F10 Scavenger Hunt #6: Wise words to live your life by...

As I sat in Purity Ice Cream last Sunday, myself and 3 friends came up with a motto that I think we should all start living our lives by.  Be Awesome, Be Funny, Get Bunk Beds.

Be Awesome:
A friend of mine recently applied for a graduate program that she was really excited about, but she had this fear that kept tapping her on the shoulder as she wrote her personal statement saying, 'This isn't your background.  Can you actually get into this program?'  Sometimes we are our own worst enemies, but having a will of iron, she muscled through her statement.  What was her trick?  She wrote the words, 'Be Awesome' at the top of the page she was typing.  In those moments of doubt she referred to the top of the page and kept going.

Be Funny:
Another friend of mine is an actor in New York.  He has a great sense of comic timing.  He said that he often thought of Michael Richards talking about his time on Seinfeld, and the fact that he wrote himself a message above the doorway that he used to make his entrances on the show.  He had written, 'Be Funny' over the door frame, off stage.  It was a simple message, but we commented that this carried the same obvious strength of the 'Be Awesome' message.

Get Bunk Beds:
This weekend, my reasons for being in Ithaca were two-fold.  I was there to help out at orientation for the Spring '11 ICLC students and to attend the Ithaca College All Theatre Reunion, as I am an alum of that program.  Having graduated in 2004, I have been out of college for less than 10 years.  Though I'm not always in amazing touch with my friends from college, most of us have a pretty good sense of where we have all gone with our lives and catching up with one another wasn't that difficult.  It made us feel nice and young.  On the other hand, we were staying in a house that is rented by current theatre undergraduates, and has been the venue for many opening night parties.  Being in that atmosphere, I felt nice and old.  We discussed this fact over our ice cream and kept referring to the film Big, not sure if we fell into the young or old category.  Because we ourselves had somewhat curious and rotating sleeping arrangements in the house over the weekend, someone was reminded of the bunk beds that Tom Hanks had in the movie, and how he invited a woman to stay over and then called the top bunk.  The four of us eating ice cream decided that to really complete our weekend, would should all get bunk beds (ultimately we didn't).

Anyway, we stuck these statements together and came up with an entire motto to live our lives by.  I think this sums up my return to Ithaca this past week, though.  It was awesome, and I laughed a lot, and even though there weren't bunk beds, maturity sunk to a new low when one of my friends was tricked into eating a dog biscuit.  And if this motto fails, there is always old faithful, 'It it's not Scottish, it's crap'.  I would like to thank Mike Myers, Patrick Stewart and the writers working on SNL in 1994 for that one.

Many people have asked Bill and me how our trip to Ithaca was.  For my part, it was great.  I hope everyone else had a good time over Fall Break, too.  To tie this to the scavenger hunt, your challenge now is to find either bunk beds or an oversize piano like the one in Big that Tom Hanks played on in FAO Schwartz (or something like that).