The World of Stuff .com

Game changer

How often do you get to witness a life-changing event? A moment in which the fog lifts over someone’s future and a single path becomes clear?

My friend Andrea had been dying to catch up with me after my winter break in Russia, so on Monday, we met up and went out to an Italian place for dinner. As usual, she had a lot to talk about. Since I had last seen her, she had graduated and started applying to law schools. We talked about the daunting challenge that was her Vanderbilt application as well as some lighter stuff like possible romantic interests.

We’d been getting into the habit of renting movies and watching them together (well, actually, she’s the one who rents them), so after dinner, we settled on Hot Tub Time Machine and went to her place to watch it. If you haven’t seen it (which is perfectly all right), it’s about some friends who get sent back in time and have to re-live a wild weekend that determines the course of the rest of their lives. They can’t decide whether to re-create events as they originally happened or to take a different direction in the hope of giving themselves a better future.

Andrea was sitting on the couch with her laptop and surfing the Internet, which is what she does when she thinks the movie we’re watching is boring. But suddenly, she stood up. She started making noises. I had no idea what was going on.

Finally, she spoke. She had gotten an e-mail from George Washington University Law School. She had been accepted. And they were offering her a full-tuition scholarship.

She asked me to read the e-mail back to her just to make sure it was real. Once she was convinced that it wasn’t a prank, she called her parents and other family members, beaming, to share the good news.

Andrea had wanted to live and work in Washington, DC, and now, she was all set to go to a prestigious law school in the heart of our nation’s capital for free. Only a few hours earlier, we had been talking about what might happen if she got accepted to this or that law school. It turned out that her acceptance e-mail had been sent earlier that day. Unbeknownst to us, her fate had already been decided. And we couldn’t have been happier about it.

By the way, we finished watching Hot Tub Time Machine. Spoiler alert: One of the guys decides not to go back to the present day in the time machine. Instead, he stays behind in the past, re-lives his life, and becomes rich.

And now, something a little lighter: foods with misspelled names. (Via waxy.org)