Marco and Polo Say Goodbye... To Flint

Marco and Polo here,

   This week we say goodbye to our city, a place we have lived for the last four and a half years.  For those of you who haven't solved the great mystery of where this friendship and this blog was born and have managed to completely miss the extremely subtle hints,  we say goodbye to Flint.  For our readers out there who have never been here Flint is an old city with a lot of history and though in recent years it has taken hits, and trust us those hits show all over the city, this city has character, a personality.  As we thought of just how to express the soul of a city and better yet how to say goodbye to a home we decided to let the city speak for itself.  After all a picture's worth a thousand words:

Flint has a very rich history,  history whose roots are entangled in the very heart of General Motors (GM)

A stones throw from campus stands this
memorial reminding people of this history

Welcome to Flint, Vehicle City

A city where downtown still has a red brick road

Where the churches are masterpieces in their own right 

Where ads are a part of the city itself

Where a giant glowing ball in the sky
can predict the weather, using a rhyme of course:
When the weather ball is red, higher temperatures ahead.
When the weather ball is blue, lower temperatures are due.
Yellow light in weather ball means they’ll be no change at all.
When colors blink in agitation, there’s going to be precipitation.

And where despite everything the people have seen,
trust can still be found

A city is not built solely on its history and landmarks, a city is nothing without the places that bring people together.  Places that for us, and our stomachs, were a comfort and break from the insanity of college.

Westside Diner is something you can only find in Flint, Marco and Polo have spent many a lunches, or breakfasts, or dinners, in their fifties style booths

Of course what is a city without its people?  The people in Flint are what give this city its character, its soul.  While Marco and Polo do in no way condone graffiti as a form of vandalism (or any type of vandalism) there is no way to live in Flint and not see how graffiti can express the soul of a city and bring buildings to life. 

The Flint Block, an icon in Flint always covered in different paint designs and messages

This is our city, a city of history, of art, of flavor, a city of people.  It is all of these things that you must remember when you hear all the dark things about Flint because hidden beneath the shadows this city has soul.  After all "happiness can be found in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light"  (thank you J.K.Rowling for teaching us all the important lessons in life).

Stay Nerdy,
Marco and Polo

Marco and Polo Say Goodbye... To Roommates

Marco and Polo here,
   This week we would like to take the time to say goodbye to all of our incredible roommates.  Some of them you have already met, like our not-gay-gay-best-friend Tex, and the secret genius Ace, and the other you haven't.
   Our first roommate, the Addict, takes a little of explaining.  We assure you he doesn't need any sort of intervention...  Well maybe he does but for nothing illegal, just a nasty caffeine habit.  Now Marco loves her coffee and during finals can consume more coffee than water but compared to the Addict she's a lightweight.  The addict mainstreams coffee and converts said coffee into pure and crazy physics and mathematical genius.  Seriously people, we've seen him do math and it's magic.  Dark magic, black magic, voodoo magic, we're not sure, he might have sold his soul to the math gods...  His addiction to coffee is not the only reason he has been deemed the Addict, he also has the worst ideas/suggestions to ever be spoken in the hobo house.  We think it might be his way of trying to steal our own souls to sacrifice to his math magic.  His suggestions became so infamously bad that we had to make a rule to NEVER listen to his ideas, especially while drinking (it's one of the sacred hobo house drinking rules).  On the rare occasion that he emerges from his math-den and his mouth isn't busy consuming coffee or trying to inadvertently sacrifice the roommates, he says some pretty hilarious things:

We figured this was an appropriate photo for
the Addict since we're sure it's what his internal
organs are slowly turning into.

• “It was like I met God...  Because there was coffee in the pot”
• “Little bit of jazz hands too...  That’s how you know it’s serious”

  Ace you met briefly amid the chaos that was Loki, he has recently been deemed the Carbon of the department by La Catedratica, because of his 'cool' demeanor and subtle genius.  We kid you not, Marco and Polo have spent many a chem class feeling utterly inferior and completely inadequate compared to the genius that is Ace.  In another Marco and Polo stroke of genius (we really need to stop having these people) we asked Ace to wake us up at 6:30 am to do morning yoga twice a week...  Genius right?  Get a light exercise in the morning, wake-up a bit, and get the blood flowing for those way-too-early 8 am classes...  Ya that's what we thought until we had the rude awakening of pounding on our doors at 6 am and the discovery that the only yoga Ace knows is the kind used in P-90x...  It was like morning torture, we finished our half hour 'light' work out drenched in sweat, exhausted, and more sore than after a 5k.  Superior intellect and yoga torture aside Ace never fails to keep us entertained with his crazy antics, strange eating habits, and unique humor:

Ace chopping onions on a plate with Marco's lab
goggles to protect from crying

• “Did you try just talking to her? That’s always my approach but then again I’m very single”
• “I was bitten in the ovaries by a radioactive spider”

   Tex you've known for a while now, and we've already sort of said goodbye, but how do you say goodbye to someone who wears so many hats, and yet no real hats at all.  Over the years Tex has taken up many a hats, these include (but are by no means limited to) a ninja warrior, a drill sargent, and a dish fairy.  Once upon a time, Marco and Polo became obsessed with American Ninja Warrior, a competition to complete the world's toughest obstacle course. We watched the show religiously and one day decided that Tex would kick ass if he competed.  In one of our shining moments of intelligence we convinced Tex to attempt one of the obstacles that we could mimic in the hobo house. This resulted in Tex climbing up the underside of the spiral staircase, probably not the safest idea we've ever had... but he was awesome at it! Another of Marco and Polo's bright ideas was to have Tex accompany us on a run, figuring he'd be a motivator/inspiration, boy were we wrong. Tex was more of a drill sargent, yelling ultimatums as he lapped us and stepping on our heels to make us run faster. Needless to say we haven't gone running with Tex since.  When not being a hard-ass-ninja-warrior Tex moonlights as the dish fairy.  This hat entailed doing all the dishes at the Hobo House (you'd be amazed the number of dishes five people can generate) at random intervals.  With the beginning of our final terms and the migration to the Hobo Apartment (yes Marco and Polo have left the Hobo House, or were rather rudely kicked out, which ever you prefer) we fear this particular hat has been lost forever... Or was possibly destroyed since it seems we have all misplaced our various dish fairy hats.  We're thinking of placing the kitchen under quarantine soon people.   Even one hat short Tex still never ceases to amaze us in his own Swiss-army-knife way.

• "Are we gonna start a moonshine band? I can go get a banjo"
• "Look at the frickin' mountains! They're just standing there!"

Tex and Marco at a Chinese dinner with the roomies

As Always Stay Nerdy,
Marco and Polo

Marco and Polo Say Goodbye... To Awkward Conversations

Marco & Polo here,

We find ourselves in the middle of 5th week and frankly we're not sure how we got here...  How can our final term be half over already...  In honor, or maybe terror, of this we have decided to write this newest blog on one of the people who has been here with Marco and Polo since the very beginning.

Dr. Mom was not only there in the dark ages of pre-Marco and Polo but she is arguably one of the catalysts [due to extreme emotional circumstances this story will not be told until the end of this series, so stay tuned].  Over the years Dr. Mom has been many things but eloquent has rarely been one of them.  She has a way of saying things that is on par with a bull in a china shop strapped to a malfunctioning jet-pack.  As such there have been many a conversations had with Dr. Mom that have never been had before between student and Dept. Head, and should never ever be had again...  Ever.  No seriously, there isn't enough Bleach in the world to properly scrub our brains with, people.  A frequent observer and occasional commentator to these awkward conversations is, Dr. Mom's partner in crime, a chemical engineering professor, Mrs. Capt. von Trapp.  Though rarely an instigator, Mrs. Capt. von  Trapp, has never hesitated to scale up the conversation, like any self-respecting chem-E would.  There are far too many conversation had and words spoken that are better left partially bleached and un-repeated but here, for your reading pleasure, are some PG-maybe-13 bits (cause bits are Dr. Mom's favorite):

• “I could star in those videos”
• “Create a standard curve” [that's five data points... We'll let you decide what the "data" is]
• “They better put that shit on my tombstone”
• “It’s going to be a continuum of no’s, from now until infinity”
• “You need to do less, better”

Get your minds out of the gutters people, they're not all what you think they are.  For all the conversations that can't be un-had, we'd never trade Dr. Mom for anything.  Being true to her name she really has become like a second (or third) mom to Marco and Polo.  How, you ask, does one join the ranks of Marco and Polo Mama-hood?:

• She's always there when we need a hug, a hug only a mom can give and ours are too far away
• Awkward conversations aside she's always there with at least a few wise words
• She never fails to listen to the seemingly endless panic attacks we seem to suffer from
• Never running out of interesting career advice
• Not to mention advice in our personal lives

Like the many members of our 'faculty therapy team', in her own unique way, Dr. Mom was always exactly what we needed when we didn't even know it.  We can't count the number of times when a few minutes with Dr. Mom could turn a no-good-very-very-horribly-bad-day into a fit of tears from laughing so hard.  For that we don't know how to even begin to say good-bye.  So here's to you Dr. Mom, for just being you, and letting us see a glimpse.

Marco, Polo, and Dr. Mom posing for Dr. Mom's Christmas snow-globe [2011]

Stay Nerdy and Study On,
Marco and Polo