On my first college road trip ever, and it just happens to be Pancake Day.

Pretty freakin' sweet, considering that I spent 13 hours in a car for 11 waking hours in Liberal, KS. Jeff, Annie, Tim, and I all headed west for the grand festivities of this Shrove Tuesday. We left at noon yesterday, and spent the night at Jeff's parents' house (they happen to be super nice, by the way; they will receive the Church of Beer's highest order, just as soon as we, uh, think it up) where I realized that I am, indeed, a cookie addict (to go with my other status as a brownie whore). This morning, we dined on pancakes that really had quite a bit of soaking power, and watched as another KU grad student, Henry, gave a speech as England's official representative to Liberal for the day. Then we headed downtown to watch the series of pancake races held under sunny skies and in perfect temperatures (perfect, we believed, for what could be world record times). At noon the feature event, the international women's race, ended with the front-runner tripping 20 feet from the line, and the winning time in Liberal was five seconds slower than the time recorded in Olney, England, six hours previous, thus snapping Liberal's seven-year winning streak. Fortunately, this did not dampen our barbeque lovin's, and we then piled back into the car for the 6.5h trip back to Lawrence. A fantastic time with my best friends and some good food and the international brotherhood of running with breakfast pastries.

On a completely unrelated note, I wanted to amend my column that ran in today's Kansan; in my submitted version, the following paragraph goes in right after 'And, please, for the love of Tonya Harding, stop taking it all so damn seriously.' The editors are perfectly in their right to cut down as they see fit (they also made stylistic changes that I in no way take responsibility for, as always), but this passage makes a larger point that I wanted to discuss in addition to the others presented.

Lindsey Jacobellis fell in the final seconds of her snowboardcross final. She had a sizable lead on her Swiss opponent, and coming off the next to last jump, she pulled a method air, went off-balance and nearly wiped out before recovering to her feet and finishing with a silver medal. Her actions were treated with unimaginable disdain; to the journalists watching, she should have gone straight and narrow down that course, won her gold medal and waved her flag while giving a Wheaties smile. That she is still one of the top snowboarders on the planet doesn’t matter; that she and her fellow extreme athletes operate by a less, shall we say, stringent notion of athletic behavior is seemingly forgotten in the media. It’s not surprising, though, as it was forgotten by our society long ago.

And on another completely unrelated note, I am less than two weeks from the end of my yearbook career. I not only have to design 70 pages in the next twelve days, but likely come up with most of the pictures for said pages. In other words, I will be dead by 13 March. That, or I'll have an I.V. pumping maple syrup straight into my veins.