February 2, 2006

So I didn’t get as much internet access as I thought I might while I was travelling. Oh well. This will be quite long, as it contains every thought that crossed my mind for the past five days. Or not. In any case, I feel compelled to use the MORE tag so that this doesn’t take half an hour to load on dialup PCs.

Travelling is fun. The being tired and missing classwork and spending just under an hour chewing through 73 unread emails is not fun. But we consider this a “balanced diet” of fun - that is, for every fun thing you do, you must also do a not-so-fun thing to make up for it. Observe:

Fun - singing in chapel services and joking around with the high schoolers there.
Not-so-fun - wearing the exact same Chorale shirt to every chapel for four days in a row

Fun - sleeping on the bus to pass the drive time
Not-so-fun - waking up with a sore back and (inexplicably) a sore left thigh muscle once the drive time has passed

Fun - staying over at people’s houses every night
Not-so-fun - realizing that the best bed you’ve had all week is the one you have to leave the earliest

Tour is also very educational. For instance, I learned that I can kill Osama bin Laden by drinking Coke. This comes from a conversation about nutrition. One of my good friends, John, has this philosophy about eating healthy: eat whatever you want, whenever you want, so long as you stick to a vigorous workout program. Alyssa, who heard this philosophy, started at that point talking about “anti-odixants” and “free radicals” running around in one’s bloodstream. Last I checked, bin Laden was still free, and still a radical…hence bin Laden is in my blood. However, since we all know that Coke can dissolve nails, and that stomach acid is even more acidic than Coke, we can readily conclude that drinking Coke kills the free radicals in my blood, assuming bin Laden’s not alone down there. He may be protected by trans fats, which are small rail lines (not too dissimilar from Trans-Pacific) in your blood. Presumably Coke can work against these, too. … Don’t stare at me all wide-eyed! It all made perfect sense when it first came up! My rebuttal of the week came when Kristin made some offhand remark about wives making sure husbands ate right. My response was, “Yes, and when one of us gets around to marrying one of you, that’ll happen…until then, let us eat in peace!” (Trust me, it was funny then. We all laughed as if I had just said the funniest thing in the history of the universe. We were also borderline exhausted, if that makes any difference.)

Other opportunities abounded that we’d never be able to do otherwise. While on the road we drove through Chicago and stopped at the Moody Memorial Church downtown. They’re not usually open on Mondays, but we stopped in anyway and managed to get ourselves let in. We also got permission to sing there. They say that if the carpet in the aisles were removed the room would be “acoustically perfect.” The room was acoustically quite good to begin with, so I wasn’t complaining. (One note - their pew Bibles are ESV.) Then Wednesday (I think) we stopped at Notre Dame University and wandered around a bit. (The existential not-intended pun of the week came from their gate worker when the BJU tour bus pulled up - “You must be lost!”) We stopped in the basilica and, surprisingly enough, received permission to sing a few songs in the cathedral. The acoustics were quite good (though a little muddled, what with all the bling on the ceilings for the sound to bounce around), and we even put ourselves out of pitch listening to the reverb from one particularly loud moment. In a story of local interest to the back-home folks, former Philadelphia Archbishop John Francis Cardinal O’Hara is either buried or at the least has a monument in the basilica. In Philly there’s a street named after him, while there’s an entire alcove devoted to him in Indiana. Go figure.

The last hobby of tour is gaining weight. It’s a rule in the handbook that each choir member must gain at least five pounds while out. This is because we go through the rigorous exercise of doing nothing on the bus most of the day, as well as the equally rigorous exercise of ultimately failing to convince our hosts (more accurate, the hostesses) that we’re not hungry at 11p and don’t want a four-course meal right then. Just point me in the direction of the salad bar.

Life went on back in Greenville, though. I see that tomorrow’s highs are to be in the seasonably cool 70s, so not much has changed there. (I’d just like to take this opportunity to say that I hate Greenville. Thank you.) Starbucks was forthwith banned from campus, as so many other various bloggers have reported diligently. Read their debates there; as for me it’s not my place to criticize school policy (though I might have done it before, probably accidentally). I will say, however, that I will be selling Starbucks drinks from both my room and my desk, and that I’m quite tempted to run out to Starbucks right now for something…anything, really. (And before you complain, Starbucks isn’t off-limits. They’re just not brewing their coffee in the Snack Shop anymore. I’ve been assured that this makes perfect sense.) Show me one time that a very small group of Fundies have boycotted anything successfully and I’ll consider not buying their coffee. (And don’t bring up “The Book of Daniel” - we can’t take any credit for that.) Call me fatalistic, but since boycotts almost invariably fail to produce results, and since most of what I buy from Starbucks comes in glass bottles or cans, not styrofoam cups, and since pulling my $10 a month from their coffers will make absolutely no discernable difference, and since the rest of the Fundy community will very likely forget what all this is about in a month anyway, I see no reason to deprive myself of their coffee in the meantime. Bring on the Cafe Verona.

So, depressingly, I’m back in Greenville, SC, wishing I were anywhere but. I have surprisingly little to make up, though I’m sure once I give my assignment sheet a second thorough look I’ll find something else to occupy my time with. For now, I’m fried, and I choose to believe that I’m still on tour, which means no homework.