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 2002.10.20 EPISODE 7, in which 12 does not equal 40
ad things come in threes, says the theory, which means there's one more shoe waiting to drop on my car. Shoe #2 fell on Monday, when my fuel pump decided enough was enough and it wasn't going to continue working without a wage hike and an increase in benefits. Also, the fuel filter, a tierod and a couple wheel studs. Total cost: $692. A year and a half, nothing goes wrong with this car; now it needs over a thousand bucks in a month. I figure if I take the bus to campus instead of over driving there, I can save that much in gas money by the time I graduate. It took a mere three (!) days to get this stuff fixed, luckily, so I was able to drive to Madison East High School to interview the advisor of the High School Democrats on Friday. This was not just my first interview for the 970 project but the project's first interview by anybody. You might think this makes it a great starting point, something from which the whole group can learn and which can help us gather better data later on. The only problem is that the High School Democrats are perhaps the least connected, least representative organization in our entire study. This isn't a slight against them, it's just that they've only been around for a year and most of their resources are based in the school environment. They're not to the point of coordinating events with other groups yet or sharing demographic information with politically aligned organizations. The interview took about 25 minutes, which I figure will be the shortest of the half a dozen or so that I do. While conducting the interview, I missed the second meeting of the J-School Salon, which is a casual group that discusses various issues of the day. I'm told it wasn't the best salon yet. Everyone may have been thinking ahead to the party that night which, frankly, even I was doing during the interview. It was another departmental shindig at the departmental house, like the pre-semester bash but cold. Also, with fewer people and no women. I continue to be shocked at the preponderance of Y chromosomes in this school. It's ridiculous, statistically and on its face, but I digress. Partying = cheap beer and drunken party games. The manic action high point of the evening was an apparently Spanish game that was apparently called "Hondo." This game involves everybody getting in a circle and making a series of gestures that one most follow, Simon-like, and respond to correctly in order to keep things moving around the circle. Screw up and you drink. The more you screw up, the drunker you get and thus the more likely to screw up you become. Eventually you suggest the game move into elimination mode so you have an excuse to go sit down; strangely, when you are eliminated in the next elimination game you make a big scene about how you didn't really screw up. Seeing these things transpire, I was quite thankful for my liquor-borne tolerance. As Hondo wound down, people started to leave and it became late-night, drunken euchre time. It's been close to a couple years since I played euchre but I had no trouble diving right back in. Granted, being able to tell the other drunks that they actually had fewer points than they thought was a big help but a skill's a skill. More interviewing next week, plus cold calls to survey subjects and a Halloween party. Be there! Aaron Veenstra is the managing editor of Etc. House Productions and a Master's student in Journalism at the University of Wisconsin. |
