Strategy Shows

The most subtle things so often slip by unnoticed, scuttling underneath our eyes, passing too quickly for us to spot them. People move in blurs, rushing from one activity to the next in a constant stream of color...consequently, staying inconspicuous is not hard a job for these little, lurking things.


Today, I sat in a patched leather chair, staring across an oak desk at the 30 year Army Reserve secretary who was processing my military ID. I swung my legs back and forth in the silence as he typed and photocopied various items, and my eyes traveled this way and that sporadically around the room. Bored, I started reading the posters that decorate the tan walls. After visually sorting through the massive amounts of Army paraphernalia, I eventually studied a picture of a familiar looking stadium framed in blue and white with lights shining in all directions. I quirked a small smile to myself as I recognized Beaver Stadium. Looking closer, I read the silver text sharpied on the blue poster: PSU vs. USC...the Rose Bowl. Slightly awed, my eyes bounced down to the small numbers just barely peeping out from behind the team names: PSU- 24. USC- 32...


At first I thought it must have been a sharpie typo. Why would anyone so proudly display such an epic poster that depicts Beaver Stadium in all its glory, if only to contrast it with the dismal failure of the team it represents? Puzzled, I lifted my eyes to the large, ostentatious words tacked to the top of the poster. "The greatest SHOW in College Football."


 ...show. This is why we have this poster taped to our tan walls in our mediocre offices while we spend hours on hours of tedious time performing mediocre jobs. Penn State, the formally number one party school in America, puts on the greatest SHOW in college football. Who cares if we win or lose? You should come to OUR school. We put on the best faces, the best music, the best entertainment, and the best reputation of a good time. We do all this better than any of our rivals. Propaganda? Rhetoric? Want to convince people that PSU is the best? Just subtly change the definition of quality. So what if we don't crash into the enzone with victory at our heels? So what if we don't rule the Big 10?


 Penn State: the greatest SHOW in college football.

I never would have noticed those small, silver letters if I hadn't been sitting in that chair, watching the clock tick time away.

In Kneed of Time

I’ve been suffering from this chronic knee problem now for three weeks. Three weeks ago today, I couldn’t finish my 3 mile run because the pain was so severe. I haven’t run since.

            For some people, being injured is like a bad dream. We think we’re invincible, and that this obstacle is some sort of fluke. When we don’t wake up, however, we get confused, and that confusion leads to frustration and anger. Funny thing about frustration…it seems to impede logical thought.

            Every worst outcome that could possibly occur (including being chased by a wild bear that catches and eats me because I can’t run away) has filled my mind since I stopped running. What if I lose my ROTC scholarship over this? What if I’ll never run again? I’m a wreck most of the time, falling victim to this melodrama that has sucked the luster from my life.

           

            This is why it’s always a profitable thing to have friends who aren’t retarded or emotionally unstable.

            They are sympathetic, but they all know, or assume they know, that this is a phase from which I will recover. Aaron has been throwing remedial advice at me, from icing to elevation to knee braces to literally throwing Advil at me, and I take it to heart. Hannah doesn’t have much to add besides her personal conviction that cookies solve all existing problems. Allyssa tells me to stop whining and toughen up; they aren’t going to drop my scholarship, I’ll recover, and we’ll all forget this happened.

            Logically, I suppose they’re right. Injuries heal, important people give other people time to recover, and three weeks isn’t a lifetime. The only problem is that pathos can be so much more powerful than logos…especially in my own head. 

P.S. This isn't a great post about rhetoric. I just wanted to whine about my knee...pathos and logos just happened to hop on the bandwagon. Speaking of P.S., Hannah asked me what P.S. meant other day. I thought that was pretty cute.

Dorito Dog

Disclaimer: I am aware of the unavoidable redundancy of this piece considering the popularity of the topic. I simply do not take enough pride in my creative, original ingenuity to be above utilizing said topic for my own benefit. That being stated, I continue.

Hopefully most self respecting Americans remember last year, the same time and situation; Sunday night Super bowl. Let me take you back there…

Friends and neighbors are crammed into a badly decorated sitting room that smells like pizza and popcorn. We revolve around the 72" TV, the most important component of our night. Chip fragments are scattered across the floor; empty soda cans, tipped and untipped, litter all surfaces. We are messy and loud enough to break ear drums, but the atmosphere of the party isn’t suffocating or overbearing, even though everyone is trying to talk over each other to be heard. Suddenly, we are all fixated to the screen.

Suitor hands flowers to the pretty lady. Pretty lady smiles flirtatiously and allows him to enter the house. Pretty lady motions to the couch and orders little boy Jaylen to “play nice.” Suitor greets Jaylen (Hey, little man!), sits on the couch and reaches for the orange chip from the clear bowl on the coffee table…

*SLAP*

Jaylen: "Keep your hands off my mamma, keep your hands off my Doritos."

An instant classic! The sassy clip became a YouTube sensation. People chortled over that slap for weeks to come. If you hadn’t seen the video during the game, you had seen it by the next day. It was by far the most popular commercial of the night.

So Last Sunday I watched a fat little pug race towards a sliding glass door towards the man flaunting that little red triangle of a chip with not a small amount of expectation. As the 10 pound dog bulldozed the door and the man into the ground, I chuckled with the rest of the room, but wondered also if this commercial met the expectations of the viewers. I also marveled at the spring board Doritos had erected for itself last year in developing this reputation for hilarious commercials. In fact, every Doritos commercial that hit the screen this year had us clutching our sides, riddled with laughter.

Doritos. You have status. We will always be perched on the edges of our seats awaiting the hilarity that must ensue from your TV ads. God forbid you fail to meet the standards, because if you don’t, the quality of your product will logically decrease over the following months. All your worth lies in this comical medium. 

T(a) = Q + A

 The white scrawl of the chalk as it flew across the board crystallized the TA’s presumably accurate representation of the 4 step function with unapproachable authority. “F prime x is equal to f(x+h) – f(x)/h…”

Our heads cocked like boxer dogs, section 007 of MATH110 gawked at the length of the equation he dismantled. I’m no mathematician, but my limited mind still toyed with the idea that there had to be an easier way to compute the prime of F(x). In fact, didn’t Mr. Hager show us an example of that exact calculation? “D/dx is equal to N(x) to the N-1 power when F(x) equal x to some N power…” Yes! Of course.

My hand shot into the air, a question and an answer on my lips.

I’m juggling the concept of an exigence, defined as the call to change, or a problem that can be resolved or changed by discourse. The situation in which I detect some flaw in the presentation of my Math recitation leader, I think, is an exigence. I felt the need to correct him with my words and my own presentation of an argument; that our lecture professor had presented us with the correct way to solve this problem. Now perhaps the recitation leader had a reason for showing us the four step concept instead of the shorter method, but I gave into the urge to use my words to begin a discussion, from whereon he could have let me know the reason for his actions. Otherwise, I would have done him a favor by improving the quality of that day’s work. Either way, a change would have occurred; I would leave enlightened, or the class and the TA would. An exigence existed, I responded with rhetoric, and both parties contributed to the solution.

In the end, by the way, I was right…