Student Life Archives (2001-2008) » Marisa Wegrzyn

Chainsaw Calligraphy

Marisa Wegrzyn — Tue, 22 Apr 2003 12:00:00 +0000

Bernell Dorrough

First, I have a practical question regarding graduation. You know how at the end of the ceremony, students throw their mortarboards up in the air? Is there someone I should be watching who instigates this, or will I just “know”? Is it supposed to be a natural reflex? And if we are throwing our mortarboards, can we be coordinated about it? Like, can we all try to throw them on the roof of Cupples? I know it’s far away, but I’m sure people in the first two or three rows could nail it.

I’ve taken an informal poll of adults I respect regarding what I should do after graduation, and here are the results: go to graduate school; don’t go to graduate school; work for a couple years and then go to graduate school; get a real job; travel; grow marijuana; find employment at a reputable strip joint in Vegas. And here is an actual thought I had a couple weeks ago: I could go to prison for a year or two. I’m thinking some medium security facility that would let me keep my laptop so I can write and play Solitaire-which really isn’t much different from my life now. And do you remember how ripped Linda Hamilton got in “Terminator 2″ after her incarceration? I could finally have a reason to start exercising!

This school helps you develop a certain amount of practical life-tools, but unfortunately, it doesn’t hand you a map towards a fulfilled life. Do you know what this school hands you? A diploma written completely in Latin. I do not read Latin. For all I know, my diploma will read, “Marisa Wegrzyn is a fart face.”

It’s not that I fear finding employment in today’s economy or that I feel my degrees in English and Theatre have prepared me for a lucrative career in bartending. I am about to enter this limbo-land that consists of equal parts giddy optimism and existential blues. Lately I’ve been weighing my post graduation options in terms of what will make me the least miserable. Is living in squalor as a starving artist an admirable thing or is living in squalor simply a life picking mouse shit out of my generic Fruit Loops? On the other hand, what are the ups and downs of holding a well-paying job where I watch the clock, pinch every minute out of my lunch break, and live for weekends?

There certainly are less depressing options, but even the fun ‘n’ fancy free options involve some form of misery. I’m not saying it’s like a Stephen King “Misery” where a psycho bashes my legs with a sledgehammer. I think we’d all be more fortunate if misery was always that blatant-”Clearly I am miserable because Kathy Bates broke all the bones in my lower legs”-but misery can be sneaky and subtle, and you’ll have to stick up for yourself if one day, after a little sleuthing in the dark corners of your soul, you realize that you’re not doing what you want to be doing with your life.

But I believe in happy mediums and there are days, quite a few, that it seems anything is possible; like it’s Saturday morning and I’m six years old. I may meet someone tomorrow who whisks me across the globe; I may get tremendously lucky or tremendously unlucky; or fall in love; or fall out of love; or get hit by a taxi; or get a job as a stripper and give a lap dance to a genie who grants me three wishes. Anything could happen. Especially that genie thing.

I know I spend a lot of time crapping on WU, but I only do it because I like this stupid place and I’ve enjoyed writing this stupid column for the past two years. I spend more time on these columns than I spend on legitimate school work. I’m not sure if the craftsmanship shows, but not every writer has the skills to reference Linda Hamilton and Kathy Bates in a single column.

So there’s another fortune cookie message: Work isn’t work if you enjoy the hell out of it. I know I’ll never have enough money to fulfill my dream of naming the psychology building Monkeybutt Hall; but I hope I leave here having etched some small mark on this campus, because WU has left a big greasy skid mark on me. Congratulations to the class of 2003, thank you to my loyal readers, and to the friends and faculty who have made the past four years worthwhile, I miss you already.

And so goodbye…

Chainsaw Calligraphy

Marisa Wegrzyn — Tue, 15 Apr 2003 12:00:00 +0000

Bernell Dorrough

This summer, Eliot Hall-the South 40′s tower of power-will at long last be smashed to skitter; Liggett Hall (along with Koenig) is the next dorm slated for the wrecking ball in subsequent years. There is nostalgia attached to these two buildings, my homes for half of my college career: the odor of bathrooms that would lead one to believe that Liggett 2 was home to a circus freak who took elephantine dumps; the widespread power outages that occurred each time Andrew used his microwave; hallway rides in a boosted Schnucks shopping cart; the Pre-Frosh who got so drunk on his weekend visit that he mistook a beanbag chair for a urinal; and if I added up all the time I puzzled through the Hexagon City level of Snood and exploded people to bloody bits playing Quake 3 on my computer, those hours would inexplicably be a larger sum than the number of hours I’ve been on this planet since 1981.

As for Eliot, I have no love for the building, its seasonal ladybug infestations, or the building’s heating system where I could either choose to 1) freeze; 2) turn my single into an Easy Bake Oven and cook brownies in my window box while I asphyxiated; or 3) leave my heat on over winter break and return to find the heat had melted the adhesive that held my posters to the wall. And half-floors? Fishbowls? Elevators filled with stagnant air smelling of Bear’s Den burps? I shed no tears for Eliot Hall. Very few people remember Eliot’s twin, Shepley Hall (d. summer 1998); I remember it only because I was taking a campus tour the day the wrecking ball smacked it, the highlight of any campus tour in the history of campus tours; in fact, it beat out the tour I took at University of Richmond where two dogs started having sex while the guide was talking about Greek Life-I kid you not.

By the time I was living in Eliot my sophomore year, I was ready to not be living in a dorm. One freshman experience was enough, thank you. But life in a dormitory during freshman year is an integral part of the college experience. It’s the place where you make friends during that first month when everybody wants to make friends. It’s where going to bed before midnight is considered early. And if you want to smoke pot for the first time, it’s where you’ll meet the people who will help you realize your dream, introduce you to Dark Side of the Moon, and turn you on to the psychedelic visualization option of your Windows Media Player; this may or may not correlate with the first time you eat an entire jar of peanut butter with your fingers.

Dorm life for me was a huge learning experience when I met people who embodied all that is wrong with the world. When boys played basketball in the hallway at 3 AM, I learned to suppress my urge to flog them with a desk lamp and, instead, engage in the diplomacy of idle threats. And here’s a question: why is it that the one guy on the floor who listens to music at a level louder than a Boeing engine always listens to crap? Is there a scientific correlation between inconsiderate assholes and poor taste in music?

I’m seriously all for the construction of suite-style student housing with paper-thin walls and retina-busting fluorescent lighting, but there is something to be said for the design of the old-school dorms like Liggett, Koenig, Ruby, Beau, Lee, Umrath, and-okay, fine, twist my arm-Eliot. The hallways of these buildings are the common rooms, the social veins, the gathering fields. It’s where you have a philosophical argument about Fruit Roll-Ups and ask important questions like: was the Care Bears battle cry “Care Bears CARE!” or “Care Bears STARE!”? This is the stuff of freshman year.

It’s all nostalgia now. When I was living in the dorms, I won’t say I enjoyed it: the lack of privacy, the lack of quiet; shower shoes, filthy shower floors. Dorm life is dirty. I can only compare it to how I always feel after a day of riding roller coasters with the white trash at Six Flags. I spent a lot of time at the library to stay away from Liggett, and it’s no coincidence that I got my best grades during my freshman year. I don’t have an adequate thesis to encapsulate my South 40 experience other than it was a love/hate, yin/yang, Indiana Jones/Marion Ravenwood kinda thing.

But Liggett Hall will be no more in a few years; I probably won’t be in St. Louis to bid it an appropriate adieu, but I may still be loitering around town to see Eliot go bye-bye. When the wrecking ball putters onto the 40 this summer, I invite you to join me on the IM baseball field to watch Eliot bite the big one. I’ll bring a blanket, a case of Natty Light, and some sparklers. We’ll make a day of it. And if a baseball game is going on, bring a helmet because we’ll be camped out in left field, lest you enjoy being concussed by a triple.

My New Hobby

Marisa Wegrzyn — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 12:00:00 +0000

Thanks to Ebay, I now own a fiddle. I outbid this guy in one dollar increments. To do that, you literally have to sit in front of your computer as the clock ticks down the final seconds of the online auction; it comes down to whoever gets that final bid before the time is up, and it requires more strategy than bombing Iraq. In the last nine seconds of the auction, I won my fiddle! A fiddle is the offspring of a classical violin that shtupped its cousin after a night of drinking moonshine. I am determined to learn how to play it, but given my track record with musical instruments, this may be a bumpy road of self-loathing.
During elementary school, my parents made me take piano lessons with a man named Bernard, and Bernard would fall asleep at least five times during the 45 minute session. Since he was an old man, I sometimes thought he was dead and that my rendition of “Give My Regards to Broadway” had killed him. He usually woke up within 20 seconds after I hit the last note, but one time I sat there for a good five minutes. If my sister had her lesson first, I would watch “Hey Dude” on Nickelodeon and wonder if sticking a pencil far enough up my nose would be a good reason to cancel my lesson. My parents finally let me quit after I had a breakdown in the middle of one of my lessons. The piano frustrated me to tears. I practiced and always knew, deep down, that I would suck. I was the dourest ten year old on the block.
The next instrument I quit was the guitar. I learned the basics if you consider the basics to be the finger picking to “Dust in the Wind” and the chord progression for The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame.” I took lessons with a guy who worshipped Jimmy Page and was visibly disappointed when I told him I wanted to learn Jimmy Buffett songs. I regret quitting the guitar; if I had stuck with it, I would be really, really good right now. There’s this parallel universe I peek into when I space out during class: I’m a rock star and I make outrageous demands like I must have 200 bottles of lemon-lime Gatorade delivered to my dressing room by monkeys wearing top hats, and then at the end of my concert, I smash my guitar into one of the mammoth speakers.
I tried learning the harmonica once. It was one of those Klutz instructional books that actually came with a harmonica, and I taught myself. I’m not a very good teacher. My teacher self says, “You need not practice” and I’m like, “You rule, Teach, I’m gonna go watch TV.” Also, harmonicas turn into a nasty Petrie dish when they get crapped up with dry spit and lip goobers. I could’ve wiped it off, but my harmonica teacher didn’t tell me to because she was a dumbass.
Now I own a fiddle. I’ll tell you why. A few months back, someone asked me what my hobbies were, and I realized that I have no hobbies. I go to class, I write papers; sometimes I even do the reading that was required to write the paper. But school is not a hobby. Reading and writing can be hobbies, but they are lame things to call hobbies. I mean, of course they are hobbies because I do read and write for pleasure, but if someone asks me what my hobbies are then saying “I read and write” sounds lame compared to “I skydive” or “I build dollhouses” or “I collect farts in jars.”
So now “I fiddle.” Starting something new causes gut-chewing anxiety; I’m a complete dope the first few weeks doing that new thing. It’s a lot like starting a new job. During my first week working at Starbucks, I was so good at scalding my hands with coffee, you would’ve thought it was a new beverage size: Tall, Grande, or Marisa’s Hands. I’m already way ahead of my first week at Starbucks because I have not yet burned myself on the fiddle; although, I have this fear that one of the strings is going snap into my eyeball and eyeball jelly will projectile goosh and I’ll have to wear an eye patch for the rest of my life.
Eye patch or no eye patch, I will persevere on the fiddle. I will, I wlll, I will. I will not be a pansy-ass quitter. If I want something badly enough, I will have it. I will get the guy. I will play football for Notre Dame. I will learn “Turkey in the Straw.” At the very least, I promise not to quit before my first lesson on Wednesday.

No related posts.

The Ultimate Driving Test

Marisa Wegrzyn — Tue, 18 Mar 2003 12:00:00 +0000

I recently watched a show on The Learning Channel called “The Ultimate Driving Test,” a program that quizzed my knowledge about what I should do if my car got caught in the middle of a police shoot-out or dangled from a bridge by one wheel. For example, did you know that if a road raged driver gets out of his car and jumps on the hood of your car, you are NOT supposed to hit the gas pedal and fling him off? The correct answer is to wait patiently until he calms down and leaves. Booooring! Wegzfucius says, “hit the gas.”
After all these extreme scenarios, I determined I probably would have died many deaths, especially since my answer to most life-threatening situations was “Turn up the radio.” Here is what I do know about driving an automobile: if you push the go-pedal, the car moves; if you push the other pedal, the car stops; if you hit a pedestrian, you get 100 points. Ha, ha, just kidding. Pedestrians are only worth 50 points.
Other things I know: there comes a time (like when the engine does not start) when the car needs to be filled with a combustible liquid called gasoline; every three months the engine needs to be lubricated by the men at Jiffy-Lube, which is not nearly as sexy as it sounds; also, a car’s tires and breaks should be in proper working order, especially during moments of adverse weather conditions. During one snowy day last month, I enjoyed relinquishing control of my life to icy physics as my car explored the possibility of driving sideways down Skinker.
In this uncertain time as George W. Bush straddles a missile in the Oval Office and spanks it with his cowboy hat and as patriotic restaurants across the country change their menus from French fries to Freedom fries (and if you know a dog breeder who is selling Freedom poodles, let me know), the pulse of America’s political sentiments can be felt on its bumper stickers. Will you slap an American flag on the bumper of your car, or how about a sticker admonishing an attack on Iraq? I recently slapped a bumper sticker on my car to express my political feelings. The sticker says “Soylent Green Is People!” because, frankly, I do not support government-sanctioned cannibalism. And I saw a great bumper sticker the other day. It said, “Gay Whales For Jesus.”
I spent my first two years at Wash U car-less, bumper sticker-less, and filled with rage; I wasn’t filled with rage because I was car-less, I was filled with rage because I was living in Liggett and Eliot Halls. St. Louis can be unforgiving for its automobile impaired citizens. Not that downtown “ghost town” St. Louis needs a subway-once I was downtown and I saw a tumbleweed trying to flag down a taxi to get outta town. Har de har har.
In other woes, transport by the Wash U shuttles can be tricky, especially when you’re trying to run after the Medical School shuttle on Waterman Blvd. When it speeds off, it is so difficult to look hip standing in the middle of the street, waving your arms above your head screaming expletives; so if a Wash U shuttle strands you looking foolish in the middle of the street, pretend that you’re praying to God or Allah or Gay Whales for Jesus or George W. Bush dropping from the sky on his Big Boom Buddy.
I am lucky to own and drive a car and pollute the air and consume fossil fuels and contribute to burning tire piles. And thanks to “The Ultimate Driving Test,” I know that the answer to surviving an explosion in a tunnel is not to “Turn up the radio” -unless, of course, it’s a really really good song; if Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut” is on the dial when that tanker explodes, I’ll be charred dog meat, a Freedom-fried Freedom poodle.

The Lost Vagina Monologue

Marisa Wegrzyn — Tue, 18 Feb 2003 12:00:00 +0000

I saw ‘The Vagina Monologues’ last week as part of Washington University’s V-Day events-I had seen the show before during my freshman year, but I was glad to reacquaint myself with it so I could reflect on how much I had changed over the past three years. Or hadn’t changed. Probably the biggest change is that I can now write about my vagina.
If my vagina could talk, what would it say? It would say, “invest in real estate in suburban Ontario.” As far as I know, my vagina has never been to Canada. Maybe it went without me. I probably should’ve noticed. I don’t know why I feel compelled to take real estate advice from between my legs; and I didn’t know what to tell my real estate agent when he asked me where I got this lead, but I gave him my vagina’s e-mail address-in retrospect, it was a mistake to get my vagina its own Yahoo account because it likes to forward jokes about nuns.
Again, if my vagina could talk, what would it say? It would say, “purchase duct tape and plastic sheeting.” Apparently my vagina is Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. But since my vagina brought it up, let’s discuss. Two weeks ago, the government suggested that we prepare for an unlikely but possible terrorist attack in the form of chemical or biological weapons, and that we should all run to the hardware store and purchase duct tape and plastic sheeting to create a “safe room” in our homes. So we are all now to create a “safe room” where nothing gets in (oh, now I see why my vagina brought this up. Very funny, vagina).
Now I’ve read up a little bit on biological weapons, and if you’d like to scare yourself witless, I recommend Richard Preston’s bio-terror book “Demon in the Freezer.” It’s a nice gesture the government is taking to address the threat, and I’m sure hardware stores appreciate the business; but when my vagina was five years old, we went to a day camp where one of our activities was to paint a brick wall with water. We had roller brushes, a pan of water, and our counselors would cool themselves in the shade while the children darkened the brick with water, and since the brick’s color changed, we thought it was like paint. We thought it was really doing something. Nobody told us about evaporation.
I know duct tape can do a lot. I used to own a book called “Ductagami” and it had step by step instructions about how to make various things out of duct tape: wallets, hats, briefcases. But a safe room? You’re going to have to leave it eventually and I imagine it would be quite difficult to escape a biological agent if you’re among an urban population-maybe this is why my vagina recommended Canada. Anyway, my homeland security recommendation is this: If you insist on making a safe room, replace the plastic sheeting with bubble wrap. That way, you can spend your day popping it while you watch us bleeding-eyed, fiddling grasshoppers, the ones who didn’t heed Tom Ridge’s advice, curse our duct tape wallets, wishing we had used it to build a safe room instead.
I can’t believe a column about my vagina took you on a tour of my fatalist psyche. It’s frightening to think the seat of my dark, dark soul is located in my personal Antipodes. Maybe I should lighten the mood with the observation that if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney don’t get reelected in 2004 we can no longer make Dick and Bush jokes.
By the way, my vagina just e-mailed to say if you want another fictional take on some of the above, my play “Psalms of a Questionable Nature” opens tonight in the studio theatre in Mallinckrodt and runs through Sunday, tickets available right freakin’ now at the Edison Theatre box office. The play has been called “‘Fight Club’ meets the un-sucky parts of ‘The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.’” You sit there and think about that, and when you’re done thinking, buy a ticket and see a play.

Return of the Haiku

Marisa Wegrzyn — Tue, 04 Feb 2003 12:00:00 +0000

According to my Gargoyles calendar, it is Waitangi Day in New Zealand. What better way to celebrate political strife in the homeland of Anna Paquin than with a smattering of inappropriate poetry. So back by popular demand, here is another skinny-dip into my ice-cold pond of Haiku poetry. The Japanese art of Haiku poetry works on the principle that if one’s mind and heart is correctly aligned, he or she will experience a simple, Haiku moment structured in three lines of 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables. I don’t exactly know what a simple Haiku moment is, but I think it involves a sort of rupturing of internal organs. Well, don’t worry, I’m not good at writing these, so I’ll save you a trip to the emergency room.

Valentine’s Day
Little heart candies
With cute words: “I love you” or
“Sorry ’bout the clap”

Withdrawing From A Course
That “W” on
Your grades doesn’t mean “Withdraw”
It means “Wonderful!”

Snooze Button
Hit snooze: nine minutes
Nine minutes is not enough
Clock in microwave

Microwave Fun
Clock in microwave
Look at all those pretty sparks!
Uhhhh… call 911

Laundry
Pile of dirty clothes
Shirts on the bottom will be
Cleaned by compression

Sneezing
I like a good sneeze
Although when I sneeze I look
Like the biggest freak

Bad Day
Don’t call me a bitch,
Just ’cause I got PMS
Doesn’t mean you’re not an asshole,
And don’t tell me I’m breaking
the sacred rules of Haiku,
I can do whatever the hell I want,
It’s my column

Bad Night
You learn the hard way:
Drunk on Bailey’s Irish Cream
Makes interesting puke

Shameless Self Promotion*
I am not above
Writing a perfect Haiku
For personal gain

* (For those Chainsaw Calligraphy readers who are theatrically inclined, I wrote a play called Psalms of a Questionable Nature that will be presented by the Performing Arts Department February 20-23 in the Studio Theatre in Mallinckrodt. The premise of the play is two estranged step-sisters discover that their deceased parents were manufacturing agents for biological weaponry in their basement. Buy your tickets now at the Edison Theatre box office before the bloody thing sells out. Back to the regularly scheduled Haiku…)

A Traditional Haiku Poem
Drop of rain on rock
Silent water dripping down
Tree… oh, fuck this shit

Plastics

Marisa Wegrzyn — Fri, 06 Dec 2002 12:00:00 +0000

While at home for Thanksgiving break, I had this delusion that I would finish every neglected scrap of homework that had piled up over the semester, and this flurry of productivity would occur just as soon as I finished playing The Sims computer game. But one never finishes playing The Sims, especially if one is a senior looking for answers.
Registering for my last semester of classes, meeting with advisors, and now visiting home and facing the first serious wave of “so what are you doing after graduation?” from well-meaning family and friends, I realize that I should have willed myself to be better at math so I could graduate from the Engineering and Architecture Schools with skills enough to design the world’s first edible skyscraper. “So what ARE you doing after graduation?” they ask. Why, thanks for asking! After I remove this ice-pick of inquiry you jammed into my eyeball, I’m going to graduate in May, fall asleep in a gutter, and if I’m lucky, sewer rats will gnaw my fingernails off.
I continue getting weekly e-mails from the Career Center: Lunch with a Pro! Interview Skills! World Class Resumes! I get pleasant invitations from the Career Center to call and set up an appointment with a Career Counselor. If I delete mail from the Career Center, I can convince myself that the Career Center no longer exists and that Wash U has provided no help for my post-college life. That way, I can happily slip into an unoccupied gutter for my rodent manicure. But I’m not going to play the blame game. I am going to play The Sims, and over my shoulder Mom will casually bring up the Career Center and you really should go visit the Career Center and did you know they have alumni resources at the Career Center?
I hate playing The Sims, but it’s more addictive than Crystal Meth. I dedicated an entire column last year to my fascination with The Sims, a computer game where you control the daily lives of simulated people. I found out the hard way that, yes, sometimes Sims will pee on the floor. If a simulated adult with a simulated house, a simulated job, and a simulated life under my care PEES ON THE FLOOR, does this reflect poorly on my ability to function in the real world? The brainwashing aspect of this game is that I start thinking of my own life in terms of all those little “need meters” at the bottom of the screen. I made a grilled cheese sandwich and thought that this will certainly add points to my hunger meter. What? I have no hunger meter! But I better get to a toilet before my bladder meter hits critical and I have an accident.
“You know, Marisa,” my mom said, “you can take that game back to St Louis with you if you just want to fail your classes and hold off on graduation.” She was joking of course, but-wait, you were joking, weren’t you? Because if you weren’t, that option doesn’t sound all that bad. On the other hand, I don’t want to stay in school forever and mutate into that grazing species of “Perpetual Wash U Student,” like those students today who know that Prince Hall used to be a boys dormitory and not because they learned it on a campus tour. (SEE ALSO: Graduate Student)
As for my life after college, it’s good to know what I don’t want. I know for certain I don’t want to work in customer service. After unrewarding jobs in retail, I’ve come to the conclusion that I hate people who want to buy things. I’ve never devoted a column to my experience working at Bed, Bath and Beyond, but here it is in one sentence: I DON’T KNOW THE GODDAMN THREAD COUNT OF THOSE SHEETS, NOW PISS OFF BEFORE YOU UNFOLD THAT TOWEL I JUST FOLDED!
I’m not breaking new ground writing about post-college anxiety. The title of this column is an oblique reference to The Graduate, a movie about life after college and having sex with Anne Bancroft. Well, I have no advice regarding the latter or, for that matter, the former. The only comfort I have to offer is what I’ve learned from my three years experience of acting in Freshman Orientation’s Choices 101: everybody is going through the same thing you are. I also learned that if you get caught plagiarizing a term paper about Geofluvialmorphology, you are going to get a hearty SMACKO! from the Academic Integrity committee. Choices 101, you were there when I needed you most.
During my freshman year, I read a “Cadenza” column about life after Wash U, and I remember thinking, “silly senior, you’re such a whiny little baby.” Woe is me. I need to stop flushing my pity potty and get my butt to the Career Center because the Career Center will obviously solve all my problems and make me a better person and, oh my gosh, the Career Center is handing out Soma! But seriously, I need to go to the Career Center. And I will. Just as soon as I finish playing The Sims.

Pain Is Funny (Especially When It Isn’t Mine)

Marisa Wegrzyn — Tue, 12 Nov 2002 12:00:00 +0000

I just have to comment on the hard-hitting, brain-hemorrhaging news reported by the November 8th issue of Student Life: repeatedly heading a soccer ball can cause permanent “deformations” in brain matter. Says Dr. Bayly, a member of this research team, “There’s certainly been some evidence presented that some professional soccer players have some cognitive deficits.” Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent to come to the conclusion that repeatedly getting hit in the head is not a healthy for your brain. Says the article, “Until now, scientists had never studied the specific forces of a soccer ball hitting a human head.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m relieved that we’re funding these projects instead of using this money to provide further funding for silly things like cancer research. You’ll be happy to know that the Washington University School of Medicine will be starting a million-dollar study next week to determine if sawing the feet off of the WU track-and-field team and having them run on bloody stumps hinders their performance.
Mostly, I was amused by this soccer ball article because hitting a soccer ball with your head really hurts. I know it looks cool to score a goal with your face-brain damage is a total turn-on according to the latest issue of Cosmo. Granted, I’m not a soccer player, so I’m not entirely aware of the benefits of using your head to play the game. I just know that when I attempted to head a soccer ball during my high school gym class, I sat out the rest of the game. Which brings me to the thesis statement of this week’s column: pain is funny.
How many times have you injured yourself and have had people laugh you? Usually, the people laughing are your good friends and family who are concerned for your health and well-being. They laugh because they care or at least that’s what they tell you. Here are my three favorite personal injuries. The first two involve blunt head trauma due to running into stationary objects that magically appeared out of nowhere. The third involves a misunderstanding with an office supply.
First, I smacked the shit out of my skull running into a pole at an Embassy Suites hotel in San Diego; my sisters thought this was very funny. Second, I smacked the shit out of my face running into a pole outside of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disney World. The ride operator saw it happen and asked me if I was all right. She was suppressing a chuckle because laughter is not allowed in the happiest place on earth. Third, I was attempting to pry open a stapler in order to staple a flyer to a bulletin board, and I shot a staple directly into my index finger. Ha ha ha!
Honestly, I don’t blame anybody for laughing at certain injuries. It’s difficult to run into a glass sliding door with any dignity. There is just no way to save yourself from that embarrassment in the same way you can save yourself from the embarrassment of tripping over nothing and looking back to make sure you didn’t actually trip over something. I’m the chief offender of laughing at pain. I absolutely love America’s Funniest Home Videos because I figure that if someone had the good humor to send in the video tape, most likely grandpa didn’t die when he flipped his bicycle into the shrubbery. I especially love the videos involving trampolines and five year olds attempting to whack piÂ¤atas with Louisville Sluggers.
As of this week, Jackass: The Movie has earned over 53 million dollars, so I know I’m not the only one who enjoys the occasional non-fatal injury. Maybe it’s because I will never know the pain of getting kicked in the nads-call me curious. My guy friends have informed me that it hurts as bad as it looks in the movies. Sure, that may hurt, but I think women get to trump that card with the child-birth royal flush.
And with all my mirth about injury, I do whatever I can to avoid pain and the potential for “repeated low-level neurotrauma.” So if someone from the Med School pitches a soccer ball at my head over this, please don’t laugh at me. Just get a pencil and shove that dribbling piece of temporal lobe back into my ear.

The Art of Cooking Ramen

Marisa Wegrzyn — Tue, 29 Oct 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Here is the average college student’s well-rounded diet: microwavable frozen foods, canned foods, pizza, beer, and boilable starches which include but are not exclusive to: spaghetti, Rice-A-Roni, and Ramen Noodles. There are sub-categories which include toastable foods like Eggo Waffles, Pop Tarts, and Bagel Bites. There is also what I like to call the “lazy” category of foods. For example, the “lazy grilled cheese” is toasting a piece of bread and then eating it with a slice of cold American cheese. The “lazy Eggo waffle” is when I don’t want to dirty a plate so I painstakingly fill all the waffle squares with syrup and eat it with my hands. My favorite is the “lazy chicken parmesan” which is when I microwave a bunch of vegetarian chicken nuggets and toss them in a pot of spaghetti with Ragu. And, finally, there’s the occasional “lazy breakfast” catered by Anheiser-Busch.
These dietary standards are primarily applicable to students living off-campus without a meal-plan, and are further applicable to someone like me who once scorched her hair while heating soup on the stove. That was back when I had long hair. Did you know that burnt human hair smells oddly like burnt yak hair? No? Obviously you haven’t set enough yaks on fire. Since my hair is short now, to set it on fire would require me to fall asleep on the burner.just wait until finals week. Just you wait.
Ramen Noodles have been my warm, economical friend for quite some time, and I have reason to believe that it is one of the world’s most perfect processed foods. Ramen Noodles are packaged in geometrically sound Noodle Bricks. Their shape is second only to the arch in architectural design and aesthetic. In an emergency, you could build some sort of crude shelter out of these bricks, and when it rains and then gets really hot, you could eat your shelter. Second, Ramen is frightfully inexpensive. Schnucks will occasionally sell packages of Ramen at 5 for one dollar. That is twenty cents for one package. Washington University tuition is $26,900 per year; if you spent a year’s tuition on Ramen, you could buy 134,500 packages of Ramen. This would be enough Ramen to build the Versailles of Ramen Noodles. Since you are sleeping through Orgo anyway, why not drop-out of school and aspire to architectural greatness? Third, Ramen is a great source of vegetables if you consider those little green flecks in the broth powder vegetables. Fourth, the excessive sodium content in that astronaut package of broth powder is the food industry’s way of saying that you should be drinking more water anyway.
For such a simple food, there are quite a few different ways to prepare Ramen. Do you break the brick into quarters? In half? Do you boil the brick whole against all rational judgment? If you are in a dorm, I understand that you’re basically getting by on “hot pot Ramen,” which is essentially boiling water and dumping it in a bowl with the Ramen noodles and letting it sit. Even though we have a perfectly functional stove at our apartment, this is the way my roommate Laura still prepares her Ramen, but I don’t tell her outright that she is preparing her Ramen incorrectly. I also don’t tell her when I knock her toothbrush into the toilet.
Chainsaw Calligraphy recommends that you boil the living hell out of a brick of Ramen Noodles broken into four pieces. Boil it until it screams. I sometimes leave my Ramen boiling on the stove for a quality fifteen minutes. At some point during the cooking process, a portal to another dimension will open and out will come a voice who will warn you that you are cooking your Ramen for too long. Ignore this portal, no matter how exciting it looks, and continue boiling. This excessive cooking time insures maximum water intake of the noodles, and in a symbiotic return, the noodles enhance the future broth-water with starchy goodness. Once this has been completed, add the atomic broth powder, stir, and enjoy.
Cooking Ramen Noodles properly is quite an art and requires some mad skills. Look for my new series on Food Network called “The Naked Ramen Chef.” I believe I have enough material to make it to the first commercial break.

Trick-or-Treat, Dammit!

Marisa Wegrzyn — Tue, 22 Oct 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Halloween is a scary time of year, especially this year out in the greater Washington D.C. area. My older sister lives in Arlington, VA and works in D.C., so we’re a little concerned for her safety. I was talking to my mother on the phone and she was saying how frightening it all was, the prospect of getting shot completely out of the blue. The questions of “who’s next?” and “how do you even begin to protect yourself without interrupting your daily routine?”were raised. In my effort to ease my mother’s worries, I said, “Well, it’s better than drowning or burning to death.” That statement has been added to my big list titled “things that will never, ever cheer up anyone, especially my mother.”
So now Halloween is coming up, and until there’s confirmation that the sniper has been apprehended, I’ll bet that there will be nary a ghost or ghoul panhandling for sugar in the D.C. area. This just bums me out. I mean, there are other things that bum me out too, like poverty and puppy mills, but not being able to trick-or-treat really bums me out. Going from door to door and threatening strangers into giving you candy is every child’s God-given right.
Halloween has always been a monumental holiday in my life. Maybe it’s the ritualistic carving of pumpkins. What a weird tradition that is because we stick fire in these things, too. Why don’t we stick candles in more things, and not just on Halloween? Like candles in running shoes on Secretaries’ Day? Or candles in toasters on Thursdays? I wish I could claim to be the master pumpkin carver, but that honor goes to my younger sister Carly who has perfected the art of “the vomiting pumpkin;” instead of discarding the pumpkin’s gooey entrails, she pulls them out of the pumpkin’s mouth and leaves them dangling. The best was the year she had pumpkins vomiting on other pumpkins who then vomited because they were being vomited on. That was awesome.
Or maybe I like Halloween because of the costumes. Really, it’s the one day out of the year when it’s socially acceptable to be a complete freak. Here’s a quick “best of” list of my past costumes if you’re looking for ideas this year: Albert Einstein, Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, a gorilla in a Hawaiian shirt, a diabolical surgeon carrying a live severed hand (the coolest illusion ever) , a Mousekateer, Batgirl, and then last Halloween, I dressed up as the most frightening thing of all: a B-School Student. Bauhaus is a wonderful outlet for the crazy and bizarre, but I wish more people here wore their costumes to class on Halloween. Last year, one of the people working at the library wore a full clown getup. I would go to the library more if this were a daily occurrence.
Now I was a hard core trick-or-treater in my day. I wouldn’t stop filling my pillowcase until the weight of the bag caused my arm to dislocate at the shoulder. Unfortunately, people in my neighborhood liked to give out Tootsie Rolls. I know there are Tootsie fans out there, but those things formed like sediment on the bottom of my bag. I knew Halloween was truly over when I passed through the strata of Snickers and reached the lower mantle of Tootsie. And of course, I can’t forget the old ladies who would wrap up small stacks of pennies and distribute these instead of candy. Not that I didn’t appreciate the pennies. They tasted better than the Tootsie Rolls.
Unfortunately, I’m going out of town this Halloween, so I’m not sure what I’ll do. Since I’m going to the airport, this automatically rules out certain costumes. That Osama Bin Laden costume, for example. I was thinking of going very, very subtle and purchasing online a pair of vampire fangs-you know, the ones all the cool pagans are wearing. So I’d wear these fangs and only occasionally smile at people. Muahaha!
Have yourself some safe, scary fun this Halloween. Get buzzed on Milky Ways. Watch George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. And never underestimate the power of a kids costume purchased at Target. You know that Batgirl costume I wore sophomore year? Only $9.99. Oh, sure, it was a little tight and totally split down the back, but for $9.99, I’ve never looked better.

Student Life Archives (2001-2008) » Marisa Wegrzyn

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