Hi everyone! It’s Joan Rivers here at the Apocalypse, where it’s not just a parade of the damned, but of the damned good looking! I can’t even tell you how hard it is to get in these gates, but luckily we’re inside where I’ll be keeping my wrinkled, corpse-like finger on the pulse of what’s hot and what’s not.
While planning my trip to Uzbekistan, I imagined many possible scenarios for what this country would be like. Most of them involved camels, naan, irrigation and Soviet-induced ecological catastrophe. Somehow, the predicament of being compelled to pick fruit while wearing a polka-dotted skirt and strappy sandals was not one of the images I had in mind.
Climb down the Exorcist steps. Take a romantic stroll around the monuments by moonlight. Climb the John Carroll statue. Eat a Chicken Madness. If you don’t, you may be a terrorist.
Sounds of giggling and squealing are leaking through the hall as the couple next door play around with the vibrating, coin-operated bed. I’m sitting in my room at the Hotel 69 doing homework, automatically making me the biggest loser in the building. It doesn’t matter that everyone else in the building is porking an aging hooker, it still has to be more fun than memorizing characters from a textbook by the dim lamplight.
Massive blocks of concrete are toppled into a giant heap, thick wires stick out at strange angles and bright blue Port-a-Potties outline the ruins. The site is entirely unrecognizable. The debris of Veteran’s Stadium, piled several hundred feet high on the asphalt, amounts to an estimated 70,000 cubic yards of material.
“No thank you,” my mother said politely declining the joint a scrappy twenty-something stoner offered her. To some, it might seem bizarre to have complete strangers offer your parents drugs. By this point in the evening, though, nothing could faze me.
If someone had predicted this situation a mere week earlier, I would have bet my very life against them.
I see it. I am on a path toward it. Nothing will deter me now. With arms shaking under a load of acrylics and wool knits, I look straight ahead and imagine myself there-at the red and orange clothing rack across the room. The obstacles ahead present a challenge: meandering customers with wandering eyes, glancing at the shiny white walls in search of the perfect evening ensemble, a smart suit or a sales associate to assist them with their shopping needs.
Last Friday, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger cancelled a lecture just hours before he was scheduled to arrive in Gaston Hall. In a letter sent to campus media, Ambassador Howard B. Shaffer, Deputy Director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, wrote that Kissinger cancelled after learning of a planned protest by GU Peace Action.