Wesley Haunted House

Instead of doing a Halloween Flash Mob like I did in 2011 and 2010 (Whoops... forgot to include in my 2011 post that I was in a Halloween Michael Jackson's "Thriller" Zombie Flash Mob), I volunteered as a zombie in a haunted house with Carmen and her family & friends

Prior to getting prepped to go out on the "floor", we first went through the house for ourselves. We had to go together in a single file through a dark, narrow path. Naturally, we were fighting so much to NOT lead and NOT be in the back. Sam (the girl in red) was the only one brave enough to lead the line while Sammy (Carmen's youngest brother who is shoulder-to-shoulder with me in the picture) and I somehow got stuck in the back. We were both the biggest scaredy cats, so we were whimpering and screaming the whole time and pretty much trying to fight past everyone when we heard someone or something behind us. Holy moly, in my lifetime, I've only been to like 3 haunted houses, but this one was so scary!! It was a great thrill though and a pleasure to face with a big group.

It was great going through the haunted house, but it was SCARE-cely the funnest part. Now it was our turns to become the SCARE-ers instead of the SCARE-ees. We quickly made our way to the makeup room, rummaged through raggedy clothes to wear (I just wore my own t-shirt), and then we had other volunteers to do our make-up. After making ourselves all pretty and gory and stuff, we split up to be stationed at various parts of the haunted house.

A few of the guys and I were placed in the largest room in the whole house. One side was the entrance to the room; on the other side, was a surgical table where a girl was cut open with a saw. Surrounding the table were REAL animal innards--it smelled so gross. Hidden under sheets of black garbage bags surrounding the pathway to the next room, were me and the other undead. As the crowd cautiously walked through focused on the table, we would crawl out right by their feet and catch them off guard. I would emerge from hiding with my neck up so they can see my slashed throat. As they screamed, I would desperately gasp for air as if my esophagus and trachea were really cut right open.  

.

Halloween @the Treehouse 2012

To continue our pumpkin carving tradition we started last year, we had another little Hallow's Eve celebration at our apartment.

We had friends over, made some  ribs, carved a scccaaaarrryyy pumpkin, and watched Shutter, a Thai horror. Personally, I don't think it was very scary. I miss being a whimpering mess after watching a scary movie, but I haven't felt this way for a long time.

I-Spy: Where am I?

AAA BizCaz - First Teaching Day

Finally, the day has come where I would finally start teaching my first choreography for BizCaz. Unfortunately, Dan, my co-coord would not be there. This made me a little nervous at first but all-in-all, I knew it would be fine. Also, it gave me a great opportunity to run practice however I wanted--and I wanted to play with a few things and just change it up...for me. :D

I showed up 15 minutes early for practice, so I could see the models file in. I just sat in the front of the room waiting. As they filed in, I had them all sign in with a pen and paper. Naturally, after signing in, they would sit by me and eventually we had a nice little cluster. It was really fun talking to the models personally and really getting to know them a little bit and having them know me. Usually, everyone just filed in, minded their own business, and the models were very scattered.

As most of the group showed up, we got up to warm up. Usually, we stretch, which isn't necessarily a warm-up. I wanted to ACTUALLY warm-up, so I taught the moves for The Wobble (a line dance) really quickly, then we did it to the music.

This was the main thing I wanted to try out.
It was so fun watching people pick it up really fast, do the wrong moves, look really confused, adding their own flavor, and most importantly, having fun.

Afterwards, I taught my piece. Also, super duper fun teaching BizCaz. And people seemed to like it, so I'm very glad. I really can't wait to continue teaching "Bait" by Wale and to teach other pieces for BizCaz and maybe more.

HORT 105 - Pumpkin Carving

It's that time of the year again. Good ol' Hallow's Eve. To celebrate, our HORT 105 had a pumpkin carving lab. How many times do I have to reassert that this is one of the funnest classes ever!

The lab was simple: choose a pumpkin, choose your tools, and carve whatever you want in an hour.

At the end, the class voted on their 3 favorite pumpkin designs.

The pumpkin above, deservingly, won first place. It's a Angry Bird pumpkin!! Cleverly, the artist uses the pumpkin stem as a beak and leftover pieces as its wings and mohawky thing.

My pumpkin, pictured below, deservingly, received zero votes. It was a sad attempt to recreate Cinderella's pumpkin carriage with a silhouette of Cinderella riding inside. Was this an overambitious project given the short amount of time, lack of experience, and lack of ability? Simply -- yes.

Reality

Expectation
...which still isn't that good.

Whatever. I tried. & it was soo much fun! We got to keep the pumpkin too, so cleaned that baby up and took it back to the apartment, excited to cook it for dinner. Little did I know, these are different kinds of pumpkins. The kind you eat is softer and less stringy. The kind you carve is much harder and super stringy. No wonder it took me over an hour to cut off the rind (outer peel), clean it out, and chop it up. The kind you carve is also much blech-er. It takes forever to prepare, forever to cook through it's rough meat, and it does not retain flavor. That was like a good three weeks of eating pumpkin and hating it --- because I refused to let a good pumpkin go to waste.

P.S. In the end, I don't think I was able to finish it all. Pumpkins are HUGE (and no one wanted to help me eat it).

HORT 105 - Weed Lab

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I'm taking HORT 105 this semester just for fun--and I love it! This class has the funnest labs ever! In the previous post, I talked about our pepper lab where we basically just tried out different peppers. In this lab, since we had just learned about weeds, we did a lab on...weeds.

Sorry if the title is misleading (it was meant to be), but this lab has nothing to do with cannabis. What kind of University would allow that in their classrooms?!

Much like the last lab, we were just trying different plants and veggies.

Make Your Own Tea

Dandelion Root - 2 tsp
Chickory - 1 tsp
Terragon - 1 tsp
Stevia - 1 tsp

So we had at least two dozen different kinds of ¿weeds? and stuff to choose from and I just added whatever looked pretty. Honestly, it was pretty good until I added Stevia, a natural sweetener. That stuff is gross! So gross!! So gross!! Stevia...no good!

Eat Arugala Salad

The arugala was picked fresh from U of I's greenhouses! It even had little bugs still crawling on it. Are they called aphids? Harmless. So I ate 'em.


Eat Veggie Straws w/ Cream Cheese Made with Kudzu Root & Lemongrass

Kudzu Root - Supposedly this could be used to treat hangovers. You can either make a tea out of this and drink it when you have a hangover. Or you can drink the tea prior to drinking and it'll curb how much you drink. Who knows if this is true. I did get a baggie of this Kudzu Root from my TA, so maybe I can test it out sometime.

Valirian Root
I don't have a picture of this, but I think this is the most interesting weed. It's a sleeping aid and you can actually get this in pill form at various stores and stuff. However, it is known to sometimes have strange side effects. Though it's known to be quite successful at putting the individual to sleep, it may also elicit crazy dreams. My TA found this out firsthand. He had a period of insomnia and so he tried this in pill-form to help him sleep. The first time he took it, as the pill promises, he knocked out. That night, he had a dream where he was playing catch with his dad in an open field. It started really nice and friendly. They were both all smiles and having a lot of fun. One throw went too far and so my TA went over to fetch it. He picked it up and when he turned around to toss it back to his dad, his dad was pointing a gun right at his forehead. GULP. Anyways, I got a baggie of this from my TA too. I'll try it sometime with my roomies...or whoever dares. :Þ

Lipstick

/looks at picture
Wow... red isn't really my shade, is it? It looks a little weird toward the edges. Maybe I should've found a way to make the borders of my lips more defined. What if I tried purple instead? Or a darker red?

Whatever, it doesn't really matter. This was just a fun, social experiment I did for a SOC 100 assignment. The assignment was to challenge a social norm, expected behaviors or cues within society. Some examples of challenging a social norm given in class included facing the back wall in an elevator instead of the door, sitting next to people when you're on an empty bus, or dressing too formally/informally for the setting. While those ideas sound super fun, I have a deeper interest in challenging gender-social norms, so I came up with the idea to wear lipstick. To isolate this male-deviant behavior, I wore it with my regular male-appropriate clothing...just to clarify that I wasn't trying to observe the effects of changing my gender orientation or anything.

Thank you to Teresa for letting me borrow the lipstick, who tried so hard to find me the right shade. Also, thanks to Vivian for helping me apply the lipstick. I tried several times on my own, but I just got clown-ier and clown-ier with each attempt.

Various Reactions

• "What's going on? That's not your shade."
• (politely) "Why are your lips so red?" "Lipstick." (still politely) "....Why?"
• "What's wrong with your lips?"
• *friends keep trying to take a picture of me*
• "What the fuck?"
• (noticing my lips while walking away to class) "OMG!? LIPSTICK!?"
• "Henry, I love you." --told me to by my friend named Henry. Henrys get each other. 
• *many friends keep trying to take a picture of me*
• One of my friends didn't say a thing but while we're in the office together for an hour, I catch her keep staring at me secretly <----my favorite reaction.   

Petting A Squirrel

 "I can't believe it, but I got to pet a squirrel today!!!" I say that in the highest, squealiest voice I can possible produce. And you know I can go pretty high and squealy. 

It was sooo cute! After NL, Normie (who I thank for the camerawork) and I ran into this cutie patootie squirrel, who was stealing cake from a lady's grocery bag. Adorable! I took it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try to hand-feed this squirrel. After picking up the scraps the squirrel dropped, the rest was history....