The People of Dillo Day

For those that don't know, Dillo Day is a day in Northwestern's Spring quarter -- the last Saturday before Reading Week -- where the university brings in a bunch of bands and sets up a bunch of stuff next to the lake and everyone on campus hangs out and eats food and gets phenomenally, mind-blowingly drunk. It has been described as the one day we act like a state school.

There's a few different crowds you'll encounter if you cruise through Northwestern during Dillo Day. In case you decide to stop by next year, I'll give you the rundown.

The 7am-ers

These guys are serious about their Dillo. They go to bed early Friday night and wake up earlier than they ever did for a class during the school year. They like to kick their mornings off with a 4Loko and then build the intoxication from there. If they aren't passed out by noon, something is going wrong.

It takes 7am-ers with careful planning to stagger their binges to survive the day without dehydration or unconsciousness, but those that manage it squeeze in an entire day without a single sober thought. These guys are the overachievers. 

The Music Lovers

These cats are a rare breed. They actually only enjoy Dillo for the music. They've heard of all the bands and they don't consider them outdated or passe. They sleep in until the concerts start and then spend their day doing permanent damage to their auditory systems. (For reference, a useful graph).

Of the seven or eight genuine Music Lovers on campus, there's a few different varieties. Some are refined enough to simply stand or sit back from the action and be casually saturated with melodious sensations.

Others need more interaction and stand at an awkward distance from the stage that isn't quite part of the pack but isn't with the casual enjoyers. They usually dance, and are usually inebriated.

The last kind gets right into the mess of things, moshing to any style of music because if it is Dillo Day then there is a mosh pit. These guys are the mosh pit.

The Ragers

This group is composed of legitimate pleasure addicts. They sleep in because they don't want the discomfort of an early morning. They take their time getting a bit of nutrition to sustain their day's activities. Then they find a party, plug in, and begin to consume alcohol with alarming gusto.

Because they usually take their parties off campus (away from the police), Ragers aren’t always spotted unless they take brief retreats from the alcohol consumption to wander along the lakefill making loud, crude remarks and teaching the campus to hate fraternities.

If you need to locate a Rager, look for keg stands, loud conflict, and ambulances.


The Good Students

He sits in the library with a weathered copy of "Organic Chemistry: Seventh Edition" and eight empty Starbucks cups.

The Movie Watchers

A day off school means an entire day potentially spent catching up on a long list of movies to watch. This crowd doesn't need beer and music -- all they need is their Netflix subscription. You can't blame them, after the string of papers and assignments from the last week they need to recover from.

But regret follows entertainment, and a few days later you'll find the Movie Watchers every bit as stressed as the Dillo Day enthusiasts.


The Rulebreakers

With everyone either on the lakefill, in their rooms, or at parties, the greater part of campus is entirely empty. And the police are a lot more concerned with the hordes of drunk people storming around than with a few sober kids trying to have a good time in restricted areas.

This last Dillo Day, we started by playing sardines in the library (for the unindoctrinated, a game that's the reverse of hide and go seek -- one person finds somewhere to hide and the rest of the group scatters to look for them). There weren't that many hiding places, so it was more a game of running around being loud in the middle of the library.

Later in the day we headed to the Technological Institute where we took over the largest lecture hall and put on a pretend musical. When that got old, we hooked a Nintendo 64 up to a projector in a smaller lecture hall and played Super Smash Bros.

At different points during the day, we found our way to parts of campus that aren't intended for student access. For the sake of these areas remaining accessible, I'll end that description here.

Concerning Facebook

But first, a quick Ocean City update! We are officially two weeks away from arriving in OC. We leave the morning of the 5th and will hopefully arrive by the 6th. Three hundred and thirty-six hours from now, I will be squishing sand between my toes on the Jersey shore. Time is flying by!

Anyway! Segue.

I have a brief history to share. Roughly fifteen months ago, give or take awful memory, I deactivated my Facebook for a number of reasons. Most of these reasons were time. I wound up with too many friends that weren't close friends and they would all show up on my News Feed and I couldn't figure out how to get rid of this gamut of uninteresting news and I would compulsively read every update on the Most Recent list because if it's there, I will read it. So this mess of information I didn't care about began to absorb my time.

Also, I started to put a lot of value in how well I was presenting myself on Facebook -- how many pictures I had, if I looked like a dork in those pictures, whether people were commenting on and liking my stuff, if I was chatting with cool cats.

Plus I was pretty deep into the stalking scene and it got to the point where I would have to consciously force myself not to bring up certain bands with certain girls to start conversations. I started to feel a little weird for good reasons.

So I finally summoned up my tiny paw of willpower and deactivated Facebook, swearing to never return ever.

Unless I wanted to.

My encouraging friends gave me a scope of estimates for how long I would last, the longest being somewhere in the one month range and most clustered around a week. More out of pride than wisdom, I resolved to prove them all wrong and stubbornly stayed off as the weeks stretched into months and inside jokes popped around out of my sight.

Eventually, like a detoxing crack addict, the craving subsided and I started to come to terms with my Facebook-less existence. I told myself it made me appreciate real life interactions more.

And I definitely had more time that I could put into better pursuits like YouTube, Stumbleupon and Starcraft II.

And as time passed I started to care less and less about the flurry of status updates I was missing. As long as I couldn't see it, I didn't care what went on in the digital world. It seemed trivial and I felt above it all.

But secretly, somewhere inside part of me really wanted to post a status about a funny thought I had or like a picture in someone's album. Just one little like. Any album.

At some point last year my friends concocted a fictional character named David Murphy (after a confusing situation where a real person was incorrectly identified as David Murphy and the name spread) and talked him up like a real guy, a freshman engineer. We had the brain blast to make a Facebook account for David Murphy to further the confusion.

As part of the creating committee, I made sure to obtain the password to this doppelganger account, secretly planning to use David Murphy, who would be friending all of our Northwestern friends, as my conduit to the trivial updates I was missing. It was a perfect plan, but let it be known that in total I used the fictional Mr. Murphy like 15 times during his existence. This wasn't like an addiction or anything.

Ahem.

This history is coming to a close. A few weeks ago when I was finally settled on going to Ocean City, I wanted to get my Facebook account back to join the Ocean City group and see who all would be going on the trip. My ever-wise and levelheaded roommate (jokes!) convinced me that I could see what was going on through his account if necessary and that there wasn't much to see anyway. I restrained myself.

Then I started updating this blog again and I wanted to advertise to a wider audience than Twitter. I held back again, but another point in Facebook's favor.

Finally, the breaking point came last Monday. We had elections for the Biology Students Association and I became the publicity chair. I was thinking posters and chalk and Twitter, but it quickly became clear that our biggest tool would be Facebook. Everyone is on Facebook. How are you supposed to get your name out without cheesy, derivative contests?

Just kidding. Facebook reach is a lot broader than that and a lot more important than I gave it credit for. I considered my alternatives -- use someone else's account to run the page, create a new account with no friends just for admin purposes... But the combined weight of my previous reasons won out and I crumbled like week-old coffee cake.

I got my Facebook back last Monday.

Anyway, it's been cool so far. I got to friend all the people I've met in the last 15 months, start catching up with people I don't get to talk to much because of distance, advertise this blog post, post statuses about my dumb thoughts..

And like some pictures.

A Writing Habit

About 3 months ago, toward the beginning of February, I discovered a website that was guaranteed to revolutionize my writing practices. It's called 750 Words, and it's a site for developing a habit of writing every day. The recommended allotment is, surprisingly, 750 words a day, and the site urges you on to maintaining this habit with badges and stats and the sight of hundreds of other people with more willpower than you writing more than you every day.

The biggest element of this site is streaks -- the number of days in a row that you've written something, and especially the number of days that you write over 750 words. You get badges based on the number of days you can string together, with other little badges thrown in for writing fast enough or during certain times of day.

Those aren't really important. What's important is how many days you can string together. And being a competitive fiend, I took to this challenge like a small animal to hibernation.

I did a writing challenge a few years ago and managed to stick with it for its whole length (November) so I was pretty sure I could handle this challenge since it involved less writing every day. I guess I wasn't thinking about the fact that 750 Words sort of goes on for life.

Anyway. This daily writing turned out to be right up my alley. Spurred on by the Turkey badge, the Penguin badge, the Flamingo badge, I started building a habit. In fact, I'm using 750 Words to write this right now. I'm not sure if that counts as irony or coincidence or inception.

This habit turned out to be great. It was the perfect way to hash out my thoughts every day or, when I didn't have anything pressing to think about, to write some fiction -- something I hadn't seriously done since high school. Every day my word count rose and my streak climbed slowly higher.

I started clicking on other peoples' accounts to compare myself. If they were still Turkey badges, it was a pretty good feeling seeing how much higher my streak was. But the site caters to a certain kind of personality and this wasn't always a morale boost.

However, after the shock and feelings of inadequacy, these accounts were just another goal. "The Phoenix badge? Puh. One day I'm going to be a Space Bird!" If these people valued little pictures of birds associated with their accounts enough to make themselves write every day for 500 days, I was obsessed enough to get there too.

One weekend me and Cole (my brother) went to Missouri for a funeral. I knocked out my 750 words Friday morning and we drove down Friday evening. We stayed all day Saturday and left Saturday evening, and didn't have access to internet the entire time. I totally forgot about 750 words, but around 11pm as we were crossing the Missouri-Illinois border, I realized I was an hour away from losing my streak and we were hours away from home.

In desperation and with a total lack of integrity, I called Eric (a suitemate) and had him copy 750 words of text into the website at 11:45. It ended up being a mish-mash of something about engineering, but it counted.

Another time, me and Danny were getting ready to go to a hangout at 11 and this hangout was guaranteed to go well past midnight. With people waiting on us, I typed out a hurried paragraph about what a cheater I was and copied and pasted that paragraph twenty times until I had 750 words.

Another time, we were driving home from a trip to Panama City Beach (during which I had periodically secluded myself to maintain my streak) and we had been in the car all day so I hadn't had a chance to get my words in. At 11:30 I started to get antsy. At 11:50 we pulled up to the dorm and I sprinted upstairs to slam my words out in 9 minutes. I don't remember anything I wrote, but I doubt it was profound. Regardless, the streak was maintained.

As my streak mounted, the website's analytical abilities began to dissect my personality. It told me I was an introvert, anxious, often upset, and obsessed with death.

But I didn't really care. What I cared about was the slowly climbing number in the top right of the screen that gradually inched its way up to 50, 60, 70 .... 78 days in a row.

And if you've been feeling anxious this whole post, sensing the foreboding tone sprinkled in every line-- well, the train's pulling into the station.

Yesterday, May 18th, I forgot my words. And the 78 day streak came to a screeching halt.

I didn't have any significant excuse. I took a long nap, I spent a lot of time sitting around... I told myself to buck up and get writing three different times. I had the time. I didn't forget. I have no defense.

But my 78-day streak is over.

So now I'm an egg again. In three days I'll be a turkey. Two days after that I'll be a penguin. It's going to be a long time before I get to albatross level again.

But in my brief moments of clarity, sometimes I see that that's not what this about.

It's about building a habit.


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Note: This post is 922 words. I'm on a 1 day streak.

Half Marathon

There isn't much more to say about Ocean City right now. Me and some friends leave on the 5th, which is still 3 weeks (to the day!) away. But in the meantime, we're sitting around gazing at textbooks wishing we were already there. I wish I had something else to say about the summer, but there actually isn't anything.

But I don't want this blog to be lifeless in the meantime, so I'm going to do an update.

With pictures.

Just like the good old days.

But shorter.

Segue.

Last Saturday I ran the Chicago Spring half-marathon. That was more or less the biggest achievement of my last few months.

When I was writing my New Years resolutions, running was on my mind and so I sort of haphazardly tossed "Run a half-marathon this Spring" onto the list.

I tried to run when I first came back to school, but sometimes I have the willpower of a small animal and so I quickly gave up on this attempt and hibernated instead. That worked well until Dan brought up the Chicago Spring Half-Marathon and I realized that my vague but good intentions were going to become a reality.

That was like a month and a half before the half-marathon. I resolved to begin training and then waved running aside week after week with my tiny animal paw.

Then all of a sudden it was three weeks before the half-marathon and I hadn't started training. So I began to run with all the determination my hibernation had been saving up.

I scaled up way quicker than I thought I could. I used the demeaning strategy of telling myself each workout would be way worse than the last one.

"4 miles? That's longer than the longest run you did during Track. Just think how much your lungs will burn."

"6 miles? That's 50% longer, and you were dead after 4 miles."

"8 miles? You've never done that before in your life. You're going to start walking."

"11 miles? Ha ha ha ha."

And while experienced runners around me told me how foolish I was for scaling up this quick, I relished in the satisfaction of realizing each run wasn't quite as bad as I had told myself it would be.

Then all the sudden things went south.

I took a 5 mile run after the 11 mile one and was almost immediately hit with severe shin pain. I've gotten shin splints easily in the past, so at the one mile mark I did a careful evaluation of the situation, assessed the state of my body ... and kept running through the pain.

That evening, I could barely walk. It was all the pain that had grown familiar during high school basketball. During basketball I hadn't done anything to take care of my shins and had just taken it easy. But I didn't have the time to take it easy now. So I went to Google and popped in 'causes and treatment for shin splints'.

There were a variety of factors that could cause shin splints -- worn-out tennis shoes, wearing flip-flops constantly, pointing your toes in when you run, running on concrete, scaling up your running distances quickly. These all had one important thing in common.

There were several treatments too, like icing or stretching or getting new shoes. But the most important thing every website said was, "Rest your shins!"

I didn't have time for that! I had a week and a half. So I iced my shins, took ibuprofen, bought new shoes, and stretched several times a day. Even the dumb-looking stretches.

My dad says this works.

And I tried to keep doing short runs to stay in shape, which was entirely counterproductive. After taking the three days before the half-marathon off altogether, I woke up Saturday morning with deep aches in my shins.

So I gave a farewell kiss to my kidneys, took six ibuprofen, and crossed my fingers.

In the end, modern medical marvels worked magic and the drug overdose buried the pain in a haze until after the race. The day turned out to be pleasantly cool, Dani and Danny came along to watch, I got the time I wanted, and the race actually went fine.

Or, at least not quite as bad as I had told myself it would.

Ocean City 2012

One of the things that the staff and upperclassmen in Cru always rave about -- definitely the event they rave about most -- is this summer missions trip (called a Summer Project) in Ocean City, New Jersey. Each Cru campus basically partners with a different Summer Project where they try to send most of their people. Northwestern is partnered with Ocean City.

Starting in the fall of my freshman year, I've had Ocean City recommended to me more times than I could possibly count. But last summer I wasn't sure that I thought the project was a good use of time. It would take up almost the entire summer, I would have to support raise to go on it, and it seemed to be nothing more than a homework-less hangout for a bunch of college kids with nothing better to do. So instead I went to work in Nebraska.

This year I had Ocean City recommended to me with no less intensity. People have been talking about it almost since we first got back on campus. After a lot of skeptical conversations, I finally started to see the intent behind the project and the good it could offer. I had seen it as a fun hang-out time with a little bit of worship and Jesus time thrown in to justify support-raising, but the picture they presented was a lot more intense.

For starters, everyone's expected to get a 40-hour-a-week job, and they're expected to work towards sharing the Gospel with their co-workers. Not only is that a big time consumer, that really intimidates me because I tend to shy away from bringing religion into relationships. Then in the evening downtime, there's several of different things that happen.

A couple nights a week there's big group meetings where the team encourages each other, worships, talks about what's going on and generally builds community. On other nights there's discipleship, training in evangelism, or small group meetings. And throughout the week, and especially on weekends, the team goes out on the beach to try to share the Gospel with strangers.

I got a little taste of stranger evangelism on Big Break, a Cru trip to Panama City Beach over spring break, but everyone says that there's just an unbelievable amount of faith-sharing in Ocean City. This scares me right now, and I feel really uncomfortable about the idea of butting into a stranger's life to drop off my worldview, but I can't argue with the Bible and I'm hoping to get over my insecurities to be able to talk about my faith more confidently.

This is kind of a long-winded introduction to what Ocean City is about. It's a summer of learning about evangelism and God, getting pushed to be proactive about evangelism, learning leadership skills, and building a community centered on God.

I'm going to use this blog to prattle about what's going down this summer, so if you're interested in what a summer spent with a bunch of college kids talking about Jesus looks like, stick around!