The Daring and Extravagant Alex Hairston

Today, I shall relate to you a story for the ages. I guess when I say ‘ages’, it might mean ages 4-11, because I’m not sure if anyone older than that will appreciate it.  But on we go on this roller coaster adventure.

Here’s the thing: My roomate Phil and I decided that we were gonna go to allllll the activities in the ward, including, but not limited to: iceblocking, pizza parties, ice-cream socials,fondue parties, service projects, softball games, flash-light volleyball, and even scavenger hunts. Yeah, I said it. Scaa-venn-ger–hunts. I know what you’re thinking, because Phil and I were thinking the same things: I do not want to go to a scavenger hunt.

Let me explain to all of you what this type of scavenger hunt entails. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean chasing rainbows and finding elves; it doesn’t mean finding fifty doll hairs dollars after looking for the next clue. This particular scavenger hunt involves me, and six other people, going onto the BYU campus and finding things that some anonymous Wizard-of-Oz person made up. When we find that particular monument, we take a picture with the whole group huddled around it. For instance, one of the things we had to find on campus was a caffeinated beverage. Guess what? BYU doesn’t sell anything with caffeine on campus. Not only does this effectively eliminate my diet-cola fix every day, but it also doesn’t sit well for a scavenger hunt. Also, we had to take a few pictures of us running and doin weirdo things. Here are some examples:

Anyway, so were trampin’ across campus and there’s this very steep, but short grassy hill. There are a group of eager spectators watching SOMEthing go down this hill, so we stop to investigate. One of the guys who’s standing there says to me, “Are you guys freshman”? My reply was a condescending “no.” I made sure to add extra oil and vinegar to that emphatic ‘no,’ just to make sure he got the point. So he said, ‘Oh, well we are, so we do stupid things.’ As if it weren’t already self-evident. But alas, here I was participating in a scavenger hunt, so what could I possibly say to the kid? Anyway, he tells us that him and his two buddies were gonna back up, run about 20 feet, and jump headfirst down this hill and see what happened. They told us to watch. So they do it. Well, one of the kids is flying down that hill so fast that he ends up backwards. at the bottom of this hill was a lush garden filled with flowers, and surrounding it is a nice, thick layer of landscape curbing, aka cement. So the kid flys backwards, and his head picks up some centripical force or whatever, and slams into the curbing.

game over.

Well maybe not over completely. He still gets a number of back-up lives I’m sure. But here’s the thing. His skull was definately cracked, and blood was definately flowing out of that crack. Another guy takes off his white shirt, puts it on the kids head, and the shirt fills up with blood within like 30 seconds. I’m not totally freaking out, but I can see there should be a sense of urgency. So i go ahead and call the paramedics, as they like to be called. They take a good country minute to get there. And the kid seems to be in good hands, although Allstate might disagree with that statement. We decided it wasn’t good for our health to sit around and wonder what happened, so we took off to our next objective. And on with our mundane, extravagant lives.

I hate freshman. And not all of them, no, no…not all. But when these guys were preforming their high-wire tricks, they had a crowd filled with young girls who admired everything these guys did, down to the way they blinked. So these dudes were out to impress the females, and soon found out that their stunts revealed what they really are. People incapable of making a logical choice.

Indeed, the urge to impress truly imprisons us. After all, ‘it is much easier to resist the first urge than to say no to all the following ones’

So yes, I went on a scavenger hunt. And yes, it was sorta a lame thing to do. But no, I didn’t try to impress anyone, and no, I didn’t crack my head open. So thank goodness for that.

BYU. sheeeesh.