The reason why is that they’re both columns I wrote as audition pieces for the editorial page of the DTH. Every semester, there would be writers, typically from the general student population and not from the DTH staff, who helmed a column one day each week. Most of them were your typical college writers, trying to push boundaries with lots of talk about sex and such. And at points, I thought about giving it a shot myself, just because. As a Californian going to school in North Carolina, I was a bit of an oddity there…or so my friends made it seem. So I thought I might have some interesting thoughts to share.

And here’s where I started.

***

Before I begin, there’s something I must let you all know.

I am in love with the pets.com sock puppet.

I don’t know exactly when this love affair began. I remember seeing the commercials featuring the precocious puppet during the fall of my freshman year, and soon thereafter, I was imitating the famous “Three dollars!” love with my bare hand, and later on, with a sock, much to the delight of my friends and suitemates.

I also fail to pinpoint exactly why this fabric-and-button creation delights me so much.

Perhaps it’s because I’m from the Silicon Valley area of California, and the pets.com sock puppet lends some much-needed levity to the fast-paced world of IPOs and dot-coms. Maybe it’s the human wristwatch substituting for a collar, or the pets.com microphone attached to his argyle hand with green electrical tape.

I also enjoy the insult comic dog stylings of Triumph, of Conan O’Brien fame, but there’s just something about a sock puppet imitating the singing group Chicago that tickles my fancy.

Pretty soon, I had found a picture of the puppet online and set it as the desktop on my computer.

People started emailing my media files of the commercials, and finally, last summer, I plunked down 20 bucks to buy my own from the website. In reality, pets.com, like many online retail stores, hasn’t broken even at all, and is hoping these puppets will turn them around.

Why am I telling you this potentially embarrassing story about myself at the beginning of months of what promises to be wry and witty commentary? To give a “this-can-happen-to-you” type portrait of what results from watching too much TV? Believe me, I know I watch too much, and my mother reminds me of that fact on a regular basis.

I figured that before I revealed anything about myself, I should clue you in on one vital fact about Allison Catherine Rost: I am goofy as hell.

The pets.com sock puppet is just the tip of the iceberg. I trip over my feet on a regular basis. I have nearly every episode of ER on videotape. I know how to tap dance and network computers. I can’t properly make a bed to save my life.

I’m sure some of you are wondering what kind of moron I might be, but in reality, I think I’m as normal as I can be.

I never would have admitted to things like this several years ago. I guess one of the big things that has happened to my since I came to college is that I’ve grown more comfortable in my own skin.

In high school, I was completely self-conscious. I rarely told anyone secrets and I felt like people would laugh at me if I revealed any personal facet of myself because I was just that strange.

And while people may be laughing at me now for that same strangeness, I’ve come to realize the goofiness is an innate part of me.

A good friend recently told me, “Who cares what other people think? Life is too short to shape your behavior on someone else’s standards.”

So I may be awed by snow like a four-year-old or walk into walls in my dreams or amuse myself with a sock puppet. So what? I’ve embraced my idiosyncrasies, and so should you.

And let that set the tone for this column.

***

Although I have come to love Chapel Hill and North Carolina like a native, I still sometimes feel like an outsider.

When I first got here, the question on many people’s minds was why in the world would a Californian like myself choose to go all the way across the country to go to college.

I’ve answered the question so many times that the response is automatic: my mother grew up near Charlotte, I’m a third generation Tar Heel, I have relatives in North Carolina and scattered throughout the East Coast, and it’s a great school.

But the biggest reason in my mind is one that is difficult to articulate: I needed a change. I was born and raised in California, and while I do like it there, I needed to get the hell out.

It’s hard to explain because many people I know think California is the Promised Land where everyone walks around carrying surfboards, the roads are paved in gold, and unicorns are the primary mode of transportation.

My choice of university was also difficult to explain to people back home. One classmate expressed concern at my going to school in the middle of a hayfield, and another asked, “How can you go to North Carolina with all of that racism back there?”

Ahhh, the perpetuation of stereotypes.

There are most definitely big differences between the two locales. In California, the freeways are wider and the drivers are crazier. At least in NorCal, where I’m from, the climate varies little from season to season, and the summers are so cool that Mark Twain once commented that the coldest winter he ever experienced was a summer in San Francisco.

We get earthquakes as opposed to hurricanes, and the cuisine and the lingo differ a bit.

But when I’ve had to explain the differences to California people, it’s been hard. I usually come up with something stupid like the vegetation and the weather is different. How can I condense all I have learned about North Carolina into generalizations that (mostly) ignorant Californians can understand?

I’ve chosen my words carefully, and while I admit there are hicks here (as there are everywhere), they are mostly hidden away in the rural areas, and I can say this because before Carolina, my previous exposure to North Carolina was limited to a small mill town.

Other than that, people are people. Most North Carolinians I’ve met aren’t far off from the people I knew in high school.

It’s been fun to burst people’s bubbles on some misconceptions. For instance, I don’t see movie stars all over the place.

But while I’m bursting bubbles, it’s fair to give Carolina a turn. While I’m sure UNC is diverse compared to the rest of North Carolina, I’d like to take whoever writes the prospective student brochures to UC Berkeley, the college many of my high school compatriots attend, where the Asian student population outnumbers all others. And to those students who think Chapel Hill is liberal, I’ll just say that a popular name for that flagship University of California campus is the People’s Republic of Berkeley.

However, my favorite bubble-bursting activity involves those skeptical Californians who thought I’d come home scared of all those redneck Ku Klux Klan members. They’d get a concerned look on their face and ask, “How was North Carolina?” I surprised them all when I said, “I loved it. And I’m going back.”

It was difficult to come here in the beginning when I knew absolutely no one. I bawled like a baby the first day of C-TOPS. But I knew college was a prime opportunity to sample life on the other coast. For those of you who haven’t been west of the Mississippi (and I know there are many of you) use this time to explore foreign areas of the country, or even the world, before jobs, marriage, and kids tie you down. You could even intern in San Francisco like I did last summer. Just remember to bring your sweater.

While I may or may not move back to the Golden State after graduation, at least I have had this time here. Through years of spending summers here with my grandparents, I always felt more at home, even with the heat and humidity.

And while California may have a certain caché to it, I’ll take my sweet tea and Moon Pie over bottled water and baby spinach any day.

***

And just because every DTH column on the editorial page ended this way (correct as of the time these were written):

Allison Rost is a sophomore communications and sociology double major from Fremont, Calif. You can reach her at alikona@email.unc.edu.

It’s November. Not only is it getting cold (even in Los Angeles), but it’s also the start of the college basketball season. If you hadn’t already figured it out before, I’m a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which tends to field a fairly decent team every year. In fact, the Tar Heels played North Carolina Central tonight…and beat them 89 to 42. So my head is a little wrapped up in college nostalgia, which made me think of the below tidbits.

These are anecdotes I put together as part of the “24 Hours” project for The Daily Tar Heel during my sophomore year of college. Writers from all desks of the DTH observed activities on the UNC campus over the course of one winter day–from noon on a Thursday until noon on a Friday. My segment was from 10 a.m. on Friday until noon that day. I walked all over campus, wrote up these little vignettes and turned them in, coming back to the newsroom a day or so later to see that the editor-in-chief at the time marked all of mine as “solid.” However, when the special section came out, none of my contributions were included.

C’est la vie, of course, though at the time I was pretty devastated (a wee lass, I was). I really liked these moments-in-time, and I still do. And since they were never published, I think it’s entirely appropriate that I post them here. Especially now.

(And two of these were based on actual experiences, with real characters and events from my daily life at that time. I’m pretty sure you can tell which ones are which.)

***

10:11 a.m. The morning sun is just beginning to peek over the top of Cobb, and the life of the slab of thick ice layered on the front lawn is coming to an end. Loud cracks spell its doom, and the grass sticking through the ice finally begins to feel some relief. Cars obliviously coast by on Country Club Drive. Meanwhile, the pansies and daffodils meant to impress visitors over by Jackson Hall look humbled and defeated as melting ice splats all around them.

10:17 a.m.: Two of those ubiquitous tour groups have congregated outside of Mangum. One tour guide assuages nervous parents by talking about the safety measures in place on campus such as SAFE escort. The other tour guide tries to make a joke about fake I.D.s. The parents laugh nervously in response. The sounds of garbage trucks behind Davis nearly drown everyone out. They continue on, each group going in opposite directions.

10:41 a.m.: A group of orange-garbed workmen fiddle with the traffic light on Franklin Street at the Bank of America Center using what seems like a glorified vacuum cleaner.

Meanwhile, the pedestrians waiting at the light are too impatient. They wait for a break in traffic and hightail it across, backpacks and purses bouncing.

A dapper older man window-shops in front of Julian’s. After glancing to see if anyone’s looking at him, he ducks in.

A semi-truck labeled “El Sol Mexican Restaurant Supplies” pulls away from the curb.

And another group frustrated with the length of the traffic light attempts to dash across the street.

10:56 a.m.: The requisite throng of South Campus residents crowds the U-bus at its last stop of Raleigh Road. However jubilant they are over the end of class for the week, a titter goes through the crowd as their chances at a seat grow slimmer and slimmer.

“When is y’all’s spring break?” yells the bus driver. When someone gives her the correct dates, she remarks, “I gotta get myself some vacation.”

11:11 a.m.: Over Chick-Fil-A and Dr. Pepper in downstairs Lenoir, a group of friends catch up. This group of sophomores has been friends since they were in the same suite in Hinton James last year, but now, the group of five is spread among several North Campus dorms.

Jen Rehberg from Middletown, N.J., returns to the table with a wrap, but complains that all of the sour cream is in the folded part. An unfortunate incident results in sour cream being dabbed on several faces.

Michelle Abshire from Selma wants to hear her horoscope for the day, so Liz Templin from Charlotte reads it out loud. Despite the myriad Zodiac signs present, it’s a 6 for everyone today.

Michelle’s boyfriend, Chris O’Connor from Charlotte, has not yet returned to the table, so Liz asks, “Did he have to go kill his chicken nuggets?” What she doesn’t know is that he went to Top of Lenoir for take-out and finally returns with fortune cookies for all. This begins a conversation over the point of fortune cookies.

Susan Boone from Roxboro deftly observes, “It doesn’t make sense to put fortunes in egg drop soup, so they put them in cookies.”

Chris tickles Jen, leading Jen to complain, “Michelle, your boyfriend is groping me!”

Michelle shrugs. “I’m not really concerned,” she says.

Liz smiles and says, “Ah, the depth of lunchtime conversation.”

11:38 a.m.: The consumer goods and games of “The Price is Right” have attracted a tired group to the big-screen television in the basement of the Student Union. One munches on a snack of pretzels, one feverishly attempts to complete calculus homework and one naps with their face smashed up against the cushions of the couch. The only noise is the sound of Rod Roddy, inviting yet another lucky contestant to come on down.

11:53 a.m.: Outside Bingham 103, the members of John Kasson’s History 156 class congregate, waiting for the class before them to exit. The people remaining inside are finishing up an exam, so the newcomers read the newspaper and finish up their lunches. As more class members arrive, two men needle their way through the swarm, one discussing his chronic bone spurs within everyone’s earshot. One stunned student leaves the classroom, remarking to her friend, “I never thought it would be that hard.” More and more people trickle out, but the 12 o’clock class is still unsure. A few brave souls go ahead and charge in, confident that they won’t be admonished, but most hesitate, not knowing the appropriate time to go in.

We also lived in a school district where the tax base made sending us to public school an easy decision. But when it mattered, my parents anted up. I decided late in my high school career that 18 years in Californian suburbia was enough for me. So, I applied to out-of-state public schools, and even though we didn’t qualify for financial aid, my parents managed to pay for every cent of tuition, housing, books—you name it. Thus, my protective bubble followed me to college, where I had everything taken care of for me. If I was hungry, I just went to the dining hall and my student ID would grant me entrance to the buffet lines. Plane tickets would arrive in the mail just when I needed them. And when the foreign experience of East Coast weather threatened my campus with its hurricane watches and empty grocery stores, I just snuggled closer to the cinder blocks that comprised the 10 floors of my freshman dorm.

My California-flavored childhood meant the concept of snow and ice in everyday life was completely new for me. When classes were canceled for three days in the January of my freshman year, I frolicked in the powder like a 5-year-old. My friends took many pictures of me relishing my first experience as a snow angel, and we stole trays from the dining halls for sledding. We also worked as a unit to create a snow turtle—snowmen were apparently passé.

Fast-forward to four years later. As a hardened senior, I had parted ways with those friends and moved off-campus. It was the last full day of class in the fall semester, and as I stood waiting at the bus stop for my ride home, the frigid December sky began spitting down sleet. Forty-five minutes on a trudging bus replaced my normal swift commute, and I awoke at 5:30 the next morning to hear the tree branches outside my window cracking under the weight of the ice encasing them—and to see the time on my clock radio flicker out. The power was not restored for four days.

To say that my love affair with East Coast winters came to a sudden and bitter end is a bit of an understatement.

It wasn’t a question of boredom. Classes for the semester had already ended, so I just didn’t have the electronic procrastination tools I usually used to distract myself from studying. My roommate and I rediscovered the art of conversation and unearthed board games we hadn’t played since childhood. It was, however, a little difficult to manipulate dice with fingers wrapped in the fleece of our best mittens.

Those mittens were one of the only ways to deal with the greatest predicament of my young life. For the first day, enough heat was trapped in our second-floor flat to facilitate actual living, and there were enough perishables available to eat without needing to touch our dead refrigerator. But after that first night, when the temperatures dipped into the teens and the flannel surface of my pillowcase cooled mere seconds after I turned my head, the frigid air of the worst winter storm in North Carolina history began to creep through the windowpanes and under the doors, rendering my home practically inhabitable. The solution wasn’t as easy as hopping in a car and driving somewhere with heat and food—the entire state was in the exact same condition. Tree branches still littered the frosty roadways and blocked most escapes out of town, and Duke Power had millions of customers out of power across two states. We were just going to have to wait for our electrical benediction along with everyone else.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t know where I was going to sleep. The lack of heat made showering an icy proposition, and I couldn’t contact anyone—the blackout had disabled the local cell towers and we didn’t even have enough light to see the keypad on our landline phone. All thoughts of finals and Christmas presents and packing for my trip home flew out of my head in favor of how to layer multiple sweaters or use a lighter on candles without burning myself. I remember the joy when, a few days into the blackout, we found that our favorite pizza place had its power restored. We ordered a pie, went to pick it up and ate it in our dining room where the heat from the pizza created a steam lingering above the table that was the closest thing to warmth we’d felt in days. My mind was discombobulated—all I could think of was where I would find my next meal and where I could sleep that wouldn’t dangerously threaten my health.

Of course, I knew I could get out of the situation if it became absolutely necessary. I had a credit card and a car. I could have driven as long as was necessary to find a hotel with heat and room service, or gone to the airport and bought a plane ticket to the Caribbean. Luckily, that need disappeared relatively quickly. The first people to get their power back were my friends still living on campus. They took us in, providing floors and blankets for sleep and running water for warm showers. I don’t think I’ve ever taken a shower with such joy in my heart before.

Only after I got power back did I realize that I’d missed several review sessions for my upcoming finals. Thank goodness I was one of the fortunate—I’d heard some students living off-campus waited nearly two weeks for power and had to take their finals during that time. If my power hadn’t come back when it did, there’s no doubt in my mind that 16 weeks of lectures and note-taking and preparation couldn’t have done a thing to overcome my basic needs of food and shelter. This period was fleeting, but I’m still in awe at how naïve I was prior to seeing those little LED numbers flick off.

The situation reminded me of something my mother, a public schoolteacher, often talks about: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which categorizes how our brains operate. Physiological needs such as food and sleep are the keys, with safety concerns coming next. For most of us in the middle class (and the  Western world), these aren’t things we need to worry about. Instead, we occupy our lives worrying about how the new freeway extension will complicate our daily commutes or remarking on how we can’t live without our TiVos. For me, my upbringing was never about not having what I needed, and only when my very survival was staring me in the face did I see how spoiled I was.

Even though our society is extremely affluent in comparison to the rest of the world, we still live amongst peers who struggle with these basic needs, yet we judge them by privileged standards. A young person living in the inner city isn’t likely to graduate from high school and launch into college or a career. Politicians and ed-op columnists say he just needs to put forth superhuman effort to achieve those aspects of the American Dream. But when a person’s first priorities are dodging bullets and finding safe housing, schooling is not high on the list.

I only wish I could go back and inform my coddled high school self of how lucky I was. I do remember a fleeting moment back then—I was doing dishes in the kitchen of my parents’ house and I looked out the window to the street, lit haphazardly by the setting sun peeking through the trees. Standing on the sidewalk were a man and his pregnant wife. They had their arms around each other, and they were crying as they took in the split-level house with four bedrooms and three baths. At that moment, I felt an inkling of what it must have been like for my parents as they struggled to make ends meet in anticipation for a family. But that was as deep as my consideration went as I dried off my hands and went off to work on my calculus homework. When we don’t have to worry about the basic needs of life, we don’t consider them.

But if my temporary inability to think beyond food and shelter is a way of life for some people, and our expectation is for them to brush it off to pursue success, I shudder to think of how deluded those expectations can be—and how easily they can change when we’re in that same situation.

***

Last night, I was contemplating what writing I should post this week…and then the power went out in my apartment. Of course, living in Los Angeles, it was nothing more than a rainstorm. But it reminded me of this piece, which I wrote fairly soon after graduating from college. Reading it now brings into perspective the various people and points-of-view I’ve encountered since then, but even so, I think it demonstrates that the situation was a decent learning experience.

There may not be a more perfect pastry on God’s green earth than red velvet cake. With its rich body accompanied by tangy cream cheese frosting—not to mention the larger-than-life color—red velvet manages to appeal to pretty much everyone. You need no further proof of that than bakeries specializing in gourmet cupcakes cropping up across Los Angeles and New York City, where red velvet has joined vanilla and chocolate among the classics. Reworking the decadent old-South recipe into a form that reminds busy big-city residents of their long-forgotten childhoods seems to have struck a nerve—or at least a taste bud. I’ve seen the resurgence attributed to the 1988 film Steel Magnolias, with its famous armadillo-shaped red velvet groom’s cake, or the 2002 nuptials of Nick Lachey to Jessica Simpson in her native Texas. While both have long since faded into the cultural landscape, perhaps it’s appropriate that the surging interest in a longtime Southern tradition counts the two largest cities in the U.S. as ground zero.

And I, for one, could not be more thrilled. A native Californian, the closest I can claim Southern heritage is through my mother, a Tar Heel born and bred in a rural mill town outside Charlotte, N.C. I also spent four years in North Carolina while I was in college. But the closest I ever came to reclaiming that heritage was through the dozens of church cookbooks my mother had collected from her hometown. When I was in high school and antsy to leave California, I’d flip through them, imagining the miraculous tastes I’d come to associate with the two weeks we spent in North Carolina every summer. Eventually, red velvet became my specialty.

It took a few tries—I went from the recipe in the Lutheran cookbook to the Southern Baptist and back again—but once I got the hang of it, my red velvet cakes became legendary. My mother began commissioning me to make them as treats for the neighbors every Christmas. And I didn’t mind; there was something so therapeutic about sculpting that cream cheese frosting over the cake fresh out of the Bundt pan and watching the first drops of red food coloring streak across the batter circulating through the Kitchen Aid.

Red velvet wasn’t something I got to experience in college—dorm kitchens aren’t so useful for that—but I was excited to discover that it had caught on in California once I had graduated and settled in the Los Angeles area. One of my roommates was from Texas, so we indulged our Southern sides with this latest L.A. trend. We trekked all over the city, sampling what various bakeries had to offer. My birthday “cakes” that first year came from one uber-hip institution called Doughboys; my friends and I went to the beach and chowed down on the moist cupcakes while watching the summer sun set into the Pacific Ocean. It was the perfect melding of the two places that I consider home.

But as our search took us further and more bakeries opened across the city, I came across a troubling phenomenon—faulty red velvet cake. The majority of cupcakes we sampled were bitter and dry, taking on more of a brownish hue than a red one. Yet at the same time, the local media kept talking about the wonders of red velvet—a sentiment I didn’t disagree with, but I couldn’t understand how they could believe it with such disappointing cupcakes in hand. I finally got a clue on LAist, a local blog where, in a guide to navigating the hysteria surrounding area bakeries, one writer described red velvet as “a light chocolate cake.”

For me, there’s no way that anyone could believe that red velvet cake is comparable to chocolate. Yes, many traditional Southern recipes for red velvet cake call for a small amount of cocoa, but it did not seem possible to me that its complex flavors—the dense buttery taste, the dark notes that play across the tongue, the slightest bit of fruit punch flavor that’s probably just a psychological reaction to the color of the cake—could ever be mistaken for something so run-of-the-mill. It actually made me sad that my fellow Angelenos had been led to believe that red velvet wasn’t nearly as wonderful as it could be.

The final straw came when I went to New York City for a long weekend, and on my first night there, took the subway from my hotel down to Greenwich Village. There, I waited in line for 20 minutes just to be let into the mother ship—Magnolia Bakery, the famous Manhattan cupcake emporium with its own cookbook that Carrie Bradshaw visited and received its own rap on Saturday Night Live. After I escaped with my bounty of red velvet cupcakes, I retreated to my hotel room for what I was sure was going to be a moving experience. One bite and…confusion set in. What I was holding in my hand was not only a bitter chocolate “red velvet” cupcake, but it was topped with whipped cream frosting. The Lutheran church ladies almost certainly screamed in horror at that moment.

The experience called for a cleansing of sorts, so once I returned to L.A., I pulled out my own recipe for good measure. My roommate attempted her grandmother’s recipe, with its traditional scoop of cocoa, and I trusted my time-tested one without a trace of chocolate whatsoever. Both were splendid, the chocolate in the one recipe simply serving to enhance the taste of what makes red velvet red velvet, even if it’s not something so easy to describe.

Maybe, in the end, the chocolate-ifying of red velvet in California is nothing more than what happens to other ethnic cuisine when it hits the United States; you’d be hard-pressed to find American-style pizza in Italy or egg drop soup in China. But to me, those are variations on an original idea that have developed and matured into new dishes. To me, red velvet will never be mistaken for chocolate—it is a flavor, a being, all on its own. No matter what the trendy people say.

***

So this is a piece I’ve had on my laptop for a few years. Every once in a while, I would go back and tinker with something else, but only two people have read it over that time. And while the cupcake thing still seems to be going somewhat strong—at least here in L.A.—it will inevitably fall out of favor…so by the time I have the time to shop this around, it’ll be horribly out of date. So you all got it instead.

Hope you enjoyed it…and that you didn’t read it on an empty stomach.