“Really? Why did you stay in Iowa for school?” “I feel sorry for you. There’s nothing to do here.” “You don’t have professional sports,” and they walk away.

I guess if the state doesn’t have professional sports, you aren’t worth talking to.

Honestly, I don’t blame the ones that gave me funny looks and thought I was some nerd who had no idea what football was.

But what they didn’t realize was that although we don’t have pro sports, many of us Iowans have a deep passion for college teams. Look at our state nickname: The Hawkeye State. I think that’s an evident sign that we care about sports whether they are professional or not.

Since I was born, I have bled black and gold. The Hawkeyes have been one of my favorite teams for as long as I can remember. I know they aren’t professional, but they might as well be considering all the hype they receive.

Iowa Hawkeye football is best described as a crisp, fall day with more than 70,000 people chanting “I.O.W.A.” It’s knowing at the tender age of 5 that the Cyclones are evil, vicious people not to be associated with, but having no idea why.

The smell in the air is stung with some kind of meat barbecuing that will soon be stuck on a stick and sold to an undergrad that can no longer speak, as they are hoarse from screaming from the front row of the student section.

The best part about being a Hawkeye fan is sitting in Kinnick Stadium with your out-of-state friend and having them turn to you, screaming through the roar of the crowd, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

So no, Iowa may not have a pro sport, but this is just as good as, if not better than, most professional sporting events that I’ve been to; except, of course, the frozen tundra of Green Bay, Wis.

Living in a small Iowa town near South Dakota and Minnesota, we really do not have many choices for an NFL team. Because of my dad, I grew up despising the colors purple and yellow. Instead, the people, homes and pets on my coloring pages were green and yellow. I somehow managed to relate everything in my life to the Green Bay Packers.

My outfit on first day of school in kindergarten? A Brett Favre T-shirt—which I still own and can still fit into—with green Packers shorts and a Green Bay Packers bow in my hair. Loyal fan or obsessed? I’d say a little of both, and it hasn’t changed much since.

I grew up being one of the only kids sporting the green and gold every week in the fall. I was the center of all jokes. You could probably consider it harassment, but I overcame it. How? I knew everything about the Packers. All the stats, players and coaches. My dad taught me well. Whenever a guy said something mean about the team, I compared the Vikings and Packers stats, which normally quieted them, either because they knew I was right or that a girl had just shown them up.

I’m not trying to brag about myself, but I just want to get the point across that although we do not have professional sports in Iowa, it does not mean we just ride around on tractors, looking at fields or doing chores in the barn. Yes, that is the typical Iowa family. Trust me, I’m from a farm town, but you will never catch me on a farm for more than two hours.

The Drake Relays also add an aspect to the wonderful state of Iowa that not many other states can boast. How many other colleges have a section of sidewalk that is devoted to being painted every April? How many schools can say they have an event so many alumni come back for? And how many universities have professional athletes come to its school’s sporting event to compete?

Not many.

The Relays are an unforgettable experience. Although this was my first Relays, I have finally experienced the fun and exciting adventures upperclassmen have told me about. It is hands down the biggest event of the year for Des Moines and Drake University. It doesn’t get much better than this.

So, for those of you doubters that walk away after hearing a person is from Iowa and wonder how we can have any fun—we can, surprisingly or not. We have the Hawkeyes (and Cyclones and Panthers, I suppose) for Division I college football, guaranteed to give you an experience like none other. We have professional teams within a few hours (or six, if you want the best team). Best of all, we have the famous Drake Relays. So set your negative thoughts aside, sit back and think about what Iowa has to offer. We have more than you think.

Mataloni is a first-year news/Internet and music major and can be contacted at rebecca.mataloni@drake.edu.

Rebecca Mataloni

While many of you were enjoying the hot, sunny weather in South Padre, Mexico, or a similar place down south, I enjoyed the balmy 30-degree weather in Madison, Wisc., and Sibley, Iowa. Spring Break 2010 baby!

I know you might have missed the sarcasm there, but honestly, I had an awesome time over break with my friend Bryn. I learned how to play the driving game “Padiddle.” I think it’s a Wisconsin thing, so don’t feel bad if you don’t know that game – you aren’t missing out. The rules are hitting the top of the car and yelling “Padiddle!” if you see a car with a headlight out. Crazy game, I know.

Well, Bryn was a little more experienced than I and had about 20 “Padiddles” just on the way to Madison. That soon changed on the way to Sibley. I finally got a “Padiddle” and Bryn didn’t really talk to me the rest of the way there, which was a six-hour drive. Talk about a sore loser.

I was also introduced to a new sport, hockey. I had never watched the game on TV or been to one. I was excited, but a bit worried that I would be bored. Don’t get me wrong, I am an avid sports fan, but hockey has never interested me. I asked Bryn to compare the atmosphere to something that I could relate to, and she said it was like an Iowa Hawkeyes football game (even though she has never been to one).

Because of the comparison, I was expecting us to start tailgating hours before the game and see thousands of people around the stadium making the surrounding six blocks blocked due to the uncontrollable amounts of people.

It was about 4:30 p.m., game started at 7 p.m. and we hadn’t left her house yet, which was 20 minutes away. When we finally got to the stadium, there was a small line of students waiting to get in. Nothing like Kinnick.

Even though the atmosphere outside wasn’t at all comparable to an Iowa Hawkeyes football game, it was definitely relatable once we got inside. The fans were crazy the entire game and the cheers were awesome. It was something I had never experienced before. I loved the game so much that I even bought a Wisconsin Hockey T-shirt.

Although Madison was a blast, we decided to drive six hours to my hometown of Sibley, Iowa. I know we are a pretty famous town, so I would be surprised if people had never heard of us. But just in case, I will tell you a little about it so you can picture my town.

Sibley is five minutes from Minnesota and 45 minutes from South Dakota, so yes, extremely northwest Iowa. If you have ever heard of Lake Okoboji, then we are by that—normally that helps people. We have the only stoplight in our entire county, but we don’t even use it anymore. I think there are maybe 2,500 people and most of them are over the age of 65. Please stop making travel plans and keep reading; there is so much more to know!

I tried to prepare Bryn that we would be busy nonstop while in Sibley because of all the exciting things to do, but I don’t think she was ready. We arrived late Tuesday night, and by Wednesday morning, I think she wanted to come back to Drake.

I wish I could say that we went on outrageous adventures in my wonderful hometown, but we stuck to eating and napping. I took her down Main Street, which took 30 seconds, and gave her a tour of our town, which took another five minutes. After that, we decided maybe we could do our homework. Call us nerds, I don’t care, but until you visit Sibley, you can’t judge us.

I don’t mean to sound like I hate my hometown; there just isn’t really much to do. It’s not that I’m a bad host. Trust me, I think I’m fairly decent, but unless you want to visit a nursing home, you’re stuck staying at home doing homework. Thank goodness March Madness was going on!

Although I didn’t travel south for break and return with a wonderful tan, I still enjoyed my time spent with my friend, Bryn. Plus, as a college student, I can’t afford to take a huge spring break trip. But honestly, I don’t need that—at least not as a first-year. A hockey game, playing “Padiddle” and watching college basketball was a perfect week off school for me.

I’m sure many of you have gone bowling before. Maybe you had an awesome time and bowled the game of your life or you didn’t really enjoy your time because you had a gutter ball in each frame. The latter sufficiently describes my recent bowling experience with my friends.

I should first explain that my friends and I like to call ourselves “The Fantastic Four.” You would be correct in assuming the movie was written about us, but don’t tell too many people; we don’t want to be bombarded by paparazzi.

On Thursday night, we received our next mission at Plaza Lanes. I was quite excited because I hadn’t been bowling in over a year. “The Human Torch” had told the other three of us that it was $1 bowling, which made it all the better. (Being a superhero isn’t really a high-paying job.)

Once we got our shoes and ball, our battle began. Our mission wasn’t to save the world; our mission was to see which one of us was the true leader of the group.

As soon as “Mr. Fantastic” let go of the ball, I knew it was going to be a long night. He had a strike on the first frame. How was I supposed to follow that? Well, I did my best: a gutter ball. That happened to me at least once in the next five frames. Yes, I am that good. By the end of the first battle, my total was less than 50 and “The Human Torch” had come out with the victory.

The next game was a bit more exciting, at least for me. I had yet to get a gutter ball in the first few frames, which was quite unusual for me. Then I walked up for my sixth frame.

I was feeling pretty confident because I was on a roll. That all changed when I went to let the ball go. Instead of rolling down the lane, I had dropped it directly into the gutter. It slowly started rolling down until it eventually stopped halfway down the lane. I didn’t even want to face the team. At least they didn’t have to worry about me being the leader.

When I turned around, I couldn’t even look at them because everyone was laughing at me. I was a failure. I had to slip into my “Invisible Woman” persona because I couldn’t handle the humiliation. Good thing we don’t have to bowl to save lives or I wouldn’t be in “The Fantastic Four” today.

Eventually I got up the courage to finish bowling the last game from the support of “The Thing. “ My goal for the final match: get over 100.

The third game was one of the best games I had ever bowled. I had some strikes, spares and only two gutter balls. I was so proud of my improvement! Plus, I didn’t get last place because “The Thing” missed 100 by one point. That moved me up on the leaderboard.

As it turns out, “Mr. Fantastic” is still the true leader of “The Fantastic Four” because he won two out of the three matches. I’m sure there will be more missions where I can come out on top, but it doesn’t really matter. We work the best as a team anyway because we’re the three best friends that anybody could have.

Once we arrived at our destination and walked to the cash register, our total was $12 for three games. Needless to say, we were not happy with “The Human Torch.”

So in case the rest of you ever want to go bowling with your friends, I have a few “Dos and Don’ts of Bowling”:

Do practice before your next bowling adventure to prevent humiliation.

Don’t go the same night an event is taking place. Your bowling game will suffer due to the emcee’s intense shouting into the microphone.

Do take a souvenir.

Don’t trust your friends with money issues. Double-check it yourself.

And there you have it everyone – The epic adventure of “The Fantastic Four.”

Before we left for the conference, we received numerous messages in our inboxes saying we had to register our “MingleSticks” for the conference. According to the e-mails:

“The MingleStick is a one-click, keychain-sized device providing a major digital upgrade to how networkers exchange contact information and connect on social media. The MingleStick enables all attendees to connect with a single click of a button! And the device is an excellent conversation starter and ice breaker.”

We all breathed a sigh of relief. We were concerned at first that “MingleStick” was a colloquial reference to something else for which we didn’t care to register.

Is that really what our generation has come to, though? Do we honestly “connect with a single click of a button?” And what if I want to become friends with the other attendees and not just mutual “networkers?”

I remember a bonfire I had with some friends last summer. It was an awkward gathering of nine girls and guys who didn’t normally hang out. I counted throughout the night and I remember at one point eight people were texting or playing games on their phone. I had fun watching them.

Our generation is often in one another’s presence, but are we really with each other?

In Survey of Sociology with Linda Evans last semester, our class had to read an essay by Stanley Eitzen entitled, “The Atrophy of Social Life.”

In it, he wrote how more than 8 percent of our society is living alone than lived alone last century. He wrote about the careers we humans have replaced with jobs and the homes we have replaced with houses. I bet if he wrote the essay today he might mention how some friends have been replaced with Facebook friends; maybe some massages have been replaced with “pokes.”

The last decade was nothing short of a revolution in social networking. Before 2000, you may have been jailed if you mentioned how you couldn’t wait to connect with others via your MingleStick.

Your parents may have hid you from the neighbors if you began speaking of some fast 3G service that lets you stalk anyone, anywhere, anytime via a book of faces on something you call “iTouch.”

I love new technology just as much as the next person and I love everything it simplifies. But there is one thing that is best left not simplified: relationships.

Call me primal, but I like being able to see what someone looks like before they go through Photoshop. I might even like smelling their pheromones or actually poking someone to annoy them.

I like connecting with others using my human brain and their human brain, instead of a “keychain-sized device.”

I wish I didn’t have to start up conversations with strangers on the DART bus, but when I do I find I have more to learn from them than I do from my iPod headphones or even my “USA Today” app.

Drake is here to prepare us for the real world, not the virtual one. So let’s take advantage of new technology when it benefits us, but let’s put it down once in a while and actually learn from each other.

And sometime soon I’d be up for some good, old-fashioned mingling.

Price is a first-year rhetoric and politics major and can be contacted at ryan.price@drake.edu.

It’s not just our friends’ pictures and profiles that we like looking at, or talking with our friends on chat, but also the applications that are the most distracting. Farmville, Fishville, Mafia Wars and Bejeweled Blitz are some to name a few. Those may be addicting many students, but the one game that I cannot seem to get away from is Bubble Popp.

I first found the game during finals week when it came up in an advertisement on the side.

I thought, “Hmm… this looks interesting. I think I’ll try it out.”

Big mistake. From that point on, I hardly got any studying done because this game took over my life.

When I first started playing the game, none of my other friends played so it wasn’t very challenging because I was always in first place. But soon more and more people started playing and caught up to me. I knew I could never stop. It is now an intense battle between my friends and me as we are constantly trying to outdo one another.

There is really nothing spectacular about this game at all; it’s just the thrill of beating your friends that makes it so enthralling. The aim of Bubble Popp is to clear the playing field of colored bubbles—red, green, blue, purple, yellow—in as few shots as possible. In order to do this, you must shoot the bubbles so that you form groups of three or more like-colored bubbles. The game consists of three rounds and then a bonus round where you shoot at objects worth $100-1000.

I know you’re thinking, “Wow! This is such an awesome game! I’m going to go play right now!”

Hold off for now and keep reading; you might be persuaded in the opposite direction. When I told my friend Bryn Goldberg about it, she made fun of me and did not understand how much enjoyment I got from the game. Later that week, after I scored a personal best, I noticed a new face on the leader board: Bryn Goldberg.

I didn’t know if I should be upset because she was closing in on my numbers or happy that I converted yet another one of my friends to this glorious game. In the end, I decided I was thrilled to have an additional opponent. She’s still getting accustomed to the game, though, so I don’t feel too threatened.

Bubble Popp has officially become part of my daily to-do list. It is a huge task that I love to cross off. I feel like this game pulls me out of reality and helps me forget about what I really should be doing. Bubble Popp has become such a daily part of my life that it has recently taken over my conversations with Bryn.

Tonight she told me, “I wasn’t even proud of the fact that I accomplished the homework I put off all weekend, but the fact that I actually got good at this game.”

So for those of you mathematicians: Bubble Popp > School. It’s a proven fact. That is why I send out this warning, not because I don’t want you to forget about your homework, but because I don’t want to lose my top-three spot.

Bubble Popp can cause severe depression from failure to win. It should not be played while in chat because it can cause a delay in the game, therefore causing the player to lose time and points. It should be played with extreme awareness or it will soon be the focus of your everyday life.

Play with caution and best of luck.

Mataloni is a sophomore news/internet and music major and can be contacted at rebecca.mataloni@drake.edu.

After returning from our meal at Hubnast—I mean Hubbell—we decided we wanted to do something different. My parents were coming early the next day. The only logical cure for a quiet night in would be having my friend change my hairstyle.

I have wanted to get straight bangs for a while, but it’s an international fact that college students don’t have money, even for a haircut. My lack of money was hindering my goal of sporting the Lady Gaga look and I was not handling it well. I could hardly look at myself in the mirror because I could tell something was missing. I thought, talked and dreamed about blunt-cut bangs. They were taking over my life! I knew I had to do something about the situation or things would keep getting worse.

After I had the calling to change my hairstyle, I realized the only solution…have my friend cut my hair! What an awesome idea, right? Nobody seemed to think Katelyn could do it, nobody wanted me to go through the torturous aftermath and nobody wanted me to pursue my dreams of looking like Lady Gaga. Apparently, no one had heard the classic ‘‘’80s song by Ray Stevens – “The Haircut Song.” I was merely following his advice by having a barber I know cut my hair. But our friends just would not go for it, so I had to set up my appointment with Katelyn in secret: 7 p.m. Friday.

Earlier in the day we Googled, “how to cut straight-across bangs yourself.” We were capable of handling this situation ourselves. So there we were, sitting on my desk chair in the bathroom, staring at the mirror and wondering where to start. Eventually we worked up the courage to begin the transformation.

Katelyn was standing in the way of the mirror the entire time, so I couldn’t see if she was creating a massacre or a masterpiece. All I noticed was the hair that kept falling onto my lap. Finally, she stopped cutting and I had the opportunity to see that the bottom of my orange sweatshirt had somehow turned black. This scared me tremendously. I was afraid to look at the mirror.

Maybe my friends were right. Maybe I should have gone to a professional. I started doubting my dreams of looking like my trendy role model, Lady Gaga.

After a few more snips, I got the chance to look at my reflection in the mirror. I slowly raised my head to find a brown-haired version of Lady Gaga staring back at me. YES! Cue “Paparazzi,” please. I was thrilled with my new ’do and could not wait to show it off to my friends and prove them wrong.

My advice to you is to stop complaining about never having any money for necessities—your friends will always pull through. Another little tidbit: Please don’t listen to that Ray Stevens song; it will be a waste of four minutes of your life. The moral of the story, however, is to never stop believing because your dreams really can come true. Each one of us has an inner Lady Gaga. Don’t be afraid to pursue it.