March 10, 2006

• I’m going to try to start a new feature here called “Weird Thing I Saw Today.” I guess this is some half-hearted attempt to stave off boredom by convincing myself that interesting things are still happening in my life. Of course, this’ll likely be a catastrophic failure, but I’ll try it anyways. I’m going to do two today, since I came up with this idea yesterday and I saw something weird yesterday.

  
  

   

  
  

  Weird Thing I Saw Yesterday: I was driving downtown on my way to Medical University of Ohio (where I’ve started a volunteer internship). I was stopped at a red light at one particular intersection when right in front of me, a bunch of guys wearing combat fatigues (complete with helmet and Kevlar vests) and carrying guns came out of a store and headed for an abandoned skyscraper across the street. They took up positions around the building like the police or SWAT team would in a hostage situation. I was kind of confused about why they were there (since I didn’t know at the time that the building was abandoned), but I knew it wasn’t anything serious like a hostage situation because the street wasn’t closed. It turns out that there’s a Marine battalion in town for the next few days and they’ll be practicing “urban warfare” during that time. So, ultimately there’s an explanation, but it’s still weird.

  
  

   

  
  

  Weird Thing I Saw Today: There’s a family in one of the houses behind me that consists of a middle-aged woman, one or two adult/college-age daughters, and a teenage son (Well, okay, the house directly behind us is owned by a drug dealer; for the purposes of this story, I’m talking about the house next to the drug dealer’s). We don’t know them at all (they haven’t lived there very long), and we rarely see them except sometimes on the weekends when they do yard work. I’m not even sure the daughter(s) live with their mother, but I know the son does, because I can see his bedroom (which used to be the back porch) from our kitchen. At around 7:00 tonight, my mom and I could hear a bunch of commotion coming from this house. We looked over and noticed the son in the backyard with about 20 other teenage boys, partying away. We couldn’t tell exactly what they were doing because our next-door neighbors recently put up a high privacy fence. With all the commotion we thought maybe the mother went away for the weekend and the son decided to party. I started to be reminded of your average Friday night at Denison. We went upstairs to watch from my parents’ bedroom, and noticed that: 1) the mother was home (she kept coming outside and talking to the boys) and 2) there were at least ten more boys there than there were when we first noticed the party (and I’ll have you know that their yard is TINY; these boys were absolutely jam-packed into it). Then we finally could see what they were doing. Apparently these boys were holding boxing matches, complete with gloves (but no pads or helmets). Two of the boys would fight while the others would crowd around them and yell at the top of their lungs (some of them had video cameras and taped the whole thing). I heard one of them say something about the “UFC,” which, to my knowledge, stands for “Ultimate Fighting Championship” and not much else (unless someone else knows something I don’t). My mom wondered if they were engaged in the boxing equivalent of backyard wrestling. By 8:00 there were almost 50 boys (and a few girls) in the backyard, and more were arriving. My mom finally got fed up and called the police, who wanted to know if the boxing was a “sanctioned event” (um, considering it’s a bunch of 16-year-old boys, I’d say no). Once the cops showed up, a bunch of the kids took off running across the field that’s next to their house, but the cops did manage to break up the party, save for about 3 or 4 guys that were apparently gonna spend the night. Everything seems to be quiet now.

  
  

   

  
  

  Well, I was also gonna post a book review, but my weird story took up so much room that I guess it’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

  • 11:22 pm
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