Well I have a story to tell you all about my life as it was on Tuesday, September 23rd. This was a momentous day, as you all know, because The Fire Theft came out on CD finally along with Holes on DVD. It should have been a joyous day.

But alas for me, it was a day of woe and turmoil. But I learned a valuable life lesson from it. It happened like this, see:

If you were ever a kid once and your parents saved up some money and took you to Walt Disney World you know that when you got there you nearly peed and pooped your pants while simultaneously bursting your skull because of the immense magic of it all. Mickey and Minnie and Goofy and Donald and all of them, strangely mute and stiff and bulbous, but nonetheless FRICKEN’ REAL AND ALIVE would come up and hug you and you’d get their autographs. I was a religious watcher of Disney cartoons and movies as a child. Now 20 (that’s right… 20! 20… 20), I have the exact same love of those characters and what they represent… fun. I recieved an email detailing the Disney College Experience and I decided to have a look at it. I arrived to the meeting on Monday night and had a magical time with Tiffany and Bobby, the hosts of the meeting. They were both Disney World employees and were generally very jovial. I decided that I liked it so much that I’d sign up for an interview the following morning. I signed up to go in at 10am, a full hour before I had to work at Panera.

To make a long story take painfully longer, I got home that night only to find that my Manager had called and wished that I come in at 8am instead of 11. Well, I said that I had an interview at 10 and asked if I could leave work for an hour or so for it and she said that it’d be no problem. So that’s what I did. I got very little sleep since I stayed up late like I usually do and then I got up bleary-eyed and trudged into work. I had a good time making sandwiches for a little while and then I took my break to have the interview. I drove over to campus with my bike in the back of my van, and with less than 6 minutes before I had to be in the building having my interview. Well, I, uh, couldn’t find a parking space in several parking lots… including this horrible gravel pit one with deep potholes. I was already out of time so I JUST PARKED and got my bike out and rode like the wind across campus to Saddlemire and ran up to the 3rd floor for my interview. I calmly handed over the yellow paper I was supposed to bring to the secretary. “Did you bring your application?” she asked. “Crap.” was all I could think and, “No.” was all I could say. “Oh well, that’s no problem, here, I’ll let you use this computer and see if you can get this application filled out quick.” I breathed a slight inward sigh of relief. I logged on only to find out that the application takes 45 minutes to complete. “Crap.” was all I could think. I filled it out at the speed of light and actually finished the thing in about 10 minutes. I triumphantly printed the application off, smirking to myself that I had beaten the clock. Soon thereafter, Bobby showed his face and said “Hi Joel”, “He remembered my name, oh man, I’m a shoe-in” I thought to myself happily.

About 20 minutes later I was out of the interview, having done a decent job I thought, hopefully enough to woo Bobby’s heart.

–::(to be continued in a bit…)::–