In honor of "Dead Week"...

So it is Dead Week in Ames this week, and for some reason, I got to thinking about the way Dead Week used to work--I have no idea how it goes any more.

Anyways, once you got to the week before Finals, everything had to be quiet for 23.5 hours.  The only exception was 10-1030pm where the noise restrictions were lifted and pretty much anything would go.

Of course, it's important to realize that in an 'academic' building, things were usually quiet, and Foster House was in between an all-girls floor, and a group of uber-nerds on the floor above (Nelson).  Nelson took their studies wayyyyy too seriously and would complain throughout the year about conversations they heard through the bulkhead-like walls of Westgate or music being played or any number of things.  --I can still name people who lived on Stalker, Lowe, and of course, Foster, but the only name I remember from Nelson was Yvette Louisell, and I remember her because she murdered a paraplegic and now lawyers are arguing she was a minor and should be released because she's paid a 25-yr price.  ...makes me want to vomit.  So anyways, no one from Nelson ever did anything social.  Ever.

So it was the winter of 1987 when we invented a new sport that burned like a meteor, played furiously for a week, then forgotten.  The game was Hall Ball.  Yes, a very original, unique name.  Westgate's halls were only 7-8 feet wide, a narrow corridor, extending for maybe the equivalent of half a city block.  The game involved however many people were around trying to kick a basketball from one end of the hall to the opposing end.  There were no other rules....which meant tackling was fine.  Elbows, gouging, everything, which was all the better given that there were 12-16 people playing.  Ahhh, the noise was enough to even bring about the wrath of the girls living below us.

Do people do these sorts of things now?  I remember we'd go in groups of 8-12 to get pop at KwikShop (and I remember one person at the end of the line drinking everything before reaching the register and then not paying at all...funny how that was amusing then and now strikes me as ethically unacceptable)

I also made sure during Dead Week and Finals to do a couple extra shifts over at KUSR--Ames' Best Choice for Rock and Roll, though now the station is KURE and soon they will be moved out of Friley Hall to locations unknown.  Maybe reading about that triggered the urge to write this.  I don't know.

What I know is that I lived with the greatest collection of personalities the world has seen.  If you are one of those and read this--you are loved.  If you are not reading this, you're loved, too.