An Ode to the Branch Campus

Oh, branch campus. I am sorry for all those times before. The times when I would wander around the parent campus aimlessly and the brief and reckless incident of actually living up there just to feel like I was a part of it all. I am sorry for saying your name with a sneer and dismissive eye roll. The list could continue but why waste this time on the painful past?
Miami Hamilton, I love you. I love the way you are so accepting. Walking down these foreign halls and being lost in the crowd of Ugg boots, skinny jeans, and North Face I miss your individuality. You accept us all, regardless of ethnicity, weight, style, sanity, and well, GPA.

I love your classes. How reassuring it is to have the same people with the same major in the same classes semester after semester. Really, what could build a better since of community? The tight knit “all for one and all for (insert major of choice)” attitude is as close to a secret club as socially acceptable. (Real life secret clubs could either be incredibly awesome, or incredibly creepy.) The Professors who know everyone’s name and don’t need those fancy new photo rosters.

I love the way you are so coy with your coffee sales. I never know when I will be able to enjoy a hot beverage and when the coffee shop will be unceremoniously closed at two in the afternoon. Not at all like this easy, quick to please, gauche corporation coffee shop.

I love your food. The food of middle class cafeterias all over America; French fries, hamburgers, pudding from a can, oh the joy! They have sushi here. Can you believe it? Oh and don’t even get me started on the amount and variety of salad.

To say that I miss our time together is an understatement. If I could come back to you, I would. The main campus has the pre-nup on my education now. I will visit, from time to time. I want you to remember the good times we had. The time I spent in your library or in the commons. Remember that time there was a random horse on campus? Or that time someone cut the power to get out of taking exams? Remember all of the snow days we had together? All the classes I skipped, all the classes I went to. All of the crazy and the good and the weird. This is how I will remember you, Miami Hamilton.

DETROIT–General Motors has entered the record books yet again. It is the first automobile maker to send a truck into earth’s orbit.

Early Christmas Eve, GM launched a 2010 Chevy Avalanche—with a boat in tow—from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. According to our source close to the project, it was a move to convey a message of the car’s dependability and to test the Avalanche’s towing capacity under extreme weather conditions. Tom Wickham, a Communications Manager for six GM manufacturing plants, tweeted  “the truck only needed one full tank of gas to make the trek from the earth into orbit. Now that’s some good gas mileage!”

As soon as the news broke, the president of Toyota Motors, the company behind the Prius, was quoted as saying “Oh crap!” while eating dinner with his family for Toyota’s annual Christmas Party last week. “The fact that we sent one of our trucks into orbit should show our buyers that our brand can hold its own under the toughest conditions,” says Susan Docherty, VP of Sales and Marketing for GM. “If this doesn’t prove to people that we have the toughest cars on earth, then nothing will.”

A team of scientists will be monitoring the truck for the next three weeks, but the final test will come January 6^th, when the truck is expected to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere without burning up into a million pieces.