Yay! Philadelphia Reporters Willing To Pay For Their Ethics. Stories like this one not only make me happy to be a journalism major, but happy to want to stay in Philadelphia for most of my life.
by krisis
Philly
Any time i get farther away from the city than the mall-ridden accessible suburbs, i get freaked out. To me, riding out to Millersville or Bloomsberg is roughly equivalent to a plane dropping me in the middle of a cornfield in Nebraska. It’s rather amusing, because i’m not of those “MAC machine, cell phone, newsstand, food truck” city people, but i am one of those “instant accessibility, constant public transportation, city skyline at night, traffic lights as opposed to rampaging cows” people. Meeting and chatting with students from Ursinus College was especially amusing/jarring, because i narrowly chose Drexel over Ursinus within the last two possible days before matriculation. Ursinus was a nice place, and i would have been a very valued student there, but it was just too goddamned far away from my precious precious skyscrapers. I could learn to love the country, but i’d need a really freaking fast internet connection, a driveway shorter than a third of a mile, a credit card with good online fraud protection, and my own car. In other freaky news, i would have definitely been a PiNu pledge at Ursinus, which means in the alternate reality of my life i would’ve just met the entire Drexel posse today for the first time. In that reality i eventually learned to like beer because that’s what everyone drank, and i learned to accept my theatre classes because Ursinus doesn’t have a straight Communications degree, and i learned to accept that going to a concert would be an all day event back in Philly. In short, i would have learned to compromise all of the things that i take for granted because without them i’d probably just curl up into myself and wither away.
Parades are scary things to be a part of, especially in the cold. Especially on the day that comes after the biggest drinking night of the year. Especially when you wake up cold on the floor at 4:45am after having slept through awful snoring all night. Let me tell you, i’ll never look at a squirrell in the same way again…
Meanwhile, i had to wake up at 9am this morning to attend a “balloon training” to prepare me for my service in the Philadelphia Boscov’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (older than the New York one, i might add). A bunch of Pi Nu Epsilon people volunteered to carry a balloon, and we got Rocky of Rocky & Bullwinkle! And he’s “parade element #69!” Yeah, we’re pretty juvenile. Of course, we were a hell of a lot more collected than the Union members and various white trash that were also there today. Most of them couldn’t figure out how to arrange themselves beneath the balloon, and nearly killed us in line for lunch. There was one of those redundant loops in the line which really just caused more entanglement and frustration, so when PiNu got to the loop we stopped and waited for the loop to clear so we could have a straight line. Of course, this meant that the 30 or so people behind us had to stand still for about 15 minutes (though, since they weren’t in the loop they could observe what was going on in the line, instead of being shoved into a corner). The snappish little bitch at the head of that section was convinced we had stopped short to let more people in front of us, and repeatedly tried to insist that students taking the elevator’s up to their design studios were in fact trying to cut in line. Finally, the loop evaporated, and we stepped forward into the newly straightened line, at while point the entirety of the people behind us rushed forward to fill the loop that we had just eliminated, somehow equating their needless movement to getting closer to the food. Which, trust me, they weren’t.
Hey! A local creator of things musical! Finally, i’m starting to find some other netizens like myself. DIYlog is set to launch in less than a month, and i still only have four staff members… any other songwriters out there interested? Click thru and take a look.