside. My favorite wrapper yet is the one on my purse that reads “Go to your special place.”
  
• green rectangle: There is no significance to this green paint sample other than the fact that it’s a swell color.
  
• orange star: This puffy little star that I often refer to as a starfish is yet another decoration on my purse that has not deeper significance than its aesthetic appeal.
  
• leaf mask half: Once upon a time last year, Katie Schmidt (Le Phoque Volant de Neige) made me a leaf mask. She drew two leaves connected by a mutual petiole and made them rather colorful. However, the mask was not very useful as a mask, for it lacked eyeholes. I took the only logical alternative course of action: I taped the mask to my upper lip and wore it as an outrageously gorgeous moustache for the rest of the day.
  
• water cycle: Layla Owens used to bring these water bottles with nifty labels displaying an illustration of the water cycle. I cut out the illustration from one of the bottles, and it has lived on three different purses since then.
  
• Crush label: My Crush outfit has reached the level of notoriety. Not only do the shirt, earrings, bracelet, and shoes coordinate, but my purse also has a bit of Orange Crush spirit.
  
• Ireland triangle: And here we have some more Irish spirit. This groovy triangular sticker came from a Highlights magazine and has on it a Celtic knot and the word “Ireland.”
  
• tidbit from box of chucks: “This box deserves another chance to hold a pair of Converse shoes. Please recycle.” (and yes, I did recycle the rest of the box)
  
• “go green” button: It says “go green” and has a green viny background. It also hails from Targét.
  
• happy frog: This smiling amphibian actually belong to a Hello Kitty mobile one of my sisters got years ago, but she doesn’t know that.
  
• ninja penguin: Originally an ordinary penguin, this sticker deserved a little more pizzazz. I added shuriken, a headband, and some Japanese sandals. You may recall that I also have a pirate flag on my purse. I am in fact a pinja (a pirate-ninja hybrid). I can’t pick a side, so I choose both.
  
• tato: The technical name for the windmill-esque origami thing on my purse is “tato.” I have no idea what that means, but it the thing looks cool and it was fun to make.
  
• “support the separation of church and hate” button: It says what I just wrote (minus the word "button"), and my youngest three sisters got it for me in Chicago. I will proudly admit that I am a Christian, but I’m ashamed by the fact that the church sometimes attacks people before trying to love them.
  
• MS button: I got this button from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society for participating in the MS Walk this spring.
  
• fortune cookie paper: It reads “You find beauty in ordinary things. Do no lose this ability.” Anybody who has known me for any length of time should be able to testify to the truth of this statement.
  
• photo booth picture: While on a mall-wandering adventure, Anna Worpenberg, Courtney Dennis, Emily Christenson, Sara Crowell, and myself all crammed into a photo booth. I love this picture.
  
• Germany sticker: As I mentioned before, I’m part German. I’m more German than anything else except Irish. This sticker also came from a Highlights magazine. It depicts a black eagle.
  
• evil smiley: This button provokes more inquiry than any other button on my purse. It was also the first button on my first hand-made purse. I found a plain red smiley face button in my basement three or four years ago and decided it needed a little personality… hence the fangs, crooked front teeth, and sharply angled eyebrows. People often believe that it is angry, but this is clearly not the case. Its broad smile should make that apparent. It is merely mildly deranged.
  
• R.I.P., my beloved art button: I would like to take a moment to recognize a dearly beloved pin that only lasted for a few months before disappearing. Life on the outside of my purse is hard indeed. This button came from my sisters along with the “separation of church and hate” pin and boldly called out “Doing strange things in the name of art.” I have been known to collect pine sap, wire a scarf to the wall while wearing it, create an abstraction of advice for reading poetry, search for lovely leaves, and write out literally hundreds of words by hand in meticulously straight lines in different sized fonts for the sake of art. And this only touches the tip of the iceberg. Rest in peace wherever you may be.

*The decorations on my purse are likely to change without notice. Do not consider this list to be by any means a comprehensive list of the various pins, buttons, and patches that have adorned or will adorn my purse throughout the years.