An Evening at Macalester College

Hi! Would you like to see a picture of the worst advertisement EVER for the Christian faith? Here you go, straight from St. Paul, Minn.

It's a run-down school bus that's driving 10 miles per hour in front of me on the freeway. It has a crudely-painted "Jesus Saves" message, along with a horrendous amount of blue smoke pouring out the back. Sorry for the poor quality, but when it's dark and you're driving an automobile (and are smart enough not to try using a flash), things can get pretty tough.

So what the heck am I doing driving around St. Paul, taking pictures that will someday send me slamming into the highway railings? Well, I drove two and a half hours today for a World Press Institute presentation at Macalester College. Then, when I got home, I found out that my brother told my parents some weird story about me working on some story about horses.

My brother shall die.

Anyway, Macalester College is interesting. The "dork on purpose" crowd–the kids who dress like dorks on purpose–is quite amazing. I swear, I was the only one in that lecture hall not wearing glasses of the small, trendy variety.

And just for clarification purposes, I'm not using the description "dork on purpose" as an insult (Except for the girl with the Monica Lewinsky hat sitting in front of me. She deserves to be killed and made into glue). I feel that I, in my way, am also purposely dorky. Either way, I'm certainly not trendy.

But it was nice to feel at ease for once. So for those who hadn't already figured it out: I'm a freaking dork, and proud of it.

But back to the pretty people. Sure, there's good-looking women at Macalester in addition to the purposely dorky, but the majority of people are quite hideous. But it's a lovely kind of hideous. And since ugly people seem to enjoy this column more than others (I don't mean you, reader. I'm talking about all those other readers), I probably should have thought to plaster the college with Daily Ramblings stickers. But Macalester probably has automatic sticker cleaners, or some other unnecessary rich-kid device that can be afforded when you charge your students $28,000 a year.

Sorry, but I had to make one joke about money. I mean, for crying out loud, a student photographer at the event had a camera lens that was and at least two feet long, and a foot wide at its end. Seriously, this lens was $1,200 to $6,000, depending on the features and specs. While I was impressed by the expensive lens, I was not impressed that the photographer decided to use this powerful lens while standing ten feet from his subject. As a photographer, you know something's wrong when your camera and lens are so heavy that you need a pole to hold them up while you take the shot (No joke. I wanted to slap the little moron). But hey, if my penis were embarrassingly small, I'd buy a lens that big, too.

Why do my columns always end in such horrible fashion?