Guest Blog: Blair Allen

I had never really thought about how many homeless people wandered Franklin Street until last weekend when I was pestered for “spare change” countless times. This got me to thinking about why all these people chose Franklin Street to sleep on, rather than some back street that was unpopulated. I obviously understand that Franklin Street is populated, but even these homeless people honestly believe that college kids have extra money to give can they? I came to the conclusion that these men and women are so common on Franklin because for some reason college students are most likely to feel sympathy for them, making them more likely to earn some pocket change. Parents constantly tell their kids, “don’t talk to strangers,” but on a college campus there are no parents; only kids who apparently feel sympathy for these homeless people. Homeless people on Franklin have become famous in a sense. Everyone knows about the man in the wheelchair and the man with the dog who does tricks. I know two girls who dressed up as the homeless man and the dog for a costume party. It is not as though were afraid of them, we welcome them and I have seen an infinite amount of people give up the remaining change from their dinner to one of them. There are the genuinely kind people who give to the homeless out of the goodness of their heart, there are the sorority girls who will give if they think someone is watching and they are wearing a shirt bearing their sororities’ name, and I even know a guy who swiped a homeless man into Lenoir to eat dinner. This guy actually walked to Franklin before he ate, found a hungry homeless person, swiped him in, and took him upstairs to eat with him. From what I heard people were horrified. Honestly I don’t know why, because I would be willing to bet that homeless man enjoyed the food at Lenoir far more than I ever have. Overall, I certainly do not mind the homeless people, and never will until I have a bad experience with one. I do not necessarily give money every time I pass by one, but I do try to at least give a friendly smile. When you think about it, they are people just like us; only without the luxuries we take for granted every day.

Planning my life... for the next 4 years.

I guess I would like to start off by thanking my roommate for not coming through on the guest blog for the 3rd week straight. Thanks for waiting for the last minute to tell me that you are not going to have “time to do it because you have an upcoming paper” while you are playing CoD, for the 3rd week straight, because with my lab final and my 4 pages of paper that I figured out that I was going to have to do this morning, I have an excess of time on my hands.
So anyway, what I have been doing for that last day or so is planning pretty much everything I have to do in college to get my major. I basically sat down with my brother and he showed me the best combinations of classes (matching easy and hard classes in the same semester and so on). I think I have everything that I need planned out, well at least the science based stuff that is required for my major.
Looking over what I have to take, semester by semester I can pretty much say for sure that the rest of college is only going to get so much harder than it is right now. Thankfully, I believe that I am starting to get better at this thing called studying that I never ever learned how to do in the soulless buildings they call a high school.
Either way at least I am on track to get my major, I cannot imagine the people that come in undecided and don’t pick out a major for a couple of years in college. I can’t imagine having to take all of the science classes in the last 2 years; it would be something around like 3 or more a semester, with labs and other random requirements that are needed for a major. Anyways, I guess that’s about all I have to say about that, so maybe next week I can come up with a guest blogger.

Dudes be robbin people up in this place!!

I don’t know how many of you have read the Daily Tar Hell today but the head line “Students Robbed at Gunpoint in Dorm” may have caught your attention. It turns out that I know the guys that were robbed, they live in Morrison. They are all really good friends with my suite mate, Kyle, and he goes over there almost every weekend to hang out. A couple of the guys have been over to our suite to hang out and those are the ones that I have met.
The crazy thing was that Kyle was thinking of going over there to watch the NCAA championship game (as freaking horrible as it was) but decided not to because of homework and studying for a test that he had today. That was just crazy that he could have been one of the ones that was robbed at gunpoint.
This just got me thinking about my security here at UNC, and it’s kind of bad. The main thing that keeps people out of the dorms is the key flex pass things, but with the way that students walk in and out of the dorms, I have no doubt in my mind that I could get into any dorm on campus with no trouble at all. All you have to do is be walking behind someone, I let people in behind me just because if you don’t hold the door open then you look like a complete asshole. If the flexpass is the only thing that is keeping people out that is kind of scary.
In the article they were talking about now they are going to lock their suite door, we cannot even do that with our suite door, only 3 of the 8 keys open the outside door, I have no clue why this is but my key is one of the ones that does not open the door so there is no way that we can consistently lock our outside suite door.
Another thing that pissed me off was that Alert Carolina didn’t send out a message. Your telling me there is a guy running around campus with a gun and robbing kids and you are not going to send out one of you fancy little text messages. The article said they caught one of the guys and they were unsure the other one had a gun, it doesn’t matter to me if he does, I would like to know.