I got you. Just when you wrote me off and thought "great, after only a week and a half he has already run out of material", I return. I left my dorm to walk to the grader's office this morning, and had no idea on what to write about today. I have a few feature ideas, but I can't very well post features every day can I? "No, Chris, we want to hear more of your observations about your everyday life." Great.

So I leave the dorm fresh out of ideas, and after 1 minute of walking I encounter the most recent bane of my existance. [in slow, stoned-out, hippie voice] "Hey maaaaaaan. Fill out a postcard to protect our national forests, maaaaaaaan?" [end stoned-out hippie voice]. For the last month, no matter where I go on campus he is there. The path between the rabbit and Mallinckrodt? He is there. Inside Mallinckrodt? There too. Under the underpass? Yup. I even saw him on the Delmar Loop one day.

And it's not just him, he has a whole army of minions who do his bidding and pass out postcards when he isn't around. One day I was late for class so I was running through Mallinckrodt when I was accosted by a female compatriot of his. After standing right in my path and blocking my way, she gave me the same song-and-dance about how if I fill out this one postcard our entire world will be much better off. I politely declined and tried to be on my way, as I was already 10 minutes late, but she would not let me by. I tried to move laterally, but she sidestepped along with me. I tried to move forward, but she would not give an inch. Finally I managed to wiggle around her and keep going, or else I may have remained there in stasis all afternoon, under the control of the hippies.

Solicitation on campus is nothing new. Unwashed, dreadlocked hippies are preferable to the cavalcade of credit card corporations that frequented Mallinckrodt and Wohl in past years, but not when they barricade my progress to class and are seemingly everywhere at once. The whole situation begs a few questions:

Do any of these people have jobs?
How are they filling a petition with the same people filling out postcards? Shouldn't they move to different areas?
What would they do with my personal information once they obtained it?

and most importantly:

Are postcards printed on PAPER the best way to save trees?

This last one is especially vexing. Wouldn't an online petition on some official website be much more informative and much more environmentally-conscious? They could do IP logging in order to make sure the same person doesn't fill out the petition over and over from the same computer. It would be so much more environmentally-friendly, and I would be able to walk to class in peace and on time. Now that would make my world much better off.