Parades and Dorm Warfare

I marched in the veteran's day parade in Hartford yesterday with the UConn marching band. It was alright, I've never been the biggest fan of parades ever since this past summer that I spent with the Hurricanes. In Hurcs this past July 4th weekend, we were headed down to Manassas, VA, for a drum corps competition. I got up around 4 in the morning, caught the bus around 5:30, and then we were on our way. On the way down, we did three parades in 90+ degree heat, and we rolled into the competition site around 6:30. On a typical competition day you'll normally have about 7 hours of rehearsal, from about 10 - 5. Clearly we didn't have it on this day. We were all exhausted as we ran off the bus and set up on the field for 45 minutes of last-second preparation. We set up the opening set on the practice field and then the sprinklers went off. We needed the practice, and we typically take showers before the show anyway, so we rehearsed in the sprinklers! That's when I started to dislike parades.
But there is still one thing that I enjoy about doing parades. Marching over bridges. It's sounds dumb, but I feel like a bad ass motherfucker (BAMF) everytime I march over one. It's like we've conquered the town, and we're marching in, just to show everyone who is boss. I can see why people invade countries, it's thrilling to conquer them! So I'm just throwing this out there now... I want to invade countries when I'm older. I'm thinking of dropping this accounting major gig, and picking up an individualized major, that I like to call, Territorial Reconciliation. It'll go nicely with my "bounty hunting" minor too. This statement pretty much ends any chances of myself being elected to public office, because this blog will be relentlessly waved in my face at the most inconvienent of times to show the voters that I am "off my rocker", but what can you do? I'll tell ya what I can do, take it by force baby! Viva la revolution.

And while we're on the topic of invasion/warfare, I'd like to talk about this weekend a little bit. This weekend was pretty much a wash as far as productive things are concerned, but it contained a lot of value in other areas.

It was Saturday evening, I was exhausted, and pretty much ready to fall asleep aronud 9:30. The earlier portion of the day was spent at the UConn-West Virginia football game, where we got annihilated for our first loss at home since my freshman year. Losses in any of our UConn sports usually tire me out quite a bit for some reason. Anyway, it was also around 9:30 when my roommate came into the room holding our Frankenstein bucket that had previously been loaded with candy. It wasn't so loaded anymore, only containing about 20 small boxes of Nerds. They aren't bad candy, but they're certainly nothing to write home about. So Steve walks in with the container... and for some reason starts throwing the nerds in the air and trying to catch them in the bucket again. He misses a few and they crash to the floor. It was at that time I said.

"You WON'T pick those up and throw them at Rory"

I picked up a container and underhand tossed it in Rory's direction, to little effect, I was off by about a furlong, and I thought it was over. But apparently, Steve took my "you won't" personally, as an orange box of nerds came rocketing by my head at mach speed, and explodes against the wall like a frag greande behind Rory in a glorious blaze of orange nerd glory. My thought process went something like this. "WOW... Did not see that coming... game over, that's going to take forever to clean..." Thought process ended right there as the box that I threw earlier came flying back towards us and exploded against the wall closest to me.

Primal instinct kicked in, I dove into the closet and my roommate retreated into the bathroom. Teams were formed, it was Steve and I, versus Rory and Sparzo, to the death. The Adrenaline was coarsing threw my veins as I army crawled towards the bucket filled with the remaining nerves. We made our best impersonations of Jonathon Papelbon by using our laser-rocket arms and gassing containers of nerds like 98-mph fastballs at each other. The sounds of nerds raining down from the exploding containers was constant. Only glancing blows were scored for the first few volleys of the war, but hten I grabbed a container, jumped out from the closet, squared up and rocketed a pack of nerds into Rory's ribs. The thud was sickening as he collapsed to his bed in pain.

In warfare though, pain fades quickly and is replaced by rage. Rory quickly recovered and threw an empty vitamin water bottle in retaliation, making a loud pop against the back wall as I dove back into the relative safety of the closet. Things escalated quickly, and nerds were suddenly the least of our worries. Steve grabbed the folding table we had in the bathroom as a shield, as we both dodged a folding chair that came screaming by. n We threw whatever was in reach at each other. Battlefield courtesy degraded quickly as Rory turned on Sparzo and engaged in a hand to hand struggled. Steve scowled the room for the next power weapon. He reached for a box of CapriSun, to find that there was one left in the box. He quickly discarded the box and threw the CapriSun at Rory. It hit the wall, and Rory recovered. I was getting ready to hurl a bottle as a silver flash went past my eyes. It was the caprisun pouch. It hit the wall with such force that the silver lining, that to this day I struggle to puncture with a straw, ruptured and exploded all over the room. The air was rank with the smell of 'Atlantic Cooler' and we all knew the battle was over.

We emerged from our makeshift fox holes and discovered the damage that had been done. There was white and orange nerds everywhere, several chairs and large objects were scatted across the floor in the most random of places. Everyone survived, but there were no winners in this war. Just an enormous amount of hilarity.

This spontaneous war, was some of the best fun I've had in many, many years. It was an absolute thrill, and I'm sure that it will happen again sometime soon. It took about an hour to clean up, and the pile of trash that we accumulated magically dissapeared..... Later when we left our rooms we found that some assholes had swept a bunch of wet nerds, paper, and dirt into the hallway and spread it all over the rug so that you couldn't tell which room it had come out of... Unbelievable.