My Life as a Journalist: Part 5 — With Friends Like These
There are countless other fond memories I have from working at The Battalion.
The people I worked with at The Battalion, such as Andrew and Adan, were more then just co-workers, they were friends.
There’s the trip to San Antonio to compete with the rest of the paper at TIPA. While the actual competition was a great experience (I won first place for a television commercial I storyboarded), the real fun was had “off-duty” — from drinking too much on the Riverwalk and spending the rest of the night insisting on doing a terrible Christopher Walken impression to checking out San Antonio’s famous haunted railroad tracks and, disappointed with the alleged phantasms, covering Aaron with baby powder so he could jump out of the bushes and scare people with his stark whiteness.
I even had my own unexplained mystery when, after doing a traditional Mexican Grito on the Riverwalk, a stranger on a passing tour boat called me out by name to compliment my yell. How he knew my name, I will never know.
There was the time my friend Jay tazored me to research a column and then there was the time the Tazor corporation sent me an e-mail informing me that the word “tazor” should never be used as a verb. Well, they can go and tazor themselves.
There were the celebrity interviews I got to do — ranging from me from calling the director of “Nacho Libre” a racist because he hired Jack Black to play a Mexican character to me driving to Houston for the morning so that I could hang out with the stars of “Clerks,” a film I had grown up idolizing.
Other heroes of mine I had a chance to talk to because of my job include Bruce Campbell, Neil Gaiman, Brian K. Vaughan, Richard Cheese, Doug TenNappel and Kinky Friedman.
Other great memories include the Batt parties such as the Crystal Pepsi Taste Party in which I gathered a group of friends together to each drink a shot glass full of a 16-year-old soda I had bought off the Internet, the Risk Party in which two of my closest friends almost got into a fist fight over the rules of one of the most confusing board games ever devised, and the countless karaoke parties in which I discovered that some of my male co-workers can sing Britney Spears songs really, really well.
There was a reason I spent so much time in the newsroom — the people I worked with. I guarantee I would not have stayed at the paper as long as I did if it wasn’t for the friends I made in the Battcave. These are the memories of college that I will always cherish.
From the Chik-Fil-A bitch-fest dinners with Stacy and Adan to the wonderful lifelong friendship I cultivated with Andrew (a guy I started off unable to stand) to the summer Nishi taught me that a vegetarian dinner could actually be delicious to Allison helping me find the keys to my car so I could drive home when I was obviously falling-down drunk (I didn’t die and it gave me a great story to tell) to Evan and Wade taking pictures of me in various forms of pain to Aaron and Whitney and I spending New Year’s Eve watching Saddam Hussein execution footage on YouTube.
For those I didn’t mention, rest assured I did not forget you — I merely ran out of room.
Some of my greatest memories, though, involve a man who would, over the course of four years, be transformed from somebody I was genuinely afraid of to one of the top five people in this world I admire: Mr. Ronald E. George.
To be continued…
