Saturday, Sept. 8
The Quad
12:30 p.m.

I was abruptly awoken late Saturday morning by the subdued sound of the doorbell. Since it was my neighbor who was loyally abiding by his promise to accompany me to Fall Fest that day, I decided to actually get out of bed and get dressed. I also dragged my roommate out with us.

As we approached the Quad, the smell of hamburgers, hotdogs and charcoal and the sound of a pretty decent rendition of a Duncan Sheik song filled the air. At least I thought it was a Duncan Sheik song.

Being that it was around noon, the three of us decided to get the free lunch that the Program Board had provided. I grabbed a complimentary bottle of Dasani and a – hopefully – freshly cooked hamburger. It wasn’t the best meal of my life, but it was free and better than Burger King.

We found a shady patch of grass to sit down on and observed the craziness that was our surroundings while we ate. In one corner I saw two guys beating each other up with foam boxing gloves in an air-filled arena. It looked like fun, but I decided I would be a pacifist today. That, and I couldn’t convince anyone to fight me.

After eating, I decided to relive childhood memories from various fairs and amusement parks. That’s right, the cotton candy. My neighbor, a study abroad student from England, asked me how Americans have such nice teeth while growing up on snacks like cotton candy, funnel cake and frozen snow cones.

There was also a game in which anyone could be a bowling ball. All you had to do was sit in a very confined-looking round contraption and then proceed to get pushed down a path so that you could knock down several foam pins. I wondered why anyone would do this by choice, especially after eating the loads of sugar found in funnel cake and cotton candy.

I saw many people jumping to great heights and flipping themselves in circles on a massive trampoline that took up much of the area. The line for this attraction was especially long.

My interests were really in all the free stuff that I could get my hands on. I was a little disappointed in Tower Records because I noticed a lot of the CDs that they were handing out were the same CDs from last year’s spring festival. I still joined the frenzy and picked up as many as I could from obscure artists I did not know.

Around 4:30 p.m., GW students flocked to the stage as soon as Redman was introduced. But I decided that I was much more comfortable sitting on my patch of grass in the shade under a tree.

I’ve never been a fan of hip-hop, and this became all too obvious when I realized that I didn’t even know who Redman was. I didn’t even know which person on the stage was in fact Redman. But that didn’t really matter since I could not see the stage from where I was sitting anyway. All I knew was that this supposed musician liked swear at us.

Everyone went crazy when he would call us inappropriate names starting with “mutha.” I grew rather tired of it and didn’t understand why he was so popular. He seemed to talk only about weed and women, and I grew very bored of it very quickly.

Sadly, I decided to leave Fall Fest early. Despite my disdain for the musical act that was chosen for this event, the sweltering heat and my wonderful but unhealthy overdose on sugar, it wasn’t that bad of an afternoon.