Colin's 4th Football Game Performance in Marching Band

Colin’s 4^th Marching Band Performance at a Football Game, Friday, Sept. 17, 2010:  The Mighty Unicorn Band vs. the MacArthur Brahma Band or “I can’t stand the rain” (thanks, Missy Elliot).

(Read with my advance apologies:  I've edited, and I've read bad stuff, a lot of it my own, so I hate to see this, but in the interest of time . . . here is this entry . . . so far.)

Missy Misdeamenor, Colin can’t stand the rain either.  The second game, when the Mighty Unicorn Band faced the Clemens' Bisons, I had gotten a call from the speech pathologist telling me she was calming him down about the chance of rain during the game.  Knowing Colin’s sensory trouble with rain, the touch, sound and feel of it distresses him, I was ready for the worst at MacArthur game in San Antonio as it was almost certain to rain.  But I talked with the booster president and teachers to let them know and learned that he’d be given a poncho to wear should rain happen.

And it did. 

But a minor miracle occurred, considering that Colin still sticks his fingers in his ears and wads himself into a tense crouch when it rains and we’re driving:  he did fine.  In fact, he did really well.  It could have been the preparation for the performance at the game, the talks about the ponchos the director gave them all, and the fact that it had been drizzling a little for a while, giving him a slow transition (transitions can be hard for autistic kids, but no transition is worse).  Thus, when the drizzle became rain, Colin simply did what all the band kids did, as a group:  put on his poncho and . . . continued. 

He's the kid in the center, the one with the unponcho-ed clarinet and no glasses

Meanwhile, we sat as close to him as possible without causing a problem.  He’d skipped school the day before on my orders to help him recover from a bad cold, so I did have to sidle up to a booster parent who was chaperoning the kids as inconspicuously as possible and solicit help determining whether or not he’d taken his decongestant.  Of course, I remembered this after realizing I’d gotten so caught up taking photos that I’d forgotten to check on his medicine when we’d first arrived.  I’d had to give it with a permission note to the booster president, who gave it to the nurse that always accompanies the band.

And, as the rain started, I dropped my pen, my one pen, the one I was using to grade, as karma would have it, on the restrooms below the bleachers, forcing me to notice the football team slipping up and down the field. 

I’ve been forgetting them.  The football team.  Not that Colin has.  Entry before this, he talked about wanting the guys on the team to win.  His mother, however, with her bad memories of football Sundays growing up where the women folk cooked, cleaned, and fed first the men folk watching the Sunday game, had been somewhat deliberately pushing those kids in the pads and helmets out of her mind.  It’s not like they are anymore anonymous than the band, which from what I can tell, is meant to function kind of like Star Trek’s conception of the Borg’s “hive” mind.  Every member is but a part of the whole, etc.  And under the plumed hats, square-shouldered uniforms, and white gloves, band members are little more recognizable as individuals than football team members. 

Let’s face it:  football team members are probably more recognizable.  At least they hold different, if strangely labeled positions, to this perversely ignorant viewer.  The football team has running backs and now, I learned, broken into different subspecies, such as half back, quarterback (where are the zero back, ¾ back, and whole back? Even a tail back exists.  What about the head back, torso back, limb back?).

             The point is that I keep forgetting those kids, boys all, yes, running backwards and forwards on the field between hanky throwings by the guys in stripes.  Except when one is injured.  Because then even I remember that they are kids, and that, somewhere in the stands, a parent is as fear-filled as I would be. 

            And I also admit that autism has metamorphosed my attitude toward team sports, especially the single sex ones.  Because of my son’s differences, I’ve become the parent I’d never thought I’d be:  I’d be backing him in football, soccer, or any team sport were he to show and interest in it.  In fact, because of autism, I wish he would play a team sport.  I never thought I would say that pre-autism.  Fringe soul that I was, I thought my kid wouldn’t want to or need to be part of a crowd. 

            Again, autism affects you, the parent.  Not like the child—I know that.  I don’t have to deal with the sensory and intellectual/emotional differences attendant with a different neurology.  All of a sudden, being a member of a group that is so popular in mainstream culture has meaning, appeal even. 

You figure this out the moment your kid can’t play with other kids, can’t want to play with them.  You figure out that being a willing part of a group can actually be good, even helpful. 

As you vainly try to get your 6-year-old autistic kid interested in tee ball because it involves social interaction you, newly realizing the snobbery inherent in your natural, loner proclivities, realize that working with other people is an intelligence, and a necessary part of a full life—especially for your child, who can’t.  Who really, painfully can’t.  It’s one of those moments parents start to grieve.

            So it was we watched Colin in tee-ball, when he was 6 and going through his rose and yellow colored glasses phase—literally—and standing around in the outfield like Ferdinand the Bull, but even more bored than the bull, who at least cared about the flowers. 

Colin wanted out of there and away from those other kids.  The home run he did make, or maybe it was even just a score, was under duress that results from lot of parental pleading and cajoling.  Come in, come to this strange little pad and touch it with your feet.  Please.  Now! 

            And so Colin did walk from third to home, where he stopped, looked down, then deliberately stomped on home plate, as if to say, “I am finished, through, caput with this ridiculous farce in which I have no interest whatsoever.”

            Karate, a one to one sport that we prayed would hold more interest, absolutely did not.

            I’ve even tried to get him interested in wrestling something some parents would cringe to see their 8-year-olds interested in.  Because at least it’s normal.  Now that he enjoys watching it, at 15, I’m absolutely thrilled.

            Remember Pokemon, which had so many parents, of all varieties and flavors, running scared?  While some parents were trudging out of movies (or being tugged into them by their eager children) praying for coffee or valium, or dragging their kids out of narrow-walled, claustrophia-inducing comic book stores, we were teaching Colin about Pokemon ourselves, vainly trying to get him interested in those strange little, wide eyed characters whose names we remember more than he did, or does . . . because other kids loved them, and because if he did too, he might want to actually talk to thtose kids about them and play with them using them!

            Thus autism has changed me, made me a believer in sports because I feel I have to be, because kids talk about this stuff and do it, and it’s a social activity, because one the of the core deficits of autism is the inability or severely limited ability to interact in social situations, and again, sports are a social activity. 

            Back when he was four, I had taken him to Wal-Mart, to try to get him to choose some sheet for his bed.  There, I had encouraged Colin to like those typical boy things I used to despise because of the way they type case children according to gender.  I’d probably still despise them if Colin didn’t have autism.

Sheets bearing cars, or footballs, or basketballs.  And he simply didn’t care.  In fact, at that point, he barely even had the language to say he didn’t care, and I felt, simply, exhausting grief.  Again, he was isolated, and I was reminded that he was different and in a way that could keep him alone for most his life, and in a dangerous way:  it’s difficult to hold a job alone, to have no relationships.  We, his parents won’t live forever, and I can’t ask his sister to take care of him.  What I saw, in that little despised sports sheet (that we bought anyway, hoping), was his future, alone, forgotten, abandoned. 

            So our Unicorn football team, the reason the band performs and the other kids’ groups assemble much as I might not like it, those young men in that institution I’ve held a long seated grudge against—they didn’t do so hot this game.  In fact it was Unicorns 14, Brahmas 28. 

            And Colin, bigger hearted than his mom by far, cared about that loss. 

            In fact, when as if by providence, karma, whatever, I lost my pen and couldn’t continue, I had to watch those padded guys, who run through an inflated unicorn at the game's beginning and middle.

The team runs through this poofy thing . . . 

 . . . and then they touch this blue thing, a hand-molded blue unicorn dragged around by a crew of girls called the "Swarm," and then, after the good luck ritual, out to the field to "play the football" (as my husband Roger's grandma called it)

            And I felt for them.  It had started raining. And they had started losing.  But they endured, and Colin endured, and, as this kid illustrates, sometimes you can endure and maybe even like (sometimes, but not always like) both things we thought were important and things we never believed were important.

Yes, it's dark.  My camera skills are inadequate as my editing here, but you can still see the tuba player, dead center.             Tuba player number 63. 

Colin's 3rd Football Game In Band Ever: Unicorns vs. Clemens

Colin 3^rd Football Game in Band Ever 

Feeling guilty, an emotion I am more and more suspicious of, I volunteered to work the ice cream stand for the band boosters at this game.  After all, other parents were sitting up in the stands next to my son and around 100 other kids in the Mighty Unicorn Band fetching them water, walking them to the bathroom, picking up their trash, keeping order, and generally seeing to their welfare. 

            So after a day helping run a training conference for Texas State’s tutors, I directed Roger, Colin’s dad, or tried not to, as he drove us through I35’s rush hour to Madison High School in San Antonio.  There we circled, looking for a stadium, until I finally spotted a student crossing the parking lot.  The game was in New Braunfels, she said, kindly not pointing out our now correctly donned but well out of context New Braunfels High School athletics and band booster shirts.

Yes, I had believed an online calendar (or was it the preceding year’s?) about the game’s location. 

To my credit, it had been a busy week, and I hadn’t asked Roger to double check the game’s location.  And, not wanting to “bother” anyone, I hadn’t called my band parent friends to check.  So, after driving back to New Braunfels (the whole, round trip wasting about 1-1/2 hours), I had Roger drop me off at the NBHS football field’s back gate to begin my booster parent duties. Walking through the small lot crowded with pick ups and golf carts, I was at least able to dredge up a small measure of gratitude that Patty, the head of fundraising and captain of ice cream sales, thought I was coming straight from a conference and did not know of my escapade to and fro on the interstate.

So, having spent much of the day submersing my hand in coolers filled with ice and water numbly shifting sodas and waters so that tutors could have chilled drinks during the training, I found myself balancing on the edge of a trailer and sticking half of my body into someone’s freezer to pull out single-serving containers of mint chocolate chip, cookie dough, butternut crunch, cookies and cream, homemade vanilla, and dutch chocolate ice cream.  This because by that point in the day, I could not trust myself to correctly count money. 

            However, at the band booster ice cream stand (a card table next the trailer), I did get to meet Ray, whose teenaged son is in band—french horn—and whose toddler son has chesnut ringlets, just like Colin’s hair as a toddler.  I also met Denise, whose son Victor is, like Colin, a clarinet player and a freshman in the band and learned that Victor had gone to the same middle school as Colin. 

Later when I asked about his fellow clarinetist, Colin said, “I stay away from him,” instantly raising a host of parental worries.

            “What do you mean,” I asked.  “You were in middle school with him.”

Colin shuffled his oversized sneakers and stared at our scarred wood floor. 

“Was he nice?” (i.e., did he threaten or bully you?).

            “Yes.  I have nothing to do with him.”

            From what I could tell from exchanges between Denise and Patty, Victor was making more social progress in the world than my son.  He’d shed his glasses for contacts, grown his hair long, and made forays involving Patty’s daughter as a driver.  He’d even been with Patty’s daughter to Whataburger—of his own free will.  This is the kind of activity we have yet to hear of from Colin, who has no normal friendships that we know of:  normal friendships here meaning a relationship between two people that is continuous and involves the two involved parties visiting and doing things with one another because they want to. 

We’ve had Colin bring home kids for formal play sessions for years, “peer play” in the lingo of Applied Behavioral Analysis therapy (ABA), the vehicle we used to teach Colin in his early years.  But almost all of our “peer play sessions” were back when Colin was young and arranging “playdates” was something the parent’s did anyway.  Later, our autism consultant and then, still later, Colin’s autism resource person at the elementary school had helped us get together with other parents who were willing to let their children be used as “peers” in what was usually a very structured (and mostly arduous) activity. 

The experience was like playing puppets by yourself:  You talk for the left hand puppet.  You answer for the right hand puppet.  You prompt your child to talk, at first and for much of the time by feeding your child his lines.  You answer for the other, neurotypical child by feeding that child his lines.  And so on, and so on . . . .

            Then the whole play session dissolves when your four-year-old daughter comes into the room and starts her own conversation with the neurotypical puppet child, who suddenly develops the capacity to talk on his own and a desire to interact hitherto unseen.

            And, it’s understandable that the peer puppet child does, in this case, did. The whole exercise was exhausting for me and not nearly as rewarding for the other child as talking to Colin’s “despicable sister,” Chloe.  Early on, the peer and Colin liked “playing” some, when it involved things like me pushing the kids around in plastic laundry baskets and yelling “choo choo” or spraying shaving cream onto his tiny yellow, blue, and white table and drawing in it. 

Truth was, by the time conversation became involved, we could only get Colin interested by reinforcing him with treats extrinsic to the activity.

            Though we had tried a friendship-like interaction with an actual same-aged peer this summer, we’d had similar results, though Colin’s “peer" was able to answer questions on his own.  And this peer was, thankfully, understanding when, after about 45 minutes of trying to play together on the PlayStation, Colin said, abruptly, “I’m ready to do the game alone now.”  Besides being mature and good-hearted and himself a high school “Unicorn” and an Art person like Colin, Isaiah has known Colin since pre-k and thus also what to expect.  

Beatific Isaiah, Colin's mature, Unicorn, Art Guy, Pal

           But back to the game, where, after putting in two hours of selling ice cream, we booster parents packed up.  And Ray, before we finished, very kindly let me go to the fence to watch the halftime show and take some cell phone shots, though I did see the pit gang trudging back from the field (Go Clayton and Jennifer, go!) and took a lousy cell phone shot of them.  As per last game, my digital camera and I were separated, though this time because Roger was sitting with it in the stands, taking fantastic photos for me.

            I thought. 

            When I did clang up the bleachers to sit with him, however, Roger told me his photos were awful.  I looked at one.  He was right.

Spying a parent-aged woman with an actual “big” camera, the kind with the lens one attaches, I asked what I could do. 

According to Monique, not much.  A native Australian, she had a son in ROTC and had spent plenty of time trying to document the exotic culture of a Texas High School football game.  She could barely get a good still shot without a tripod.  And, our flash would do us little good.  A pity as it was dark out now.  Feeling guilty again, I took pictures anyway.  On the bright side, they would at least be a record, Monique said. 

Yep, the whole Mighty Unicorn Band, with their backs turned to us.  Colin's a smudge wearing a plume out there.  Somewhere.

Unicorn Band, field level.  See the stand from which the drum majors take turns conducting?  See all the heavy stuff?

  

Colin, dead center, walking away.  Downright fantasic shot, huh?

Brass section.  Colin's not in the brass section, but at least this shows you the kids attentively playing music.

The best picture of the entire game was of the creature Colin said had “bugged” him the previous game.

  

Best Picture Award Winner.

            No, the "creature" is not the man in the picture.  That’s Roger, Colin's dad and my husband (for those who've forgotten).  The one with the gray hair.  The one facing away from the camera.

            While she watched me toil with my digital, Monique did have to offer her own astonishment and fascination with the football culture from the eyes of a “ferner” (that’s foreigner, in Texas, “Auslander” in New Braunfelsian German).  In Australia kids and adults played cricket mostly and football (yes, the ’mercan kind) once a week, but the experience of it was never “like this,” she said.  Even her friend in Virginia said they nothing like it.

            All the activities revolving around the practice of Texas High School football—the band’s, the cheerleaders’, the drill team’s, and twirlers’ performances; the seven-foot mascot’s lurching; the boys racing with giant flags or the girls dragging a blue papier mache-looking Unicorn before the stands following the team’s touchdowns—all of these strange activities simply don’t take place outside of this state. 

            Listening to Monique, pondering from behind the drill team (this time), and staring at the back of Colin’s head while he tried to dance with the band during their between-performance performances, I found myself thankful, for Colin’s sake, that we were here, where insurance only recently started helping with autism treatment thanks to legislation passed too late for Colin but thankfully, soon enough for the next generation of ASD kids.  And where, again, we had a band that would let him in a group, a social group, that accepted and supported him. 

           

            But the best item to report came from Colin, my somewhat unwilling participant in this blog.  Here is his answer to “what you thought about band and the game and what you liked the most about it and what you liked the least”:

            “I didn’t want to do this at first, but I loved the fact that I got to stand up and dance once a friend of mine named Dakota asked me to do it.  I was very very exhausted when I got there.  My back was aching and I couldn’t stand in that position—straight—but I knew that it was part of being in the band and I had to deal with it.  I did and still love to cheer the football players which was about the only thing I did like.  I like the football players because they are unicorns and that is what we are.  It came up in my head through feeling and instinctively that it’s important for them to win.  I wouldn’t want to play football because it seems really hard—you have to tackle people and I wouldn’t like it. I wouldn’t like losing or being attacked or beaten.

            I didn’t like the fact that we lost especially on our own field and I didn’t like to [wear] my band suit because it was sweating my neck.”

            Colin especially didn’t like it when one of the “elder classman” (his words) made fun him when he lost his balance and said, “Whoa.”  While I told Colin that freshmen always get teased, he insisted he hasn’t noticed it happening to another soul.  Now, why would I think my highly socially aware child wouldn’t notice others getting teased . . . ? 

            His answer to the question, “Why do you think you get treated differently in band or school”:

            “I thought I got treated differently because the way I usually behaved, you know, very tempermental and silly a little bit and how I kinda react to things.  People wouldn’t understand me.”

           

            And, finally, that first display of foolishness, or at least the first that I am willing to admit to from my last post:  a photo of my Heiseman trophy-winning, football-playing-squirrel shirt, complete with Colin’s band “button” photo (which is a good photo—Colin’s wearing a mild, adolescent-rocker snarl, and sporting enough hair to be a candidate for a an 80s hair band), on a field of goldenrod, the color of the opposing team, the Clemens’ Bisons, from last game: 

Fantastic squirrel tee shirt.  Colin's Band "Button" photo upper left on shirt.

 Until the next game, Aufwiedersehen, or something like that, and Go, Bluuuuuuuuooooooohhhhhh!!!!!!!

Sept. 6, 2010: Unicorns vs. Bisons vs. Chance of Rain

Sept. 6, 2010: Unicorns vs. Bisons vs. Chance of Rain

Mighty Unicorn Band.  You can see Colin, can't you?  He's on the right. Yes, right there.

So now I have been to two high school football games in my entire life, as has Colin, my son. Colin is in his first year of marching band as a freshman in high school. For those who didn’t read my first entry, Colin has High Functioning Autism. I am attempting to record or at least give my impression of his thoughts and feelings about being in a marching band, being in high school, and being autistic.

The first item I’ll contribute because a.) I found it before I located his description of the game, (which he’d taken to his room), and b.) Colin’s second performance posed a threat to him that the first game didn’t pose: rain and the possibility of more rain.

If you know much about autism, then you know that autistic folks often have great hang-ups with sounds, smells, tastes, and visual stimuli that neurotypical people don’t have—or at least not to the extent that an autistic has. To further complicate your comprehension, each autistic person, (kind of like us neurotypicals), has different combinations of sensory “things” that set her/him off.

Here’s a list that I asked Colin to write this summer because sometimes he prefers writing to talking. In the list, he writes about sensory challenges/issues and how they affect his emotions, anger:


I’m feeling like the real world is the problem. That’s keeping me mad. Here are some examples of how it’s effecting me:


• When I’m trying to imagine certain things a lot of loud sounds tend to bother me such as barking, our dogs snorting [they are Pugs so this goes with the territory], even when people yell such as my sister I tend to go off.


• People repeatedly calling my name these people are – mom/dad.


• People sniffing which often keeps me from concentrating and eating.


• The rain makes me feel like an earthquake’s going to hit because of the loud noise on the roof and the sound of it makes me feel nervous just because. The sound of the rain going under the car sounds different, odd, doesn’t match the sound you’re used to driving in the rain. And I don’t hear it everyday.


Those are the main things that disturb me it would be really helpful if you could write some techniques down on how I can get over those things. [We, the parents “repeatedly calling his name,” have been working on these “techniques” for years. And years. But we can’t think of everything, or, half the time, many things. So feel free to suggest things!]


In any case, back to the rain-threatened band.

I knew that the rain might be a problem. I’d had to pick Colin up early from practice the day before because it was raining, and I thought to call another band parent (bless you, Jennifer, for answering so many of my rather silly calls and questions). In so doing, I found out that practice had been cancelled early. As an autistic teen who can hardly keep his school notes organized, Colin doesn’t have the cell phone that seems to be in the hand of almost every high school or middle school student I see. For example, Colin’s “yelling” sister has had one since she was 11. Colin has shown a desire for a cell phone one time: the day we gave his sister Chloe hers. He said, “I want one of those,” as we passed her the holy grail of tweenagerdom at her birthday.

Since then, he has expressed absolutely no desire for this critical piece of technology without which most teenagers and tweens cannot live. Thus my need for helpful parents who can tell me when their teens have phoned them with useful information (don’t laugh, you know their info can be useful).

Again, thanks to my friend’s relayed information, I got Colin early from rehearsal the day before the game. Hunched and head lowered to avoid the downpour, he scrambled into car after I had waited 30 minutes in an unmoving line and assumed his typical position for a drive through rain: modified fetal with his fingers stuck in his ears. At once, he gurgled a plea that I turn right to go home, thinking I would avoid driving through puddles this way. But by now, puddles were general over New Braunfels. And puddle I drove through had Colin humming and digging his fingers ever deeper in his ear canals.

This should have been a heads up to his mom that game day might be a problem. Did she prepare for this though? Not until the high school speech pathologist called her at work the next day at three. She’d been talking to Colin about handling the rain and would be able to sit with him through the game that night as she is a band chaperone. Seredipitously, this angelic person had worked with Colin in middle school (angelic person’s photo here):

Angelic speech path/band chaperone.  May a thousand blessings "rain" down upon her!

Then she told me that Colin might need me to bring a pair of black socks he could wear to the game. They were walking to the band hall to see if there were spares.

Now, I started worrying. Only three weeks into the semester, Colin had been having trouble in Algebra, as I figured out after trying to help (very unsuccessfully) with his homework the night before, Spanish, and World Geography. In short, I had begun fearing he might need tutoring the school wouldn’t provide.

On “red” alert, my brain began emitting fear like my flatulent old red Honda had exhaust: if Colin failed academically, he couldn’t be in band, which offers the kind of socialization that you can’t find many places for autistics in a small Texas town. Here, the only social skills group that has been formed for kids on the autism spectrum keeps falling apart for lack of participants, something that has distressed me over and over. Plus he actually liked that group, just like he likes band. What to do?

Drive back to New Braunfels, pick up his medication, drive home, fix spaghetti for his second supper after the game, cool and refrigerate spaghetti, and don a yellow/gold Heisemann Trophy-positioned-squirrel tee shirt in an effort at showing football “spirit.” Appending Colins band button photo to the shirt, I grabbed the camera and drove to the game . . .

Where I realized, once seated in the stands near Colin, that I was wearing the opposing team’s colors in a field of royal blue band parents. Oops. Remember this was my second game and second game only. Plus I had again managed to get as close to Colin as I could without looming over him (though I’m sure that, by season’s end, the poor dance team girls I use to hide myself from Colin are going to hate me and my wild-eyed attempts to peer through their ranks to keep tabs on my son).

In the end, though, once again, Colin had a good experience: the rain didn’t happen and spectators watched the sun set through a cloud streaked sky as our kids played, performed, gossiped, screamed, and in some cases confabulated under the bleachers. Fear quelled, for the moment, I sat texting my husband who was in Lubbock at his parent’s old house. Reading glasses balanced so “un-cooly” on my nose, I relayed impressions of Colin’s performance (good) and the exotic culture of high school football, including our mascot, the seven foot unicorn, introducing the opposition’s mascot, the not-as-tall-bison, to the band, and snippets of other parents’ reactions to the game, such as their collective groan at the announcement of the opposing team’s band’s choice of halftime music, Lady Gaga’s “Pokerface.”

Giant seven-foot Unicorn peering over sign on left.  Bison on right.  Yep, the brown  furry one.  Go, Mascots!  Go!

And when I wasn’t busy sending belabored messages across Texas, I took occasional photos with that same cell phone. Prepared as ever, I’d packed the battery, not the camera, in the camera case.

Wonderful twirlers and poor shot of beeyootiful "cloud streaked" sky.  See, no rain!

That's Colin, dead center, on end, standing and participating in grand display of Unicorn hand sign.

Colin at end of line on right.  You can't see it, but he's glaring, or at least giving me a hard stare.  Good ol', normal teenage behavior.

So, having read and seen my ridiculous parental perspective on the game, here, at last, is Colin’s:


I was afraid of the rain because it could mess up the pads of my horns [and] mean that I wouldn’t be able to play anymore. Also, [I was afraid] because I am wearing my band uniform and it might mess up its color and ruin it. So basically I wouldn’t want to mess up or ruin any of my band equipment under any circumstance.


I really enjoyed the game because I got to sit next to Mrs. G. and talk to her about how the game is going to be, as well as meeting some of my friends that weren’t in band. I didn’t like the atmosphere however because there were bugs buzzing above us and near the lights and in particular I don’t like insects. The band on some parts was ok. [I really enjoyed] that I got to play in front of the crow. I also I liked to cheer on the football players.


And, as an antidote to the thousands of wistful, faery-sprung creatures on tee shirts, in cover art, in movies, and on friends’ youthful, doodled spiral notebooks, here is Colin’s rendition of his schools’ mighty mascot:

In the spirit of the antiquated but beloved Public Enemy, “Power to the Unicorns, Ya’ll.”