The Rabbit Hole 16th Edition

Welcome back to The Rabbit Hole! We’re so back.

Life Update: The Rabbit Hole is back by popular demand. You guys know me, sometimes all I need is a bit of an ego boost from my friends to motivate me to continue doing something I started for that same reason!

Life has been good, I had a busy week last week with my first midterm. You really don’t realize how good you have it as a Media Comm. major until one of your real classes makes you do real work. I feel like I haven’t studied for an exam in years before last week. It was almost even fun for me. Last weekend was homecoming at UT and WXUT was in the parade so I had to wake up bright and early to help decorate one of my buddy’s trucks and we were off! This was my third hoco parade and this was probably the best because of how much the station has grown in the last couple of years. Not to pat myself on the back but it really was just like 4-5 dudes who liked sports when I joined and now we have 30+ members who are consistently engaging with us and coming to meetings. It’s been rewarding to see the evolution and I can happily and confidently say we’re leaving it A LOT better than we found it.

We had our first tailgate of the year as a club which was very fun. I’ve never really interacted with a lot of the people outside of the station, especially in a social environment so getting turnt with them was a lot of fun. I unfortunately have caved and bought my first pack of cigarettes. A couple of weekends ago I was in Ann Arbor with Kirkey and I bought a pack of reds at 7/11. What made me feel a little better was that as we were hitting the town Kirkey revealed that he also had a pack of cigs on him so we were at least twinning that night. The Kid has influenced me perhaps too severely this time, but when I pulled out my pack of cigs at the WXUT tailgate my aura skyrocketed. Immediately a couple of people wanted a dart and I was the MAN. I did let the peer pressure get to me and smoked three back-to-back and had to sit down out of commission for about 30 minutes. I only stayed at the game until I felt like I could lie in bed and not feel like absolute shit. The walk definitely helped too. Later that day G sent me a six-pack of insomnia cookies for bf day which was quite the gesture. I also got a Subway 6-inch out of it as somehow the driver picked me up the completely wrong item from the wrong restaurant, but I was drunk and couldn’t complain, I inhaled that thang in about .07 seconds.

It was a stress-free Sunday as the Lions were on a bye week, but in the morning Spurs blew a 2-0 lead to Brighton; but at least Brennan Johnson scored another goal, making it 6 goals in his last 6 games, absolute phenom.

I just finished making my first attempt at French onion soup. Kirkey had told me he made some the other week and let me try some, so shoutout to him for the inspo. See Twitter for the final product. Overall, it was a positive experience, just very time-consuming, I’ve never fully caramelized onions which of course took the bulk of the time. I used like 2.5 large onions and it’s crazy how much they cook down after caramelizing. If I had a better cheese it would have been perfect, but still happy with it on the first try.

Creative Corner: I went and saw Joker: Folie à Deux on Friday, and that’s what I primarily covered on my show on Monday. As a big fan of the 2019 film, I was severely let down by this sequel. Read my full review here.

After missing a Friday upload a couple of weeks ago, we had a triple header of Trivia Tails last week. The final episode of the regular season will air this Friday and I’m hoping to at least get one episode of the playoffs out next week, we shall see. I mentioned this before, but I’ve loved how it has played out so far, people seem to like it and it has had a reach I hadn’t previously anticipated. Cam shared a wholesome story of him and his roommates watching an episode together and I guess that’s all I’ve ever wanted when I create anything. You get caught up in making something and sort of lose track of why you’re doing it in the first place. I never expected the series to go super viral or anything, I’m happy as long as people look forward to watching it, and sharing it with friends and family is an added bonus on top!

Yesterday afternoon, I had a brief meeting with one of the founders of Friday Beers about starting a Toledo Friday Beers account which went well and I’m gonna be starting up my own affiliate account which is very exciting. Cam should be doing the same soon, and from there, we’re gonna take over the media world!

Content I’ve Consumed this Week Cave: For some reason river the past week I got deeply rooted in Gracie Abrams TikTok and I may be obsessed. Now that Noah Kahan’s tour is over I needed another artist to watch all of the clips people that go to her shows post. I hadn’t really listened to anything from her in the past but I’ve liked what I’ve heard so far. One of the unreleased songs she plays at her shows has me wanting to learn the guitar so I can recreate it in my room. I’m reluctant to even include that last sentence because I was fantasizing about one day just busting out a guitar and shredding out some crazy song and impressing everyone. That goes hand in hand with my secret pilot’s license training fantasy.

Riffin’ Recap: A really funny occurrence happened at the tailgate that probably won’t translate to text but pretty much one of our members was grilling burgers; I got there like 30 minutes after they started so he was already through one or two cycles of cooking the burgers and after a couple minutes of me being there, I notice some dude just strolls up and stands a couple feet away from the grill while staring a hole through the burgers. I assume someone knows him so I don’t think too much of it but after like 20 minutes, I realize he hadn’t said a word to any of the members and had accumulated a few others around him. Keep in mind these are abroad students who aren’t familiar that there’s a difference between tailgates and buffets. I started talking about it with one of my buddies and we both started dying because he had noticed the same thing. At this point it’s impossible not to notice these people, it’s literally an entire family, but eventually, my friend steps up and tells them to get lost and that the burgers are only for members, in a way that certainly could have been perceived to be racist from an outside perspective.

That felt good. A nice, long Rabbit Hole to come back to. Next week’s will almost certainly be late as I’m gonna be in Massachusetts from Thursday-Tuesday night. It’s UT’s fall break and I’m fired up for the long weekend. I haven’t seen my Habibi since August (a whole 49 days!!) so this weekend is long overdue. To make things even more exciting, my fall break just happens to fall on our 1 year anniversary (WOOOOOO) so we’ll be celebrating that over the weekend as well.

I hope everyone enjoyed today’s edition and that y’all have a great rest of your week. I miss and love you all. Be kind to yourself :).