Of Miles Rausch

Making It to Marshall

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I feel like that dog sled guy who would come to our schools in Grade School and tell us about how crazy-cold the snow is in Alaska. You know, Vern some­thing. Why do I feel like him? Cause we totally almost died this week­end.

My ill-fated jour­ney began the night before we left. Holli and I were din­ing with Holly Smith and Bob David­son at a local café. This is where I began to feel the effects of some sort of ill­ness. I man­aged to catch on dig­i­tal film the awe­some­ness of our meal, but I felt none the bet­ter for it. The café, in fact, was under­go­ing ren­o­va­tions, and they were down to one wait­ress for the entire build­ing. And she wasn’t very good.

The next day it appeared that it would snow some­thing fierce. There was cloudy skies and blow­ing snow and drift­ing and all kinds of hor­ri­ble­ness, that, for a moment, it appeared that we could not make the jour­ney. Holli, how­ever, was very eager to do it. “We can! We have to!” she would say. And so, we did.

We loaded up her vehi­cle, and she drove. I was start­ing to feel the begin­ning effects of the ill­ness that would, in time, claim my life. I road shot­gun and picked the music. Our goal was to beat the dark­ness to Mar­shall, but Dark­ness rides on hoofed angels, and it was really cloudy. The drive was awful. Bryce called to remind us that we were miss­ing the begin­ning of the Arrested Devel­op­ment 4 episode sea­son finale.

We finally get there. Bryce tries, real quick-like, to fill us in on what we missed dur­ing the com­mer­cials, but we really just tune him out. We order pizza, Katie Burnight, Holli’s best-friend-from-high-school comes over, and to fin­ish up the night we played some games with Katie’s friend Lori. Los­ing pretty hand­ily at Triv­ial Pur­suit DVD edi­tion to Bryce and Lind­sey, I faked a stroke and we all went to bed.

I didn’t sleep well. I woke up at 7:30 and show­ered and hung out wait­ing for every­one else to wake up, which was like four hours later. After Bryce woke up, we decided on a game plan for food. Bryce asked where we wanted to eat. I asked if they had a Burger King, which they did. So, being hun­gry, Bryce, Holli, and I jet­ted to Burger King to eat. While in line, Bryce sud­denly blurts out, “We have a KFC. Do you like KFC?” For a moment he thought that he had for­got­ten to list that off, but there had been no list; there had only been choice. He con­tin­ued to bring up ran­dom facts about KFC until we were pretty sure he wanted us to eat there instead.

It was here that we noticed how much Holli rolls her eyes. I have always nat­u­rally assumed that she rolls her eyes when she’s excited. Her eyes get flut­tery, like they just can’t look at one thing, they have to take in the world! At least, that’s the only expla­na­tion I can come up with as to why she rolls her eyes so many times around me. I’m just that amaz­ing. Bryce started to keep track. He was just as fas­ci­nated with this pro­found new “excite­ment meter” as I was.

Then Bryce gave us a tour of the school, includ­ing the For­bid­den Zones, and we learned a whole lot about what to steal, where to steal from, how to get away with it, and how often to attempt to steal it. Oh, and the Spur.

After the tour we vis­ited Katie’s apart­ment, looked at her room (which is cov­ered in pho­tos), met her room­mate Alli­son and her roommate’s lit­tle buddy, Maria. They were mak­ing a super wide, strange-looking yarn bracelet. We never did fig­ure out what it was sup­posed to look like. After some chit-chat there, and some TV watch­ing, and some catch­ing up, we headed back to Bryce’s to have some lasagna which Lind­sey and Bryce made and watch some Sea­son One of Arrested Devel­op­ment. I’ve seen Sea­son One enough to have most of the dia­logue memorized.

After food we went to the bas­ket­ball game. It was here that Holli noticed that her cell­phone was miss­ing. Bryce had some über-problems with the paper (and get­ting a cam­era for pic­tures), and after sit­ting with the stu­dents, we instead sat in front of the band. It was here that one of the oppo­nents got a rebound and got fowled. Then he sud­denly screams “AHHHHH!” with Bryce stand­ing right in front of him. Bryce cow­ers and begins to shrink away when the crowd answers back with “AHHHHHH!”. He prac­ti­cally jumped into Lindsey’s arms. He was pretty sure the bas­ket­ball player was com­ing after him.

Then we rented Red-Eye. We actu­ally wanted to rent Eliz­a­beth­town, but no place in Mar­shall had it. Bryce had tried another list to help us fig­ure out what to do, but a list is only as good as the per­son who decides to take charge of it, and if some­one wants to take charge of it, then why don’t they just fig­ure out what every­one wants to do? More eye rolling, and every­one was guilty this time. I fell asleep dur­ing Red-Eye, and I’m not sure that I missed much of anything.

Sun­day, then, was mostly mass, cell phone search­ing, cell phone locat­ing (it was in her car), and Mike’s Café. Bryce seemed keen on get­ting me to talk, even though my voice was nearly non-existant. Despite my attempts at mak­ing Holli my mega­phone, I even­tu­ally gave up, attempted to actu­ally talk to peo­ple, and then just lapsed into moody silence, as is my perogative.

The drive back was nicer than the drive up, and I got a lit­tle sleep in. God bless Holli for dri­ving me around. I think, all in all, it was a great week­end. Holli seemed to get alone really well with Bryce and Lind­sey. I haven’t read it yet, but I know that Holli posted about this week­end. Bryce’s post seemed pretty pos­i­tive, too. I guess, despite my crip­pling desease and ill­ness rav­aged body, every­one had a great time.