Dear Grandma,

Thanks so much for the care package you sent me-I was so excited to get it! With second semester coming up and book-buy right around the corner; the generous gift you enclosed will definitely go to good use. Thanks also for the yummy food you sent-it’s a nice break from the cafeteria!

Things at school are going well. Classes are challenging but I’m budgeting my time well to study. I also joined a fraternity since we last spoke. Even though I’m still a pledge the guys already consider me a full-member and good friend.

I hope that things are still going well in Key West. My Dad says that we’re going to visit you in April–I can’t wait to see you! Send my love to Grandpa and CiCi as well.

Love,

Peter

Translation:

Dear Grandma.

When I first saw the large box at the student union post office I was excited. The box was probably big enough to comfortably house a small child-so I naturally thought it would be jam-packed with home-made cookies, precious jewels and useless war memorabilia from grandpa.

My boyish hope was put to rest, however, when I opened the box to find only: six boxes cup noodle, one Tide to-go pen, and an envelope with five dollars. How could I forget that you and grandpa are so cheap you’d use a large box left over from your move to Key West in 1968?

In regards to the money-thanks so much! Your petty contribution will go a long way to settle the $100,000 debt I have with the university. Well, probably not, but at least your gift can be used for the cover fee for a party. Who knows, I might go to such a party and find a totally wasted girl and end up sleeping with her. So in a way, you may have helped your grandson get laid-how thoughtful of you.

The cup noodles will definitely go to good use. The cheapest meal plan here only gets you 10 meals per week so maybe if I eat the noodles really sparingly I can support my body’s metabolism on such a meager diet for a few weeks.

I joined a frat last week and it’s only because I told them that you’d died and that I had to write sympathy emails to my parents that they let me out of the putrid basement where they keep pledges locked up to develop “brotherhood.” Speaking of which, the three minutes they’re allowing me to write is almost up. So I’ll make my goodbye.

I have heard it through the grape vine that plans are in order to visit you in Key West during April. While the thought of being in Florida during Spring Break is at first appealing- sipping tonic water on your porch while listening to you talk about your recent bowel obstruction is thoroughly unappetizing. Let it be known that I will do anything I can to avoid such an excursion. Even if it means taking a last-minute “foreign exchange trip” to free me from any obligation to see you.

I hope all is going well with you and grandpa-for god’s sake don’t die! Send my love to grandpa and that annoying dog you’ve recently adopted as a way to feel needed.

Love,

Peter (I’m Catherine’s son).

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.