Turbidity!

So Wednesday morning when I was putting water in my hair, I realized that the water was very, very cloudy. I actually refused to use the sink once I filled it with water because it was so disgusting. At first I just thought there was something gross lining the sink I was using, but I tried one or two other sinks and I figured it's probably the water because the same thing happened with them.

At about 3:30 that afternoon, Bill was sitting in the room playing football on XBOX or something along those lines when he got a text message and then said, "Holy crap!" And I asked, huh, what? And he said, "I just got a message from PSU Text saying not to drink water from the sinks or anything."

((o_O)) crap. There was something wrong with the water. About half an hour later I got the same text that Bill did (good thing it wasn't something important, haha!) saying not to drink the water due to high levels of turbidity (cloudiness) from overflowing water in the recent rainstorms.

So ever since then the campus has been going CRAZY about this whole turbid water thing. There are signs everywhere telling you not to drink the water - on every entrance to every dorm on campus. There are bags and papers posted on drinking fountains reminding you not to use them. Kids got text messages and it's posted on PSU's website. The cafeteria's stopped serving water and soda and ice tea and any other drink that uses water and started bringing in cartloads of bottled water and canned sodas. Milk must be about 5x more popular now than ever before. There are bags over the silverware containers in the cafeterias so that you don't use silverware washed with this water - instead we have plastic utensils. We even have plastic cups and bowls and plates. They posted papers all over the soda machines and everything as well, just in case we forget.

I filled the sink up yesterday and today to see how it looked and honestly it looked perfectly clear, but I don't think anyone's gotten official word that the warning's been lifted.

Anyway, just thought anyone reading might find it interesting that the university has been operating without tap water for almost 48 hours now.

Peace out!

STRATFORD!!!

So this Saturday, I'm competing with the PSU Indoor Drumline at the WGI Regional in Stratford, Connecticut. I know this might not seem like a big deal to some people but I've been waiting for something like this for about three years and I am VERY EXCITED.

I don't really know what to describe about it. Back in Garnet Valley we all kind of knew that we would never score very well or succeed other than having fun and trying to do the best with the crap we were given. With PSU at Stratford this year, it's totally different - I kind of get the feeling that how well we place is actually up to ME. Like I have some control over how well we do and if I do my absolute best, maybe it'll make a bit of difference and push us to the top. We actually have a rockin' show and I think we can do well if we all try hard enough - that's a huge difference from GV, where we knew that no matter how hard we tried, our book still sucked. Not to mention, "doing well" with PSU means "Winning Independent Open and moving up to Independent World," which is very different from the definition at GV which was either "Coming in not-last in the lowest school class" or "Doing okay in the lowest school class and eventually moving out of it."

I know it sounds like it but I'm not bashing GV's line. I think all you kids are super talented, I just think we were given crappy shows year after year, sadly.

Well so anyway. We have to pack the truck this Friday sometime around 1PM. We've never packed the truck with all of our equipment this year so far, and when I talked to Jason on Sunday, he said he wasn't sure if we'd be able to do it, and no one would get UHaul to give us anything so he was sort of upset about that. But I talked to him today and he said he thinks he's got it under control.

I don't know exactly how I'm getting up there yet. I talked to Brian Cuce and he said that Dan Rutherford will be sending out carpool information tomorrow for PSU kids... I just hope they don't expect me to drive. The drive from here to Connecticut will probably be about four hours... I hope it's with some cool people, or some cool music, or at least through some pretty parts of Pennsylvania. I think it'll be good no matter who I'm with though, pretty much.

So we'll probably get to CT sometime around 10PM on Friday night. We're either going to unpack and go to sleep, or we'll just go to sleep right away. We'll be sleeping in some high school near Brunnell [the HS where we perform] on a gym floor, most likely. I don't have a sleeping bag, so I don't really know what I'm going to do. I guess I could bring towels? They're pretty compact. I don't know. Anyway, the next day we'll undoubtedly wake up really early, go to our instruments, and practice. We have our first show sometime around 1:20PM, so we'll have to pack up, go to Brunnell, play, and then we have to pack up and come back to the other high school. Then we'll practice again, pack up for our second show at Brunnell, play, then pack up again. At that point, it'll be about 9 or 9:30PM, and we'll be in CT. Instead of getting us a motel or hotel or house or school floor or rides home, the drumline is just releasing responsibility and telling us to go home. For a while I didn't know that was coming, so I thought I would just take a train home the next day or something, but that messed everything up so now mom and dad are coming to pick me up after watching the show that night.

OH MY GOD. I'M PERFORMING WITH ONE OF THE BEST LINES IN WGI INDEPENDENT OPEN. I'll probably even be on wgi.org a couple days after the show. This is so exciting. I hope we do well >_<

Peace out!

Compression Shorts

Yes. It means *EXACTLY* what you think it means.

So Penn State drumline, unlike all you losers at home in Garnet Valley, actually has their uniforms already, and would have had them in time for the first show we actually competed in if it hadn't been for the weather. We still got them before our first actual show, and due to schedule changes we got them on a rehearsal weekend too, so we could check ourselves out in them and fix what we needed to before we had to rush on the floor to perform.

I guess overall they're not too bad. The battery's uniforms are multicolored, with red, blue, and grey mostly if I remember corrected. I remember one of the snare drummers - I think we call him Bryce - held up his uniform's pants part and said "Oh my god, I'm wearing a sun dress." It did kind of look like that. The bottom piece goes all the way up and straps around your shoulders, and with those colors, it did look quite like a sundress. You have to step into them and pull them all the way up your body exactly as they are - no zippers, no buttons, nothing. Just step right in.

The tops only go down to about the bottom of your ribs, and they're the same colors for the battery. For some reason these have a zipper in the back - I think that's probably to help the battery with their harnesses but I'm not exactly sure, the zipper seems unnecessary. Anyhow, the tops have seams that pop out a little bit and sweep around your rib, basically. It kind of makes a hemicircle with the center at the far side of your fifth rib and the circle reaches out to your sternum. The girls in the pit were complaining about this because our uniforms are all black, silver, and gray, and the color and design together accentuates one side and sort of downplays the other, and they thought they looked funny. I didn't really think so but I didn't really look. I thought the pit uniforms looked good overall.

There's one thing about our uniforms though. They're very, very, very tight. Extremely formfitting and custom tailored. You can see the outline of my abs through my uniform, even though I don't even have notably defined abs. Thankfully the color and the sweeping design sort of hides my freaky chest thing, I was a little concerned about that.

However... it does not hide what we in the drumline like to call "your package." In fact, it accentuates it. It's ridiculous. Keith put on his uniform and we all swore he was smuggling a small animal in his pants [that's NOT a compliment]. Tollie was sitting against the wall and Keith came out in his uniformed glory, right near Tollie's face, and exclaimed "Hey Tollie!" and she just about died. Keith is an extreme example. Generally, for thinner people, it was less of a problem. Myself, Rod, and Zach are probably the smallest-built guys on the line and for us it wasn't much of an issue as it was for larger-built guys, but it was still an issue that we're going to have to deal with.

At one of the practices - the week we were supposed to play at CB West but instead had rehearsal - we were talking about our uniforms. Cass asked if they were going to require that we wear compression shorts, to which Brett [our director] said that yes, we would have to. For some reason I thought that wouldn't apply to me and I just though, feh, I'll be okay without them. But once I put on my uniform I knew that I would definitely have to get some. So I asked Cass where to get compression shorts, or if they were basically just UnderArmor's underwear brand, and he said yeah, just go to Wal*Mart and it'll be with the rest of the UnderArmor.

Today, reluctantly, I began my search in Wal*Mart for compression shorts. I walked in and looked around for a few minutes, but didn't find anything that looked like UnderArmor or compression on my own, but a woman working their quickly noticed I looked lost and asked if I needed help, and I said I was looking for UnderArmor. Wal*Mart doesn't actually sell UnderArmor, but a rip-off brand called Athletic Works, so I just looked at that, but they didn't really have anything that looked like (compression) shorts. I figured this store would HAVE to have it, so I kept looking around.

It was terrible. I had to look at like EVERY pack of men's underwear there was. I wanted to cry. I've never looked at so many half-naked men in my life, and it was terrible. To make it worse, did you know that they basically make male thongs now? They were on a rack with all the things that looked something like underwear for atheltic purposes, and then I saw those and I just wanted to crawl under a rock and stop living.

So I kept looking around, looking for UnderArmor, looking for anything that looked like athletic garments, looking for compression shorts, looking for someone to help me, anything. It took like twenty minutes and I didn't find anything I thought I was looking for and NO ONE came around that entire time to see if anyone in the men's section needed help. I didn't want to go to the women's section or the electronics section or anything to ask for help with this, but eventually I had to go over to the changing room to ask for help.

The woman there was very very short, with short gray hair, talking on the phone. She asked me what I needed but I didn't know if she was talking to me or the person on the phone. After I figured it out, I said, "Hey, I'm on a drumline and I wanted to know if you had compression shorts we need?" And she said, "Muscle shirts? Yeah, let me show you." To which I said, "No, no, compression shorts." I wanted to add on "...for my balls," but I didn't.

She took me to the same old woman that had shown me the Atheltic Works things before. I swear to god she did NOT understand what I was asking. I had asked her the first time for UnderArmor because I didn't want to say "Hey, I need to squeeze my private parts against my body for long periods of time and still have free hands, could you show me underwear that does this?" but I think she took that as I just wanted to find UnderArmor. So I kept trying to tell her, No, no, I'm not looking for UnderArmor, they clearly don't have it, I just need compression shorts, I just need those, do you know if you have any? And she kept showing me their stupid UnderArmor rip-off stuff. Eventually she did find shorts, but they were definitely not was I was looking for.

So I have a show this weekend in Connecticut for WGI and I am still compression shortsless.

In conclusion, on a scale of helpfulness from 0 to 10, I hate Wal*Mart.

Peace out.