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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Technology plays key role in student routine at LC

Will Green Lewis and Clark High School

Brandon will graduate from Lewis and Clark in 2006.

This year he has made a habit of waking up before 7 a.m., and breakfasts on toast – not cereal, because one of several traits he shares with yours truly is a delicate palate in the morning – while lunch is always peaut butter and jelly, and dinner is made possible via the grocery store’s frozen foods section.

Brandon holds under 2,000 songs on his iPod, although to his credit he already had surpassed that mark last month when, while in the process of uploading the albums of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Audioslave and The Shins, the whole contraption crashed, deleting all of his songs.

The aforementioned machine that crashed was one of his family’s “detested” Dell Dimension computers and was bestowed to him as a byproduct of living with an “anti-Mac” father.

On any given night at 9 p.m. Brandon is probably begrudgingly starting his homework. Brandon, perhaps in for a rude awakening when the college-application circus comes to town, declared with the end of his junior year, “I feel like I’m graduating now. … It’s all downhill from here.”

Brandon is a talented young man who once managed to destroy the newel and railing of his house’s main staircase when he decided to bound down it a la Mary Poppins one afternoon.

Will graduates from LC on Tuesday. He too has mustered up the strength to roll out of bed before 7 a.m., and when he feels adventurous, decides to apply some sort of spread to a bagel for breakfast.

Lunch is large, comes from a sack, and is consumed between the hours of 10 a.m. and 3:30 p.m.

Dinner is often provided via the South Hill’s finest take-out establishments.

Will also has a meager 2000 songs on his iPod and loves listening to Stephen Malkmus, the Wrens and The Shins on it. Back when Will had a computer, an older Toshiba laptop, the machine became contaminated with so much injurious downloading that its motherboard was fried to a crisp one evening.

Will has a hunch his forthcoming graduation gift will be a 15-inch Powerbook G4.

On any given night at 9 p.m., Will is most likely staring at the clock in his room, concluding that he still has several hours left in the evening to commence any work that needs doing.

Will often exhibits poor word choice and once claimed in a British literature essay that “the king had expensive loins.”

Will is an easily confused individual, who once forced his family’s garage door into the shape of an accordion when he unconscionably chose to shut it on top of a bike rack hitched to his father’s 1995 Jeep Cherokee.

Colin graduated from LC in 2004. This year he has tried hard to wake up by 9 a.m., and skips breakfast for a compensatory lunch. He then buys dinner and takes part in periods of “scrounging” throughout the night, which consists of perpetrating schemes to filch his hallmates’ disregarded pizza slices.

Colin has almost filled his iPod, sporting a whopping 3,600 songs, on which he can’t seem to stop listening to artists such as the New Pornographers, The Streets and The Shins. Colin’s laptop is a 15-inch Powerbook G4 that he bought partially because he feels it looks cool enough to be in a Sharper Image display window, partially because it’s not a PC.

On any given night at 9 p.m. Colin is most assuredly heading to a poker, video-game, Ultimate Frisbee or pingpong gathering. Colin describes everyday life at college as a land of “rainbows and butterflies and sunshine, and that constant feeling of doom that you’re forgetting to do something.”

Colin is a genius who once streaked, in the seminude, across campus to a 9 a.m. final exam at 11 a.m., only to stop along the way to attempt the seduction of an attractive girl, then ace the three-hour test in a span of 45 minutes.

While these stories remain anecdotal at best, they contain one principle worthy of recognition.

However we manage to change our lifestyle (or perhaps just redirect our immaturity) from high school to college, our uniting bond is simple: Ours is a generation made of willing minions of the Apple Corp.