The Drunk

As I've mentioned in a post before, it's always a bit funnier when someone isn't completely in their right state of mind.  Inevitably, people's reactions to events around them will be considerably different from the reactions they would have in an entirely sober mind.  That being said, I ran into a rather fun woman last night.

The Background
First I have to explain the lead-up to this or it won't make any sense at all.  I had been over at a friend's house whose air conditioning and heater have serious issues and as such I had taken my shirt off while there to try to cool down.  When I left to go home, I simply didn't bother to put it back on.  On the way home, at roughly 11:20pm, I had to stop and get gas.  There happened to be a Redbox at that gas station so I started my pump and walked over to it.

The Event
It was as I was looking through the Redbox that I first noticed her; a woman was walking her dog down the sidewalk towards the gas station.  Bear in mind that it is nearly midnight, so a woman walking her dog alone is far from ordinary already.  As she nears my car, I walk back towards it from the Redbox which was a good twenty or so yards away.  As I got closer she saw me coming out of the darkness so she scrunced up her eyes and looked at me really hard.  She then opened her eyes wide and the first thing she said to me, I quote, "Really, dude? No shirt? You must be drunker than me!" Which of course immediately explained to me every weird thing about her walking her dog in the middle of the night.  We then had a wonderful little conversation about her puppy and how he's sick, and what I had rented from Redbox and that it should be a lot of fun and then we bid each other farewell and I continued home slightly more amused than I had been ten minutes earlier.

The Undie Run

Setting a World Record
This Saturday I had the opportunity to be a part of something big.  Something awesome.  Something so freaking fun I could scarcely believe it was happening.  Roughly 3,300 people showed up at the Galivan Center on Saturday night wearing nothing more than their underwear and shoes to participate in the Undie Run.  It was an attempt to break the previous world record of 550 people running in their underwear through town and we beat it by having over 2,500 more people than the previous record.

My Part
I got a group of about ten people to come with me to the Undie Run and we had quite the fun time.  There were six of us who were wearing nothing but a pair of boxerbriefs and a cape each.  It made quite the impression I'm sure.  As a group, everyone who came to the Undie Run ran from the Galivan Center up to the capitol and back again.  After we returned we were spoken to by Rocky Anderson and the afterparty began.

My Favorite
My favorite part of the Undie Run was not the people in the Undie Run themselves but rather the reactions of the people watching.  It was very clear who approved and who disapproved of this particular kind of protest and that directly influenced how they reacted to it.  Many people cheered us on, laughing excitedly, and most of them videotaped the run as it passed them by.  It was the people who disapproved that were the fun ones though.  The fact that everything we were doing was legal meant that they couldn't tell us to stop or get us in trouble.  So the majority of people who were unhappy with the run would just glare at us.  They wouldn't say anything to us, even if we spoke to them, they just ignored us.  Which of course to me was no less funny than anything else they could have done.  Offending people on purpose is generally a bad idea, but I feel a certain level of discomfort can always lead to a lot of entertainment.

The Utah - USC Game

Oh, what better place to observe human hilarities than at a college football game?  Specifically, the University of Utah - University of Southern California game.  Which, by the way, was supposed to be an easy win for USC and ended up almost being a win for us; rather it would have been a win for us, had we a quarterback who isn't mentally deficient from time to time.  Argh, that's all I have to say about the game itself, it still irritates me to think about it. 

The game itself doesn't really matter anyway, my focus here is the tailgate.  Holy cow, USC has one of the biggest tailgates I have ever seen! There are people everywhere, virtually half of the campus had to be covered in people.  And props to the roving Utah fans, there were WAY more of us there than I expected.  My friends and I even made the local news, but that had a lot to do with the fact that we had giant red and black letters painted on our chests. 

The funniest part about messing with people at the tailgate is the fact that, even though they were playing against us and making fun of us, most of their insults, even those that were actually intended to be offensive, were far from it.  The majority of the people there clearly knew absolutely nothing about Utah, save for the one fallback joke: the "aren't you all mormons" joke. Which is confusing because were I even Mormon I still wouldn't find that offensive, I'd probably be proud of it.  However, even that joke fell short for us as not a single person in our group of 10 happened to be Mormon.  We got a lot of jokes about "not being allowed" alcohol in Utah and so we quickly began playing that one up; we would run up to a tailgate, point to their drinks and act like we'd never seen them before... the best part about it was that people believed us! They actually thought that it was illegal in Utah and far be it from me to quash someone's beliefs.  I guess the most amazing part to me was how easy it was for someone to believe something outrageous when they already wanted to believe it.  I convinced a couple people that I did in fact have 6 wives waiting for me at home and that I was looking to pick up at least one more before heading home... after all, I didn't drive 700 miles just for a football game, I'm coming home with another wife in tow too.  They found that hilarious and a couple of people even tried to offer me their friends.... I almost accepted a couple of them. 

All in all, I think I've realized that the best place to observe people is a place where they just let themselves go.  It makes for much more interesting stories and kept me entertained for hours.

The Naked Man

My inspiration for this blog started with a man I noticed on campus one day.  Now, the title of this particular posting is a little bit misleading because he wasn't naked, but he was in fact changing clothes.  Outside.  In broad daylight.  In a flowerbed.  Now normally, if you're stuck somewhere and you need to change clothes I can understand the occasional public change.  If and only if however, you took some care to, oh I don't know, make it a little less obvious.  You see, when I walked up, all he had left to put on was his shirt, so it wasn't a huge deal but the fact that he was changing clothes isn't what made things weird.  It was the fact that he felt it necessary to stand in a flowerbed to do so.  I mean, if he had found a bush to hide behind I could understand but he was standing in nothing more than mulch and petunias; not exactly going to hide much now is it?  I just thought it was exceptionally odd that when faced with the prospect of changing in public he just went ahead and did so... but still felt the need to have some semblance of shame or decency or whatever it was that made him step into a flowerbed that hid nothing from anyone.  Oh well, at least he tried.