Chickens and Stabbing Apples

Two days ago, a bunch of guys from the floor and I went to Rigatoni's - Monday Rigatoni's, which is the best Rigatoni's, except for Wednesday. We got an inaugural cookie. Collin, Matt, Tarik, Nick, Tim, and Mike were there.

Dinner was cool. We talked about eggs, because someone asked if there were eggs in the salad. I asked if eggs were always so perfectly shaped and perfectly white, or if we had selected for chickens who made eggs like that, and thus forced them to evolve to where that was all they made. Some kids suggested that they had always been like that because the structure is the strongest that could be made. Matt, however, suggested that we had evolved them into this. He also suggested that chickens would soon be evolved into nothing but egg factories, who would sit in a barn eating a constant stream of corn and pooping a constant stream of eggs, which has the consequence, he said, that if one ever escaped, the entire world would be covered by eggs in a matter of days. I almost died laughing. I've retold the story a few times since then, and each time I died laughing. Even as I was writing this right now, I started laughing.

In either case, after we were done eating, we played the napkin game. You throw napkins into people's empty drink cups, and if you get a napkin in and then also get one in on the very next shot, then you win. More accurately, your victim loses. And the next time you have dinner with them, they can't have a drink. And they also have to wear the same color shirt for a week, even if that's the only shirt they have of that color.

During that, Matt got up to get an apple and some forks. He explained that you throw the apple to someone else at the table and they try to catch it by stabbing it with their fork. Then you throw it to someone else. We all thought you'd take the fork out, but he clarified, "No, you leave the fork in when you throw it. You just throw it by letting go of your fork." And so we all got our forks ready and started doing it. It was easier to stab it than I thought it would be, and eventually we were lobbing around this apple-and-three-fork conglomeration. I got my fork ready in hyper-stabbing mode and went for it so hard it just went straight through the side of the apple. Someone else slammed it down into their bowl.

Then a crotchety 30-something at the table behind us got up and came to our table.

"I know you guys think it's fun to act like you're 5, I know I did when I was in college, but you break it you buy it, so I think it's time for you to leave."

There were so many things wrong with the situation that we didn't even know what to do. First, she had no authority. Second, people break things in dining halls all the time and don't pay for them. Third, we already bought the apple, so if we broke it, who cares. We were seriously just dumbfounded, and not knowing which place of idiocy to capitalize on, we just left, and arranged for what to do next time. Possibilities included inviting her to play with us; asking her what crawled up her ass and died; telling her that she didn't have any authority to kick us out; telling her that we already bought it so we didn't have to buy it; suggesting that SHE leave; waiting until she asked us for our ID cards and then just running as fast as we could since they're all old and out of shape.

Peace out.

A Conversation with Gift

She told me her real name, though I forget what it was. Thai people usually have very long first names, apparently, and instead go by nicknames. Her nickname was Gift, which is apparently a very common one in Thailand. She was sitting in the orange chair by the main door in Emerson's apartment, the one that we didn't come in through at first. She was wearing green and black on top, which khaki-ish shorts, and lip gloss and eye-liner. Emerson and I talked to her for a little bit about Semester at Sea and how she could get the same scholarship that he did - by being an East Asian Studies major or minor - while I tried to show her that it was actually cheaper than a normal semester at UVA, which was beared out by the websites of the two organizations' own numbers. She also said that she was a biology major and didn't know if she could pull of the East Asian major or minor.

She told me that she had studied in a boarding school in Connecticut before coming to UVA, just for a year, and that was her first time in the states. She said that she mostly felt used to it by now, though. She used to be alright at speaking, but then she got self-conscious and clammed up, and from talking less and less, her English got worse and worse. Her roommate was the one to help her, and said that she could always talk to her and ask her for help with speaking or writing or anything. And slowly, over time, they worked on it. Her conversation with me was perfectly flowing. She said that she missed her roommate a lot.

I asked her what she thought was the most striking difference between Thailand and America. One thing she mentioned was the parties, and that she didn't understand why people did things like that. I forget what aspect of it she didn't like, but it was one of the same things that I've never liked - dark, loud, drunk, crowded... something along those lines.

And she said that friends were different.

"So tomorrow, you will wake up and maybe you won't think about me, but when you do think about me, you will say I'm your friend, right?"

"Right."

"It's not like that in Thailand. When you say friend, you mean someone very, very close to you. Someone who you think about every day."

Interesting.

"So that's why I don't just hang out with American people and I hang out with Thai people too, because they understand what friends are to me."

Peace out.