Elections! SPINNEY TESTS?? Wait...they dance here?

If you ever thought that voting in presidential elections was a big deal, clearly you have never experienced the PHC senate elections. It’s impossible to walk anywhere on campus without someone stopping you and accosting you with the overused phrase, “WHO ARE YOU VOTING FOR?” I quickly learned the easy fix to this problem that kept everyone semi happy. “Sorry, I don’t vote.” It disappointed many, but at least I didn’t have to pick and choose between different people and risk getting hazed if y decision didn’t satisfy absolutely everyone. Chrabby did, however, endorse someone for Senate. The lucky recipient of our fabulous recommendation was none other than Brodi. DUTY, HONOR, JUSTICE!!!!

The best part came later, though. We were coming back from dinner, look up onto the wall of our lobby and realize that our fabulously kissed-up poster has disappeared. We were at a completely loss as to who would have been as cruel to remove our trophy from our very own dorm. The nerve! And to add insult to injury, a new, clean poster was put up later the same day. We mourned the loss.

But wait! A few days later, I find out that no, our poster had not been cruelly stolen. It hadn’t been censored. Our blatant endorsement had not disappeared forever from us. It now hangs on the door of its rightful owner J Say hello to the freshman legends, thank yaaa.

                Freshman dance? Well that sounds….incredibly homeschooled. Swing dancing?.......NO HOUSE MUSIC? – My thoughts before the famous Freshman Dance of PHC. Not going to lie, I was FRIGHTENED. But I was determined to face the challenge head on. I donned my highest heels, and Chrabby set off for the dance. And who would have thought? We had a GREAT time. Never in my life have I experienced a dancing event where the guys were better dancers than the girls. But hey, I’m thankful for it. (terrible dancer right here.)

When people told me that freshman year was going to be a whirlwind, I don’t think they knew how right they were. Having the freshman dance and a Spinney test in the space of three days was kind of a crazy idea. That weekend contained very little sleep, and a lot of coffee, but as far as I know, our class didn’t suffer any casualties.

A little background: For the past two or three years, I can remember periodically seeing facebook statuses from my PHC friends that contained some combination of the words “Spinney, death, caffeine, and fml.” Not planning on going to PHC, I’d never really paid them much attention. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I feel like I’ve always just innately known that Spinney tests are a big deal.

Flash forward to this week: I never thought that I would be the one posting the desperate Spinney status, and frantically calling my parents the night before to tell them to pray for me. Wow – what a cliché PHC kid I’ve become in the space of a month. (But at least I never succumbed to the whole ‘white board’ craze. I’d say that will never happen, but seeing as I’m here right now, I don’t have much success with statements like that.) The one amazing thing about Spinney tests is that everyone on campus knows what you’re going through. It was a weekend of hugs, prayers, encouraging text messages, coffee from RAs, and chocolate from wing-mates.

When the day of the test finally arrived it was almost surreal. Everyone kind of walked around in a daze that morning, unable to believe that test day was finally here, and muttering about the differences between Spanish and British colonies to themselves under their breath. Normally the whole business casual thing is pretty fun; it forces you to look good at school, instead of throwing on sweats and a baseball cap and looking like a total slob like I tended to do at community college. But some days…specifically the ones with 8am tests, it would just be way easier to wear jeans and a hoodie than to try to put together some kind of outfit. Another great thing about Spinney tests is that when you show up in slacks, a sweater, and a ponytail, people understand. Desperate times call for desperate measures, people. That may or may not include showering the night before, and not doing anything with your hair. To the people who managed to look cute on Monday, I can’t decide whether to hate you or worship you.

In the end, we all survived, and are probably better for the experience. And I think for the most part, it wasn’t as bad as we all thought it was going to be. Congrats everyone, we made it! Time to go outline next week’s Spinney lecture. The next one will be here before we know it, and we’ll get to do it all over again. If I start outlining on a whiteboard, someone please have an intervention.

Don't forget to check for updates on the Spinneyism/Favelism/Chrabby ism pages frequently! And also, if you have a funny story, cool picture, Favelism/Spinneyism of your own, request -- send it to keepcalmandstudyspinney@gmail.com and we'll do what we can to get it on the blog for you :)

I hope you all are doing your homework and studying for that LOGIC TEST! (and not spending all your time reading and cracking up over a new My Hair Is Dress Code post ^__^ )

-- <3 Chrabby

Hello all PHC freshmen! (and other students, if you care to take a look :) )

Hi there!

I definitely just typed and erased about six different intros to start this out. Where do I begin? Maybe an introduction? This blog is going to be run by two different people. The person behind the keys at this very second is me :) Christina. My other half, Gabrielle, will be writing a portion of this post, down there VV. But as for me:

I'm from Sparta, New Jersey. I don't say Joisey (New Yorkers talk like that), but I do say cawfee, draw, and tawk. I'm anticipating a Government major (possibly IPP) at PHC. I like to blog, but unfortunately haven't been able to much lately due to a computer that decided to, you know, crack its own screen (all by itself, of course) and render it unusable until I got it fixed....a month into school. Yes, I worked without a computer. YES it was hard. YES I hand wrote my papers. *CREDIT PLEASE* But I have it back, so we are finally launching the best blog to ever hit the Internet. 

To be brutally honest, I was not expecting to like PHC very much. It was definitely the place God was sending me, but it did not happen without a fight. I was prepared for the worst.  And my first week was DEFINITELY a rough transition. First problem? Dress code. Now I knew about PHC's dress code. I signed a contract. But being dress coded every day for the first week? Not fun at all. Unfortunately, some of my clothes have been retired. But the BEST part of dress code: my hair. What is wrong with my hair, you ask? I SAY NOTHING. But according to some authorities and enforcers of PHC's incredibly high, yet subjective standards, my hair was cutting it close to being out of dress code. I guess no one else has a black stripe in their bangs? No? Either way, I was allowed to keep my hair the way it was, but it sure makes for a great story. Thus, the blog has been named.

The purpose of this blog is this: we want to capture the TRUE experience of PHC. What better way to do that than have two students write it? We will be posting a collection of our own stories, but we also accept submissions if you have something awesome to add. (You can send them to keepcalmandstudyspinney@gmail.com) Also, if you have any Spinneyisms or Favelisms, send them in as well! Any tips on what you'd like to see are always welcome. We plan to put out a blog post every Saturday, probably around noon. 

I’m Gabrielle, the other resident blonde. {{Just to clarify, Christina and I are not twins, sisters, or old friends; we met on Skype a week before orientation, just like everybody else.}} Luckily, I’m just straight blonde through and through, so the legality of my hair has never been in question. Clothes are a different story. I knew stuff was bad when I got asked to change out of the longest pair of shorts that I own. And it was the third time I’d been dress coded that day. [In my defense, they were completely dress code shorts. But apparently they got shorter when I sat down or something. At that point you don’t even ask, you just roll with it, go put pants on and hide out in your dorm.] I used to think my parents were strict, but that was before I came to PHC. At home I didn’t really have a dress code or a curfew. Here I stayed out too late and used one of my 10 allotted curfew passes on the second night of freshman orientation (yeah, before school even started). Probably not one of the smartest things I’ve ever done, but I was still in the process of getting used to having to be in by a certain time. What can I say? I typically make my own rules. But I’m working on getting used to it here.

I’m from the state of New Mexico, where the air isn’t half water, and nobody knows what a “bug bite” is. I’m basically the typical homeschooled kid who decided to ditch mom and dad and get my share of apathy at community college before coming here [where *gasp!* we DO actually have to do the assigned reading!] Funny story, I always swore that I would never go to Patrick Henry College. I almost didn’t even apply. And when I did, I sent an essay on South Park as my writing sample, just to see what would happen. Also, under the section in which we could make the admissions committee aware of any “special circumstances,” I told them that I was actually Lady Gaga. The only explanation for why I’m here is that God has some kind of crazy plan that I don’t know about yet. Guess I’ll find out.

Over our first week together, Christina and I discovered that we had a lot in common. A couple of them were that we both love to study outside, and we’re also terrified of spiders. [Those turned out to be a bad combination.] We got into the habit of studying on the patio outside of D2, and actually got nicknamed the “Lions of Monticello.” The thing neither of us knew is that this campus is literally crawling with spiders. We can generally keep our heads around spiders, unless they startle us, or get too close for comfort. Once there was a big one in the lobby of our dorm, and luckily a security guard happened to be walking by and was willing to kill it for us. A few nights later we’d noticed a spider coming uncomfortably close, and walked to the other side of the patio while someone killed it. After they went inside we looked back at the pile of books we’d left on the ground, only to see an even bigger spider crawling over the keyboard of my laptop. Needless to say, we definitely broke the whole “quiet hour” rule. Three security guards came running over, and rescued the laptop. [In case anyone was wondering, you are safe on this campus. Security is on it!] The next morning in class, the girl sitting next to me asked if I had heard the commotion last night. Apparently a couple girls outside were screaming bloody murder, and security had come out, just to find out that it was all because of a bug. I said they couldn’t have been screaming that loud, because I didn’t hear a thing.

During our first week, and by first week we mean Orientation, we discovered something that we had never experience before. Back home at our respective community college, we would sit wherever we wanted in the cafeteria, and my friends would come sit with us. Here, not so. After going a few days wondering why no one would sit with us, we were told something very educational by the upperclassmen of PHC. There is a loser side of the dining hall, and apparently we always sat in it. We quickly learned to NEVER sit there again. It's bad enough that they serve alligator meat, let alone make you worry about where you sit...

A couple weeks ago, we had our first brother/sister wing event. It was actually the first time we found out who was even in our brother wing, and I guess that our RAs have a “if you make a low first impression it can only go up” kind of mindset, because the event turned out to be having breakfast together at IHOP at 8am on a Saturday morning. When we stumbled out of our room at 7:59, in sweatpants, hoodies, and bed hair, we were a little embarrassed that all of the guys seemed showered and groomed. Great first meeting. As we sat at IHOP and waited for the waitress to bring our coffee, one of them even asked us why we looked so tired. [[Guys, not an awesome opening line, just for future reference!]] But once we had caffeine in our systems we were ready to have some fun, and we decided to tell the waiters that it was one of our brothers’ birthday just to mess with him. So we snuck over and pointed out the guy, and managed to sit back down at the table with mostly straight faces. In a few minutes the IHOP crew came over, holding some kind of breakfast version of birthday cake, and ready to sing. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to us, it actually was one of our other brothers’ birthday! So the cake and song quickly got redirected to the actual birthday guy, as we sat and watched in shocked confusion. In the end it was all good; even though our joke completely backfired, hopefully it made the actual birthday guy happy. And we kinda basically deserve “favorite sisters” status for that one.

If you haven't noticed, there are two links up above this post titled "Spinneyisms," "Favelisms," and "Chrabby-isms." You may have already guess what these are and investigated them, but if you have not, HAVE A CLICK. They are pages dedicated to quotes that we deem worthy. Obviously, Drs. Spinney and Favelo are worth quoting any given day, but why, do you ask, have we been so vain as to add our own ism? It is simply because: we think we are funny, and we want to share that with you :)