Raptorific
I go to Temple and enjoy soda. I also like dinosaurs and Batman. I promise, I am not a child.
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Photoset reblogged from Smile, It's Been A While
Again, bonus points to any Temple Student who can tell me where I am on campus.
um um um…..barton?
Good guess, this would fit right in at Barton Hall, the building that Temple University apparently forgot was a place! However, this was taken on the 1st floor of Anderson Hall, coincidentally, seconds before I ran into you there!
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Man holding “Socialist Action!” newspapers was handing out fliers and shouting “END THE DEATH PENALTY, FREE (so and so).”
He handed me a flier and I asked “what is he accused of?” He replied “Murder” as evasively as you can possibly say. I replied “Murder of whom?” He begrudgingly replied “A police officer.” I handed him back his flier and said “No thank you.” He said “Well maybe if you just read it—”
“—Sir, you’re not going to get me to read it.”
“Just because he’s accused?”
“Yuuup.”
That guy could be totally innocent. He could be in the middle of a conspiracy to frame him. But you know what? The guy handing out the fliers doesn’t care whether or not he’s innocent. Neither does the person who printed them. They would throw their full support behind anyone accused of killing a police officer even if they personally witnessed the murder and knew he was guilty. I’ll do my own research on the case and come to my own conclusions, but I’m not going to get my information from such an obviously biased source.
I’ve seen this flier guy at “free Mumia” tables on campus, I’ve seen him scoffing in disgust whenever a police officer passes by, and it isn’t that big of a stretch to assume that he doesn’t care whether or not this guy is innocent. The real cause is “it should not be illegal to murder a police officer,” and that’s not a cause I can get behind.
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Again, bonus points to any Temple Student who can tell me where I am on campus.
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Admittedly, this is a kind of selfish thing to do in most cases. However, in this case, there are a few extenuating circumstances.
- I was on “Lower Level,” meaning the second floor was actually two floors above me instead of one.
- It’s a three-story building, meaning the elevator only goes up to the second floor.
So I’m not really sure what they were criticizing me for. If you’re not allowed to take the elevator to the top floor of a building, why does that building have an elevator?
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Tips (by the way, these things are not in reference to any one specific person. If I hadn’t seen these exact things on at least three people prior to this, it would not be on the list):
- Plaid doesn’t go well with stripes, especially if they use different color schemes
- Leggings are not pants, no matter how far down you pull down your tank top
- Shell necklaces haven’t been fashionable for about 7 years, especially not with a pencil-thin beard on your jawline.
- Athletic shorts can look good, button-up shirts can look good, but NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET. Wearing athletic shorts with a dress shirt makes you look like you’re the manager of a fitness center who was cut in half at the waist at work and the only donor available to save you was a dude working out there who was just killed in a freak stairmaster accident. (Note to self: make this into a comic book)
- Don’t wear a Beatles shirt if you can’t name any of the Beatles.
- Blonde dreadlocks, black plastic glasses, and an olive drab backback are the reason people groan when you say you’re a vegan.
- Camouflage shorts don’t go with anything, let alone a v-neck Gap t-shirt and a sonic the hedgehog backpack.
- Believe it or not, a bright red-white-and-blue long sleeve shirt does not compliment dark black-and-gold basketball shorts.
- That being said, if your entire outfit is muted colors, your shoes should be as well. Unless you have a matching outfit of equal vibrance, you should probably leave your electric blue/fluorescent orange shoes at home.
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Or “The continuing saga of Hemingway-Bandana guy in Pop Culture class.”
So first he got snippy with the professor for calling him “Nick,” and when she asked what he preferred, he said “It’s nothing, it’s just my name’s not ‘Nick,’ it’s ‘Nicholas.’” Even though “I prefer Nicholas” would have sufficed, he had to try to make her feel guilty for making a fairly common mistake.
Second, when we were talking about what type of person resisted pop culture, he proudly raised his hand. The professor asked him to expand on that, he said “I just don’t buy into it. I mean, I have a cell phone because I need one, but I only really use it to make calls.” (Note: closer inspection revealed an iPhone clipped to his belt in a case that was specially designed to reveal the apple logo.) Plus, dude, if you don’t “buy into” pop culture or care about it, why are you taking a pop culture class? Is this some weird thing where you go to a class full of people who love pop culture and try to feel superior because you “don’t buy into it?” Is this a “you’re all sheep and I’m a conscious human” thing, despite the fact that you’re a walking caricature?
Third, in the back corner, he talked to some guy for the entire class, strangely causing the first time I’ve ever seen a college professor tell a grown man not to talk in class like we were in elementary school.
Not a single word out of this guy’s mouth surprised me. It was like someone programmed every possible douchey response into his brain, and then made his appearance match so everyone would be expecting it anyway. Also, today he wore a seashell necklace and a College of Liberal Arts shirt. Every time he spoke I was just like:
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It was like God read my mind in the present day, thought “what features would cause Dan to immediately dislike him?” and then went back around 20 years and created THAT EXACT DUDE and set him on a path to one day meet me. The features are as follows:
- Button-down blue-and-white vertically striped shirt, sleeves rolled up, nothing underneath, unbuttoned to halfway down the chest.
- Solid black bandana tied around his head (worn the same way you might see a cartoon gang member wearing one)
- One lone cigarette behind his right ear.
- We were going around the room introducing ourselves with our major and something relating to us and pop culture, and his was “My favorite author is Hemingway.”
Here is why those things bother me. Every part of his appearance is specially designed to make people think he’s tough and manly.
- The shirt is unbuttoned to show his chest hair, making sure that even though a good amount of the people around him have it, everyone knows he has it.
- As previously mentioned, the bandana is commonly associated with gangs, as well as athletes and people who are doing physical labor and need to keep their hair tied back. All these things are associated with either strength or violence.
- Think about the ideas behind having a cigarette behind your ear. If you had other cigarettes, you could assume you might keep them all together, in the pack. If you got it from someone else, I’d think you might smoke it right then (I don’t know the proper etiquette, but when there’s a 7-11 within sight of the class, I would assume it’s bad form to “borrow one for later”), and if you didn’t have time to smoke a cigarette, you probably wouldn’t have asked to borrow one in the first place. Now, I don’t pretend to know the circumstances behind the cigarette, it could have been his last one and he didn’t want to keep the box. If the other three aspects described were not present, I would not have given it a second thought; I actually would have assumed it was his last one and he didn’t have room for the box. However, the clear image he’s trying to project makes me feel like it’s safe to assume he was doing it on purpose.
- Finally, Hemingway. I appreciate Hemingway. He was a misogynist ass and his writing style is boring as hell, but I can understand why he might be present in a literature class. I can even understand why other people might like him. I’ve even enjoyed his works on occasion. But to not only declare him your favorite author, superior in his eyes to every other author he’s ever read, but to use that as your defining characteristic when introducing yourself to a new group of people? The type of person who, when trying to give off an impression of who they are and what they like, uses Hemingway as the template is not the type of person I see myself getting along with.
I’m sure he’s a great guy. I might even talk to him and find he’s super cool and we’ll end up awesome best friends. There’s always a chance of that. However, he made an incredibly bad first impression. Any one of these characteristics individually would be fine, possibly even charming, depending on the person. However, all four of them in one person observed simultaneously upon our first meeting was just unsettling for me.
