A Dude's Guide. . . to everything

Eagle Eye

by Richard

I have come to a stunning conclusion. Gather ’round, dudes. This is going to be earthshaking. The conclusion is this: I will never understand teenagers.

You know, looking back on that one, maybe it wasn’t so earthshaking after all. But it’s still true.

We had another long drive full of fun and games (I drove, Zippy the Monkey Boy texted his maybe-possibly-he’s-hoping girlfriend and watched movies) (What? I can only take his driving at high speeds for so many days in a row.) Actually, this one was rather interesting.

Most times, long drives consist of tremendously long, tremendously boring drives along interstates. Well, considering we’ve been doing between Nowhere East and Nowhere Slightly-Less-East, interstates don’t really figure into it all that much. We drove through a whole bunch of small towns out in the middle of nowhere. It was actually pretty fun, getting to take a look at a section of the country I normally never see. Had we not been on a deadline to get to Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, GA, I’d probably still be out there driving very slowly and stopping and then driving very slowly again. It was a great trip.

Anyway, we alighted in Statesboro and had a nice dinner in a college bar where, I’m guessing, college students take their visiting parents for dinner. College type food and very little in the way of a bar.

Anyway. The reason I’ll never understand teenagers came to light during the tour. Georgia Southern is a nice, mid-size to large school with about 20,000 students. It’s about an hour or so to the beach (the one and only of Zippy the Monkey Boy’s criteria), so that’s all good.

The tour was a bit. . . different than most of the ones we’ve taken this week. The guide — who was well-spoken, knowledgable and personable — basically walked us around the campus. We only passed through a couple of buildings, mostly to get some air conditioning relief from the near 100-degree heat. Georgia Southern has a 700-acre campus and we toured through in less than 45 minutes. Good campus, just  quick tour. Again, all good.

Still, it has no marine science program. Based on what I’ve learned of him during the last week or so all said he’d start acting snarky and dismissive. Not so fast, my friend. He loved it.

It was a beautiful campus, with smallish lakes, lots of trees and a serious hankerin’ for putting up new buildings and renovating old ones. The entire time, Zippy the Monkey Boy kept smiling and nodding. When I asked him why he liked it, I heard nothing about the new library, the very nice freshman dorms, special programs for kids with diagnosed learning disabilities. Nope. He liked it because, “I like it. I like the feel of it.”

Can’t argue with that.

Now we’ve just got to find a way to tour University of North Florida and the University of Florida and then we’re done. (His mom and I are quite excited about that one. We’d love to have at least one of our little dudes go to UF) Of course, we still have to start Sarcasmo on his way toward applying to schools, considering he should be attending a college next year. It never ends. Thankfully.

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More Than A Rooster

by Richard

So, Zippy the Monkey Boy and I roll up into the bustling metropolis of Conway, SC, and the first thing that comes to my mind is to roll down the windows and listen for the sound of dueling banjos. ‘Cause, dude, if I hear the first string pluck, I was so far gone out of there they wouldn’t even know we’d been there.

Fortunately for us, the hard-pounding, deep, throbbing (you know, I might have been away from home and the loving comfort of the arms of She Who Must Be Hugged for a bit too long) bass line coming from the car’s speakers drowned out any unelectric stringed instruments.

The hotel I’d picked on the internet was located off the side of the, and I used this word advisedly, highway all by itself. I mean, it was the Bates Motel done in post-modern Soviet bloc architecture. Still, the room was air conditioned and relatively clean. Good news.

Now here’s where I talk about how dumb I can be. I’d looked up Coastal Carolina University and knew it was relatively near the beach and located in Conway. What I didn’t do was to look about 15 miles east. Turns out, the university is right next to Myrtle Beach. Motto: Just like Daytona, only smaller and with fewer redeeming values. Still, Zippy the Monkey Boy and I did have a good time wandering around and seeing what was what. But more on that later. It’s long past time to talk about the tour.

To start with, the campus is small. Beautiful, but small. Which was not a bad thing. With only 8,000 or so students, it was a good size. Zippy was immediately taken with the scenery, the buildings and the fact that the university actually owned it’s very own barrier island set aside purely for marine science research for the students. Now that got him excited.

I was excited as well, but mostly because I’d just hit the part in the CCU brochure that talked about how much it cost to send an out-of-state little dude there for school. It’s, well, it’s a bit of a shock. Still, I did like that they showed some extensive work on possible scholarships offered there. These merit scholarships are given automatically to kids who are accepted and meet certain marks on the SAT, GPA and other abbreviations and suchlike. Something to shoot for.

What impressed me most, however, was the size of the dorm rooms. Those things had 10-foot ceilings and three beds inside each two-person room. I know. I was depressed at first, as well. I figured they were going to be stuffing three dudes in a two-dude room. Turns out, they offer the extra bed as a (and, no, I’m not making this up) guest bed. Just in case. The students can send them back and get an extra desk if they want.

Our tour guide this time out was fantastic. She was erudite, engaging and did a great job of communicating the enthusiasm she felt for the school.

All in all, it was a great visit and leaves Coastal Carolina University high up on Zippy the Monkey Boy’s list of schools he’d like to attend. We also learned something new. Coastal Carolina University’s mascot is the Chanticleer. The thing looked like a rooster, but Chanticleer? Never heard of it. So we looked it up. Turns out Chanticleer was a rooster, known from certain fables, mostly those surrounding Reynard the Fox (a Germanic and French folkloric trickster).

And now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

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Cougartown

by Richard

mwraarrr!

Yeah, dude. Cougars. You know you gotta like dat! Yeah, we– Wha-? What do you mean not that kind of cougar? A mascot, you say? Not a, you know, cougar, but a cougar-cougar? Oh, yeah. Right.

Sorry. Got a little carried away there. So, yeah. Zippy the Monkey Boy and I made it to Charleston, SC, after a nice, relaxing five-hour drive. Loads of good times. In fact, I even forced Zippy to do a little driving on the way. And, yes, that was forced. He wasn’t happy, but he did a pretty good job merging onto the freeway and driving (sometimes through rain) for about an hour or so. But boy was he tense.

Anyway, at the end of the trip, we spent the night in a nice hotel in downtown Charleston and then headed out to visit the College of Charleston, mascot, the cougar.

CofC is a bit of an odd duck for a university. It’s situated right in the middle of downtown Charleston and the main campus is, really, quite small. The actual instructional buildings, however, are spread out within the city and are not all concentrated on the main campus. The student dorms, the cafeterias, the new science building and a number of other facilities, all are on city streets. It makes for an interesting setting.

Oddly, CofC is actually a state school, something of which I was unaware until we hit the actual information session. Only about 10,000 undergraduates attend the school (along with approximately 2k graduate students), leading to an optimistic average of between 23-25 students per class. Speaking of averages and ratios, this is another school with a great female to male ratio for Zippy the Monkey Boy. Approximately 60 percent of the student population is female, while the rest are males. Not a bad ratio of you’re a male, yeah?

College of Charleston has one of the better-regarded marine science programs on the east coast and even has a special learning center outside the city devoted to the subject, all of which Zippy loved. He also couldn’t stop talking about how much he loved all the Spanish moss hanging from the huge oak trees dotted across campus and the city. Said it reminded him of St. Augustine in Florida, one of his favorite places.

The tour itself wasn’t so great, but that’s probably because I’m old. Our young tour guide said either um or uh probably every fourth word and fully half of her sentences ended in a rising inflection, indicating a question, rather than a statement. I realize that’s something only an old person would get irritated by, but, well, it did irritate me.

Still, it’s a nice college, situated in a great city. This one is definitely on his apply-to list.

Now we’re off to Conway, SC, and Coastal Carolina University, a setting that makes Greenville, NC, look like Metropolis and Gotham combined.

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