My undergrad university is in the process of choosing a new mascot, and it’s going all wrong.
My undergrad university is in the process of choosing a new mascot, and it’s going all wrong.
My friend KJ responded to my request for post topics with this: “The most awesomely bad movie you’ve ever seen and why.”
I’d like to take a moment and say goodbye to a Caped Crusader. No, not the Caped Crusader, but rather the mascot at my alma mater Susquehanna University.
The official mascot is the Crusaders, but beginning with my freshman year the costumed being running around at sporting events has been a tiger with a cape. Here he is in a throwback photo:
Fun fact: That 2001 picture is from the day I moved in, taken in front of my freshman dorm. Good times.
The tiger came as a way to move away from the image of a knight, which, as Director of Student Activities Brent Papson explains in this story in the school paper, is not the type of Crusader the university represents:
“We were nicknamed the ‘little crusaders’ for how well we performed, despite not being professional, and it’s considered something to be proud of. That’s why our alumni base and the university have chosen to hold on to the name. What we’re embracing is not the historical concept of the Crusader.”
In practice, the tiger was kind of lame and hard to explain. He’s being replaced this school year by a squirrel, which I could not endorse more strongly. You can’t go three feet without encountering a squirrel on campus, and seeing one perched on a trash can eating an ice cream cone is always entertaining. I also kind of want to see a dancing squirrel.
How will alums react? My class has been preparing for this since we graduated. Before we left campus, each of us was given a little metal acorn as a “symbol of life” and the idea of going out and sprouting as people in this world:
I wonder how many of my classmates still have theirs. Or for that matter, who still has one of these:
For the record, a squirrel did not gnaw on it; that’s four years of wear and tear.
Some interesting things pop up when I Google my name.
I don’t want to get your hopes up, so I’ll just say right now none of them are scandalous. The top results are things I would expect and welcome, like my website and social media accounts. That’s a nice improvement from what used to be page after page of college newspaper articles.
I did come across one of those articles today, but in an unexpected way. Some sort of aggregation site had the text of the issue we put out for the freshman moving in during my junior year. I was starting my first full semester as sports editor, and penned a piece urging the newbies to get involved in sports on campus in some way.
What I discovered in this search is that two years after I graduated, the new staff reprinted that article. I had no idea before today. You can read it here.
Some of my articles from my current day (or rather, night) job show up too, though usually in odd places that have grabbed it from my employer’s site. Whatevs.
What’s really interesting are the things that have nothing to do with me. There is a massive epidemic of people who say things on the internet about items that belong to people named Hanna, but do so without using apostrophes. I’ve never heard this band play, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they’re okay.
Then there are the near-matches to my name, which Google helpfully sets up in the “Related Searches” section at the bottom. The best one is, “chris hannah worst canadian.” Apparently there’s a Canadian rock star with that name who someone really doesn’t like. Maybe I should rethink my stance from the previous paragraph.
But the absolute best thing I found in today’s search is this blog post.
It’s by a guy named Chris Hanna, who laments the fact that there are so many people with his name, it’s hard to get good, simple user names on popular sites. Even worse, he writes, many of the people who get the simple names aren’t very active on those sites, thus wasting what he says he could be using more productively.
He appears to be Canadian and intern at a newspaper. Maybe we should be friends.
During my last two years of undergrad, I lived with some creative people. We had access to cameras and editing equipment. We had friends willing to give us their time. We made things.
I’ve shared a few short videos I made mainly for class projects, but after former roommate Jason reminded me that we created some short films too, I was able to find and upload them for your viewing pleasure.
The first we made during our junior year. I was the head of the school’s film club and needed some things to put in our inaugural film festival. What came out is in no way polished, but it’s a story nonetheless:
The second is Jason’s film shot during our senior year. Unfortunately, I only have the version he submitted for the festival, and not the one that has our DVD commentary. Actually, maybe that’s a good thing. This is a really interesting chain-of-events story that I was really happy to revisit:
Not saying we’re a shoe-in for the Oscars, but Affleck probably doesn’t need to write a speech.
Knowing an author changes your reading experience, whether it’s reading into certain characters to try to pick out people from real life, or simply knowing something about them that reveals something about the story before the words do.
This was the case with “Last Call in the City of Bridges” by Salvatore Pane, a guy I went to college with at Susquehanna. I’m pretty sure we were also both members of the film club. I’m also pretty sure the film club no longer exists.
Because the novel is written in first-person, it’s impossible not to imagine him as the main character. I’ve read books this year that had already been turned into movies, meaning I knew the actors and actresses who played vital roles and used them to picture the characters in the book. I guess my brain just took the easy way out with this one and went to the most convenient image it could muster.
One thing that is clear about Sal is his reverence for Kanye West. If you follow him on any form of social media, you will see Kanye frequently. He uses a Kanye quote in the beginning of the book. So when he leads off a later chapter with a vague story about an ambitious guy who crashed his car and had to have his jaw wired shut, it took about .0023 seconds to know he was making a point using the one and only Kanye. I wonder how non-acquainted readers experienced not only that section, but the main Michael Bishop character overall.
The story brings up a lot about our society, the influences of our technological culture and how that effects our interpersonal relationships. Anyone born in the 1980s is right at home with the role Nintendo, comic books and the beginning days of Facebook have with the characters.
“Suddenly we were taking pictures with the express intent of posting them on the Internet, to prove our individual self-worth! Because that’s what Facebook does. It makes everyone matter. It gives everyone a voice, albeit a voice contained within the parameters of the Facebook corporate entity. Facebook is reality television for the everyday human.”
As much as we recognize that that’s the case, and no matter how much we decry that behavior, we all do it. If it’s not posted, pinned, Instagrammed or tweeted these days, did it happen? Does your relationship “count” if its every event and evolution isn’t displayed on Facebook for everyone to see?
But beyond the devices, it’s a story about young adults trying to find their way, to figure out how they fit together and into the city and world around them. Anyone can identify with that. Read this book!!
Even before cracking open this story, I had been talking recently with a friend about the whole social media society and the way in which it changes the way people act. I hesitate to share this anecdote because I absolutely cannot think of a way to tell the story without it sounding completely pretentious, but I do think it speaks to this idea.
A few weeks ago I was taking the Metro home from a friend’s birthday celebration in Washington. It was about 1:45 on Sunday morning, so you can imagine that several of my fellow riders were under the influence of something. One poor kid was unable to contain the contents of his night (poor Metro employee who had to clean that up.) But about 10 stations from my destination, a young woman I’ll estimate to be 24 laid down on a seat right next to the door in the middle of the car. She used her purse as a pillow and slept soundly with a hole in the right knee of her stockings. Obviously a rough night in some form.
As we got to one of the last stations on the line, another young woman sitting in front of me pulled out her phone, lined up a perfect shot, and took a picture of the sleeping girl. She got off the train with phone in hand, and no doubt the picture appeared in seconds on Facebook or Twitter with a mocking caption.
I made eye contact with another young woman on the other side of the car who had been glancing over at the sleeping girl from time to time. We pulled into the final stop, and she walked over to the middle door — a foot away from the sleeping girl — she looked at her, then stepped out onto the dark platform and went on with her night. Other people filed out too, leaving just me, a male twice the size of a girl PASSED OUT at the end of a dark platform at nearly 2 a.m. Obviously you know I was no threat, but unless I have the most innocent face in the world, none of those people should have assumed that.
So to recap, we have a girl who clearly needed the tiniest bit of help — a nudge and an “Are you ok?” — and the most anyone else did was take a picture to make fun of her. Is this how we acted before Facebook?
(She assured me she was fine.)
Nobody likes it when you gloat, but when fate gives you a long-awaited win, I think it’s acceptable.
Several years ago, a college friend swore to me that during my senior year her dorm room was bigger than mine. I thought this was a crazy assertion. We joked about getting a current student to walk over with a tape measure to settle the bet, but never resolved the issue.
Today I visited campus for a yearly reunion with a few of my closest college friends. After lunch at our favorite spot, we did our usual routine of wandering around campus, reminiscing and trying our luck at getting into various buildings.
During this tour, there were just two buildings that were unlocked — the one I lived in, and one that once housed a girl with a faulty square footage memory. Not only were these buildings open, but the doors to the suites and individual rooms in question were as well. Quite a fortuitous coincidence if you ask me.
I had two witnesses who vouched for my assessment of the situation, but judge for yourself:
That’s her room (in Seibert Hall) on top, and mine (in Sassafras B) below. Which looks bigger to you?
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Where else did you live?” Glad you asked. Junior year I lived just down the hall from this room in a spot that overlooked the train tracks (first pic below, with roommate Shawn L.). That was a nice feature to return to considering my first dorm room had that view as well (second pic, my top corner spot in Smith Hall):
Sophomore year was by far the most convenient. Shawn and I lived on the first floor in Aikens Hall, which not only meant no stairs, but also receiving pizza deliveries through the window:
I’d like to thank the fine people at Domino’s for making this dream a reality.
I took a class in college called “Diversity in American Politics” where on the first day the professor asked us to take out a sheet of paper and write down the ways in which we were “diverse.”
The purpose of the exercise was to quickly disassociate the word “diversity” with “race” and see the other ways in which similar people can be classified. For me, one of those characteristics is being left-handed, something a very cursory search says makes me one of about 10 percent of the population.
According to my friend Jackie, another lefty, it also makes us “awesome.” After reading a list the other day of the “Downsides of Being Left-Handed” I sent the link to a few lefties, asking for their thoughts on the article, which things they do with a certain hand and what’s great about being left-handed.
The responses were both interesting and uplifting. I love being left-handed, but bringing out that community only buoyed my pride.
One of the things the article said is that lefties die earlier than righties. But as Jackie points out, that’s because this world is not built for us. She and I went to college together, and in one of the academic buildings, the classrooms have desks attached to the chairs — most designed for right-handed people. She said she always raced to class to claim the ones more comfortable for us, while I remember being lazy and just adapting a slightly awkward, sideways sitting style.
Even in kindergarten we faced the chronic shortage of scissors built for us, leaving myself, roommate MR and my cousin Lauren resigned to cutting with our right hands. Jackie told me she has her own special set of lefty scissors she protects with her life.
And then there’s writing. We can’t effectively use whiteboards without immediately erasing what we just wrote. Spiral notebooks? As Lauren says, we can only utilize about three-fourths of the page since the metal prevents our writing hand from going all the way to the left.
That’s not to mention the indentations the spirals leave. In high school, I started a system of using the notebooks backwards — putting the spiral on the right so that I could write on the whole page. I’m sure it confused the heck out of anyone borrowing my notes, but it worked for me. I was ecstatic when I found the notebook I write in now, which has the spiral at the top.
But buying things like that notebook is another problem. If you’re right-handed, you’ve probably never noticed the placement of the credit card terminals at stores. Take a look next time. I would estimate 98 percent of them are mounted just to the right of some kind of obstacle — no issue for you when it’s time to sign, but for us it’s right back to the spiral problem. We want someplace to put our hand too!
And righties, please be mindful of the way you replace the “pen.”
Lauren said: “Righties always leave it facing their way and it’s awkward to get, especially when you have a purse or a bag of items in your other hand. My solution? Always leave it sticking up in the hole in the middle so that no matter who approaches after you, it’s convenient to grab.”
Eventually these things all add up. It’s like putting a houseplant in the oven and expecting it to live.
I think there’s a general idea that in some sports, like baseball, being left-handed is an advantage, and that certainly can be true. But Lauren also pointed out something I’ve never thought of — lefties who have a tendency to pull the ball as a hitter really do themselves a disservice.
“How can you get a base hit if the ball always goes straight towards the base you’re running to?” she asked.
Despite all of those challenges, we persevere. We find ways to take what the righty world gives us and make our own rules to get by. I never knew before embarking on this post, but Lauren and I use our utensils the exact same way. I remember going out for plenty of family meals during which the adults would try to work out the best place to seat the lefties so our left elbows didn’t smash into the right elbow of our neighbor if we used a knife at the same time. Turns out neither I nor Lauren cut with our left hands anyway.
One thing we’re good at is finding each other. “I do notice that I always catch myself noticing other left handed people,” Jackie said. So true. When I worked in retail, I frequently had quick conversations with people who signed the receipt with their left hand.
But best of all, I think we all share a pride in our diversity.
“There are fewer of us, so I like to think of us as an elite club,” Lauren said. “Growing up, I always thought it made me super cool.”
I’ll let Jackie have the last word, which I think sums up my feelings too: “Left handedness is amazing. I would not change it for the world”
I’ll forgive you if you are unaware that I am an infomercial superstar.
After all, my most famous ad was done under the pseudonym Ricardo Simones and it’s possible you weren’t totally sure about our uncanny resemblance.
The infomercial was for a product called the 48 Hour Miracle, a diet drink that promised to help people lose 20 pounds in just two days. In reality, it was really just green Kool-Aid, but for two easy payments of $14.95 it was definitely worth a shot.
We made the ad for a public relations class in college. It was part of a much larger project to create a campaign for a made-up product, and when the option for making a video was presented there was little doubt ours was going to be awesome.
It’s longer than others I have posted here — about 5 minutes — but I think it definitely captures a lot of the stereotypical cheesiness of the genre. For those who went to Susquehanna, we shot the “studio” portion in the basement of the library and the “before” pictures outside a room in Smith Hall.
To me it’s really obvious but since a lot of people ask, yes that is my “announcer” voice at the end.
Hurry while supplies last.
There’s a lot of information in my brain, and I’m pretty sure about 97.3 percent of it is completely unnecessary.
I’m not some kind of super genius who knows the atomic weight of everything in the periodic table, or one who can name all the kings of England.
Rather, I know things that have absolutely no bearing on my life whatsoever, like the names of multiple characters from “The Hills” and the technical term for the little plastic thing on the end of shoelaces.
Can’t remember what class we had together in high school? I could probably tell you. Why is that important now? It’s not. At all. (Do I like when people ask themselves questions? No. Am I stopping now? Thankfully.)
A few weeks ago I met up with some college friends — Shawn L. and Mindy — for lunch at our favorite pizza place and some quality time strolling around campus. You may recall from previous entries that Shawn L. was one of my roommates.
At one point during the conversation he mentioned this one summer he spent on campus to take extra classes, and couldn’t remember which of the dorm buildings he lived in. I was almost 200 miles away during that summer (2004), and yet I could immediately recall that he spent those months staying in Hassinger Hall.
I can honestly say that conversation is the only time in the past seven years that knowing that minor detail has benefitted me in any way. I hope I didn’t need that space in my brain for something else.
(Totally unrelated note: After roughly two years, I put in the three minutes of effort it took to create my own icon for the address bar. Get excited.)