The other night Liz Burke encouraged me to start a daily log of sorts here on the site where I just ramble about whatever’s on my mind.  So, here is the debut of this amazing new feature to my site.  It will give me an opportunity to showcase my witty tongue, so to speak.

I just got done with a nice four-day weekend.  It’s been a while since I’ve had four straight days off from everything.  Last time that happened was Easter break, if my memory serves me.  In all, I accomplished very little, but I did get a chance to unwind a bit.  Laziness is the key to any successful weekend, and I did just that.  Example.

I noticed that when I left college in May, I weighed about 215 pounds.  At the end of the summer, I weighed 198.  Just over two months later, I’m up around 217.  I have gained 19 pounds since college started, apparently.  What is to blame?  Hmmm… six meals a day, five snacks a day, one minute of exercise for every ten hours of TV watched, and lack of stairs.  I eat about six meals a day, I figured, if you count a bowl of Ramen a full meal.  Then there’s the incessant snacking on my box of 360 Butterfingers I bought at Sam’s Club.  I estimated one week that I watched ten hours of TV, and besides walking to and from classes, I spent about one minute doing actual exercise.  (That was the day I was going to start doing sit-ups.  Obviously, it fell through.)  Even in the dorms, I had stairs.  Three flights in fact, that I had to walk every day several times.  Now it’s flat ground from our house to the buildings on campus.  For the love of God, someone come over to my house and pry my ass of my computer chair with a 2×4 and lock me out of my house!  During the summer, I didn’t exactly join the US decathlon Olympic squad, but at least I stood a lot.  And that walk from the employee parking lot is very uphill.  I only ate about one, maybe two, meals a day.

Monday night I went to Sioux Falls with a group of friends from college, and no, it did not include Chris Ahrendt or Brandon Hanson.  Here at DSU almost all my activity involves one of those two, but not this time.  I am expanding my small group of friends here at college ever so slightly.  It’s funny how that all works.  Not so much ha-ha funny.  In high school I was friends with everyone in school (all 75 of us).  Everyone knew everyone.  At Valleyfair I was friends with all my co-workers, probably because we were all forced to be around each other all the time and it seemed best I get to know everyone to make for more pleasant working conditions.  But at college it is much different.  Here, I actually would have to go out and meet people on my own.  I have many acquaintances here, but not very many people I would consider to be great friends.  If I wanted to go bowling or something, Chris and possibly Nick Sandbulte would be the only two people I would feel comfortable asking.  If I were in Minnesota, there’s any number of people I could consider.  I could get a mix-matched group ofJon Wivell, Kim Weber, and Ryan Carlson and we’d have no problem.  But at DSU it’s much different.

Every time I see a really good movie, I get super inspired to write a script of my own.  It happens very often.  After a movie like “Pulp Fiction,” the creative juices are really flowing.  The other day I saw “Adaptation” and decided I had plenty of great ideas for a movie.  I decided to write my own at 2:30 am.  I decided I’d start with something very random and uninteresting and go with it, and maybe I’d think of a good story as I continued on into the night.  Well, I failed miserably.  But it is my life’s ambition to write a movie script, and I think sooner or later a great idea will come to me and I will make it happen.  Then I’ll talk Luke Katuin out of retirement and we can make the movie ourselves.

In case no one noticed, I am the news editor for the DSU Trojan Times.  The “news” editor.  We don’t have news here, so I typically write about my friends.  Then, those stories fall into a section other than the news.  Then one week we really did have big news.  DSU got a new president, and I was of course in charge of it.  I wrote the story and it made front page.  When you pick up the college newspaper, Ryan Glanzer is the fist name you see.  I got to thinking about the movie “Van Wilder” and how Tara Reid did all that research on Van, trying to make front page of the graduation issue.  I slapped together some crappy notes and turned in a story in fifteen minutes and made front page–for the sixth week in a row.  Go me.

That’s all for Wednesday.  I hope you all enjoy my column and check back tomorrow for more.