Christmas Decorating

All over campus, the signs of Christmas were popping up. Starbucks had their annual Mint Mocha’s coming out, McDonald’s extended holiday greetings, students scurried past, thinking about finals, and the long Christmas break coming after them. There was even a Santa Clause on the corner of Maryland Ave. and Rollins, ringing his bell next to the Salvation Army stand and beckoning to all the inhabitants of Greek town to disgorge their parent’s money into it’s happy red coffers.

Gonga trudged happily across campus as well, toting his accordion and sending glorious Christmas melodies dancing across the frigid air. He loved seeing all the Christmas lights showing up on the buildings down town; the brilliant window displays, the greenery and wreaths. He reveled in the joy welling up for the occasion.

One day, venturing a litter further south than normal, Gonga noticed one spot lacking any spark of Christmas. Old dorms next to the hospital were being knocked down to give room for some expansion project. The carefully fenced and screened area was only a pile of rubble, with huge machines crossing and re-crossing, bent on their task of demolition. From the hospital, one could see the tops of the cranes weaving back and forth, and the heavy bucket of the digger rising and falling rhythmically.

Colored flags waved on top of the cranes, and blinking lights flashed, warning the medical helicopter of their position.

Gonga took one look at those blinking lights and knew that he had to bring Christmas to that place. He spent the afternoon scouting out the largest Christmas wreath he could find. Then he bought dozens of strings of icicle lights. As soon as it grew dark, he strolled down to the construction zone.

The gates were locked, but Gonga didn’t even bother. He heaved the monster wreath over the fence and crawled after it, hauling his pack of lights. Using all his ape-like skills, he scaled one crane, attaching a cable to the top and hanging the wreath. Then he climbed the second crane, stringing up the other end of the cable. After that it was only a matter of sliding out to the wreath and stringing icicle lights all the way across the cable.

Gonga worked quickly, stringing the lights down bother sides of the cranes in magnificent festoons. He grunted happily as he worked. There were no lights like these back in Congo!

Finally he reached the ground and scurried around the construction zone with the final end of the extension cord in hand. After scouring the area for roughly fifteen minutes, he found an extension and inserted the plug.

The lights flashed on in a dazzling imitation of ice.

Grinning marvelously, Gonga swung back over the fence and darted across the street the top of Parking Structure #7. From there, he relaxed against the hood of car and observed his Christmas decoration with satisfaction.

Gonga’s Thanksgiving

Gonga managed to Skype his family in from Congo on Thanksgiving day and spent a miserable time trying to imagine his Pumpkin Pie was half as good as the roasted termites his family so exuberantly enjoyed on the other side of the ocean.

After finally saying goodbye, Gonga mournfully pulled out a piece of paper and began drafting a list of the things he was thankful for.

1. Publishers who update their editions every year. This means students have to choose between buying the new expensive editions, or choosing to buy used.
2. Professors who require more than one textbook for their class.
3. Publishes who pay professors to require more than one textbook per class.
4. Students who drop their books in puddles of water.
5. Students who sell their books back to The Textbook Game instead of giving them to a junior classmate.
6. Students bored enough to stand and listen to Gonga’s accordion playing.
7. Even better, students who throw money in Gonga’s hat for his accordion playing.

I felt the urge to add a few items myself as I gazed on Gonga’s handy-work later that night.

8. A warm costume in which to mascarade.
9. A mask which securely hid my identity.
10. A mission much bigger than simply selling textbooks.

Overall, it was a good thanksgiving day. My superiors had contacted me briefly, confirming that they were actually paying attention to my movements and were please with my performance to date. I even managed to slip home for a quick bite of turkey and stuffing with my family halfway through the day. What more could I want?

How To Not Lie, Cheat or Steal

Your mother has probably pounded into your head the idea that you should not lie, cheat or steal. If she has not, hopefully you have had several run-ins with the law and have now learned how not to lie, cheat or steal.

However, in the small probability that you have not yet learned those all valuable lessons, Gonga has a few suggestions to pass on to you.

If you are wearing a bright red T-shirt that says, “The Textbook Game,” do not walk into an insurance company’s headquarters and tell them you are from the IRS and they need to show you all their financial records. Your T-shirt communicates very quickly that you are lying. If you want to lie about being an IRS agent, at least wear a business suit and come with a posy of similarly dressed friends to try to collect bogus taxes.

There are ways to cheat, and there are ways to not cheat. One way to not cheat is simply Googling for the solution manual for your textbook and then neglecting to verify that the manual matches the edition actually used in class. At bare minimum, you should crack the textbook just enough to make sure the problems are the same. Also, do not copy and paste from the online format. Most html formatting is slightly different than word documents and if you submit the homework electronically, the grader will be able to tell that you copied and pasted.

Stealing is a whole different topic. The best example of a way to not steal is taking your room-mate’s textbooks down to The Textbook Game to turn in for cash, forgetting that your room-mate is working overtime as a cashier at The Textbook Game during finals week. Sneaking the books out of his room was one thing. Trying to convince him to give you the cash from the cash register, when he recognizes the doodles on the cover page, is quite another. At least find out which shift he works so you can avoid him!

Not lying, cheating, or stealing in these ways would be quite an accomplishment. And Gonga is sure that your mother would be proud of you. (Even if you totally ignored all her instructions and have just now figured it out.)

Gonga’s Financial Advice

Gonga had worked at The Textbook Game for quite a while by now, and the shoebox under his bed was beginning to overflow with crinkly new $20.00 bills.

He watched another handful of coins clatter into the hat sitting in front of him as he played his accordion down at Speaker’s Circle. The wind swirled past, picking up leaves and swirling them in on top of the coins. He was glad no one was throwing in dollar bills at the moment. They would just blow away.

The whirling leaves made him think of a book he had leafed over a few days ago while checking in at The Textbook Game before work. The wind was whirling the leaves away, just like inflation was whirling away the value of money.

The value of money!

Gonga sat up straight, his mind racing back to the shoebox under his bed. He could almost see inflation whirling through his room, picking up the dollar bills and swirling them out the door.

In near panic, Gonga finished out his day of accordion playing then rushed back to his room just to make sure the bills were still safely stacked under his bed. He shivered a little. He could still feel the invisible tendrils of inflation creeping in a stealing away his money bit by bit. How could he stop it?

Investments! That’s what he needed. Something that would earn faster than inflation could take away. He pulled up the browser on his computer and went to check his local bank for savings account rates. The best he saw was .0001%. Yes. That’s the same as .000001. Amazing. Next he checked CDs. Not much better. The money market accounts offered about 0.10%, or 0.001. Clenching his teeth, he pulled up the inflation rate tables. It showed 1.14%. He could feel the icy wind sweeping through the room, ripping bills out of his box, out of his pockets, stripping the warmth from his blood.

“A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow,” Gonga whispered to himself.

That was that.

He closed the browser and turned away from the computer. “A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow.” He smiled sardonically.

“So what do I do with it?” he mused. He chuckled slightly, “Spend it now while it’s worth something!”

“I think, therefore I am.”

This is the sort of statement that Gonga discovered one day as he was paging through one of “The Textbook Game” books which he had been commissioned to advertise.

It made his scratch his head slightly. He didn’t have to think. He just knew he was. The whole idea of thinking hurt his head, so he pictured a big ripe banana and a tall glass of milk with Nilla Wafers instead. He smiled. That was better.

A few pages later, he realized the author was asking whether it was possible to be sure you were not dreaming even if you didn’t know if you were dreaming.

Dreaming? Was he dreaming right now? Maybe that’s why the book was so confusing. Gonga decided to put it down. He wanted Nilla Wafers really bad. Was that just a dream also? Maybe he was asleep and all he would have to do to get those Nilla Wafers was to wake up, and they would be sitting right in front of him.

I switched out of my Gonga mindset. He was a useful projection of my imagination, but he would never fully grasp philosophy. After all, he couldn’t even figure out that he didn’t really exist!

I, on the other hand, was fully aware of how the world operated. I put on the Gonga persona when it suited me, but always, in the background, my own mind was still thinking, still working.

Long ago, I had slogged through Rene Descartes’ philosophy as he questioned the existence of everything. He had concluded that he knew he existed, because he knew he was thinking. I thought that was funny. He spent reams of paper trying to argue logically whether or not he was really awake, or in a dream, and how he could know whether or not he was dreaming. I pondered it for about two minutes and then concluded that he must have been dreaming when he wrote all that stuff; which is why Philosophy class still seems so much like a dream to students today.

Gonga roused himself and closed the textbook. With a grin stretching from ear to ear behind his plasticized face, he went into the kitchen and pulled the Nilla Wafer box off the top shelf. Now he knew the answer. “I eat, therefore I am.”

Bandana Power

Continued from “First Sighting of Zombies”

Gonga stared at him in bewilderment.

The man with the orange bandana wrapped around his arm brandished his nerf gun impatiently. “Come on, hand over your ID so we can input you in the system. You’re dead, game over.”

I shifted uneasily inside my gorilla suit. ID? What did this strange nerf gun wielding college student want with my ID? I don’t care how big his gun is. He doesn’t need my ID unless he’s law enforcement of some sort.

“And what’s with the costume?” The gun wobbled menacingly. “Didn’t you read the rules? No face masks this time around. You’re not allowed to hide your identity.”

That was it. No college student was going to demand my ID and see it without showing some sort of badge to go along with his request. I lunged to my right, darting towards the columns, and the howling mass of people milling around Jesse Hall.

“Dude, come on! Seriously?”

I kept running.

One of the milling figures on the outskirts of the crowd pointed my direction and shouted.

Instantly, a horde of people wearing bandana’s tied around their heads charged surged away from the main group and came pouring towards me.

I froze for a second, unsure of where to turn. Then I realized they weren’t running at me; they were running towards something behind me. I turned and saw my nerf gun toting pursuers faltering. The leader took two more steps. Then he shouted something angrily, shaking his fist in my direction before turning and skittering away as the first of the horde reached me.

“Ha-ha, look at those stupid humans run!” someone in the crowd shouted in delight.

“Zombies rule, zombies rule!” someone else chanted.

“Cool costume.” A girl with a pink and black camo bandana tied around her head paused in front of me, hands on hips. “You look like a real zombie with that mask and everything. But you know they’ve changed the rules, right? You’re not supposed to wear masks. Don’t let the mods see you or they’ll get your ID and have you suspended.”

More talk of IDs! What was this crowd’s obsession with IDs? No one was going to get my ID. Nor would I get suspended for doing something I am paid to do. Namely, walk around in a gorilla costume advertising for a bookstore.

Of course, the T-shirt was turned inside out at the moment. And I wasn’t exactly “on-the-job.”

If you had to choose between a detour and a frolic, it would be hard to convince the courts that this was merely a detour from work and I should be compensated for any injuries received as part of my job.

I decided it was time to find a way out of the horde, away from the nerf toting bands that circled the perimeter of the horde, and go back home. Getting hurt on the job was one thing. Getting hurt because you were pretending to be on the job when you really weren’t was quite another.

I took off my bandana and stowed it inside my costume. That seemed to be the key. Now I was invisible.

Gonga strolled away from the Zombie horde circling Jessie Hall. He passed invisibly by the nerf gun toting Humans darting around the fringes and continued a blissfully uneventful walk back to his house. That was more than enough adventure for the night!

First Sighting of Zombies

Gonga had just finished a long day of playing the accordion at Speaker’s Circle to advertise for his employer. I was ready for adventure, anything out of the ordinary. But Gonga simply trudged home and stowed the accordion under his bed. He sat for a minute with his head in his hands, replaying the events of the week before. One night on top of the engineering building was enough for him.

I remembered Yellow Bandana, shouting at Pete to go home and get his gun.

It was all like a bad dream, quickly fading away.

“A yellow bandana,” I smiled to myself and looked in the mirror. Gonga’s shaggy face peered back at me with his typical plasticized expression. I kicked open the door of my closet and reached into a box on the top left shelf. A bright blue bandana came out. I rolled it on itself and wrapped it around my head.

Gonga looked good in blue. He grunted appreciatively at his reflection, remembering his days as a youngster in his home country, dancing late into the night, decked in bandanas of every hue.
He walked out of the house, breathing deeply of the night air.

A light fog trailed through the alleys, giving the street lights an eerie glint. Gonga looked up at the full moon doing its best to outshine the lights. Even the moon looked green compared to normal.

Gonga drifted along the streets, gravitating towards the columns on campus; his favorite spot on the whole University.

Then he heard it.

A roar.

Of some tortured thing.

Or many tortured things. It was pulsing through the air, varying in intensity, but never ending.
He paused at the north end of the quad, looking towards Jesse Hall. Indistinct shapes surged around the building on all sides. The roar continued. Gonga eased closer.

People were milling around Jesse Hall. At least, they looked like people. But they were growling, roaring, howling, as if they were mad.

Unconsciously, the hair on the back of Gonga’s neck rose. He sank to the ground and blended into the shadows.

“Die,” someone hissed out of the darkness. A flurry of foam darts followed the statement, pelting Gonga.

In surprise, he leapt to his feet.

A band of five darkly dressed figures with bandanas wrapped around their arms brandished nerf guns.

“You’re dead, hand over your ID,” one the figures declared, stepping forward and holding out his hand.

To be continued.