Joey and the Stinkberries

You may think this sounds like a great name for a band...and it might be, but it's actually referring to a very traumatic event in my life that I was very recently reminded of by none other than Joey himself.

Let me set the scene for you. Joey and I were friends in college. We met freshman year when we were both engineering majors...a major that didn't last for either of us. We had all of our classes together courtesy of a program called "courses in common". The university's theory was that by giving several people all of their classes together they would form bonds. Well, it worked.

The University of Iowa had other genius ideas as well. Like planting some pretty trees in the Pentacrest. The drawback to these trees is that in late fall they drop these berries onto the ground, which is fine unit they are stepped on and break open emitting a rancid vomit smell, hence the reason we called them stinkberry trees.

So it's a unseasonably warm day in December and Joey and I are headed to our Engineering Calculus(with the infamous Freddy G as our professor) final which we had spent hours studying for. As we prance through the Pentacrest on our way to final I give Joey a friendly nudge and I must have caught him at just the right time, because he was knocked completely off balance and fell into a large evergreen tree. I start dying laughing because I think falling is the funniest thing ever. Joey did not think it was quite as funny, because I was 10 steps in front of him when I heard feet pounding on the pavement behind me. Here comes Joey, grabs my backpack and twirls me around at lightening speed to which I go flying to the ground....right in a GIANT pile of mashed up stinkberries. I now have rancid vomit smelling stinkberries on the back of my jeans and on my hands. With no time to run back to change and a final looming ahead of us, we continue on to see what Freddy G had cooked up for us. Let me tell you, stinkberries don't wash off your hands well and it was very hard to concentrate on that final smelling of stinkberries. The only consolation was that Joey sat by me and had to smell me the entire final, too.

And that, my friends, is the story of Joey and the stinkberries.