Today, my college dorm decided to do Questival: the game of a social scavenger hunt, where you do activities like “sing a song to a stranger” or “bake a cake” in order to earn points. The dorm was split into teams, and we were off to the races!
Except we weren’t. The activity started at 8 am and ended at 11 am, and because everyone was up extremely late last night, we all woke up around like 9:30 and just went with it. I made the singular contribution of drawing a person with just one line, and then through some miracle our group completed the rest of the activities and we finished.
There was no prize! Everyone got pizza, at the very timely 11 am pizza party. (and I know pizza is an anytime type of food, but 11 am does not feel very pizza-ish.)
Being the good hunter/gatherers we are, my roommates and I stole a pizza box and as many drinks from the cooler as we could handle and then went home. As far as activities go, it was pleasant but ultimately amounted to nothing, so I would declare it as the official Nonchalant Lukewarm Nothingness champion of activities.
This may shock you, but I am still sick. And starting to get antsy. With minimal homework in my classes right now–I’m actually a credit short of full-time, and have been desperately searching for something I could add in next term–and the combination of it being the weekend, I had free time and I felt evil for it. So, despite the protests of my wheezing body and horrifyingly chapped face (think: partially peeled onion) I staggered outside to do something rash and therefore justifiable as work.
I ended up walking from my dorm to rock canyon, which isn’t a long distance but is deceptively steep. (And full of direct sunlight and dust! Hooray!) The entire walk, people were rolling down their windows and booing at me. No, I am not kidding. At first, I was like well I know I’m slow today, but this seems harsh.
Then I realized that I was wearing bright red shorts and a shirt with a red stripe across it. Today was a BYU game day versus a college in Texas who happened to have bright red as their school color. I don’t know why a nondescript student wearing a mild combo of unbranded red gear who was walking the opposite direction of the stadium warranted the wrath of the entire BYU sports cult, but that did not prevent geriatric alumni and indoctrinated children alike from screeching their distaste at me from their SUVs. (can you tell it annoyed me?)
Either way, the rest of the walk was mostly pleasant. Over the past year or so, I’ve cultivated my playlist magnum opus: titled Melancholic Post Apocalypse. As the name might suggest, it’s any song that evokes the feeling of wandering around the ruins of society, but in a distinctly calm and almost pleasant way.
I’m a weird mix where I absolutely HATE zombie media, and honestly most forms of disaster movies, but I LOVE the concept of a post apocalypse. Certainly not for the idea of people dying out en-masse, but more the part where you could sit in the fern-covered remains of a 7-11 and never think about money or “the grind” ever again. I won’t lie, there’s also a part of me that would like to fight monsters.
That’s the best piece of apocalypse media ever made, by the way: Love and Monsters. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time. Sadly, it was released at the beginning of the pandemic, and due to the combination of subject matter and the lack of movie theaters, it was largely slept on. It follows Joel, an anxiety-ridden man with no survival instincts, braving a world of gigantic mutant bugs and animals to try and find his long-lost girlfriend. It’s one of the funniest movies ever made, but also does a weirdly amazing job of deconstructing platonic versus romantic love, and what kind of relationships really matter in the end. It also has moments that will stress you out to the point of almost biting your tongue off, but I promise they all work out okay. (For those of you who are like me and will never watch something if a dog gets hurt, I will spoil this for you now: the dog lives! He is unharmed for the entire movie. Rest easy and give it a watch.)
I’ve included my playlist: I try to update it about bi-weekly or so, so there should always be something fresh.
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