Okay, if today doesn't make me an official Longhorn, then nothing will apparently. I participated in the UT/A&M football draw this morning. Yes, I've done football draws before, and gotten tickets, but this one was a little different. Since the UT/A&M game is one of the more highly anticipated game of the season, it's usually one where tickets are a little more scarce, and prices are a little more higher. The draw definitely reflected that today. I anticipated a bunch of people camping out in order to get tickets, so I made sure to have everything in order and planned on getting to the stadium at the butt crack of dawn.

I woke up this morning at 4:30am. Yes, you read that right. Four-freakin-thirty. Got to school at around 6:00am where there were already about 50 people lined up.  Many of them had been there since around 11pm the night before. I sat down in line and began reading and studying. I don't think I had quite realized how long I would be in line, but I was in for what seemed like an eternity.

Throughout the morning, students trickled into the stadium, some with sleeping bags and pillows, knowing that they would be in for a few hours of waiting. By 7:30, the lobby was completely filled with students. Many people were trying to make deals with those in the front of the line, which got me and a few of my line-mates worried that there wouldn't be enough for us by the time we got to the ticket booth.

At 8am, a stadium official showed up to reorganize the line. By then, the number of students present was just ridiculous and we were asked to snake the line outside and up the stadium ramps. This was the point that many students decided to make a dash and skip ahead in line through all the confusion. For some it worked, and for some it didn't. But what ended up happening was that we jumped back a few positions in line. By 8:45, the cutting was getting pretty rampant. A girl who was in front of me in line was getting pretty angry about all the people cutting. She would jump out of line every 10 minutes to count the number of people in front of us. At one point she counted 87. Twenty minutes later, that number had jumped to about 100.

At this point, the guy behind me kept announcing the time almost every 3 minutes. It was pretty comical actually. Time could not have progressed any slower at that point. Nine o'clock came around, the box office opened and the line began to move... sort of. It took us about an hour to move up to the booth. We were pretty worried that there wouldn't enough tickets. Someone had mentioned that A&M was more of an alumni game, where tickets usually went to those whom had made significant donations to the Longhorn Foundation. In the end, we each ended up getting our tickets, and I was pretty relieved. Four hours of my life was spent waiting for 5 tickets.

It was ten o'clock and I was dead tired. I went up to the lab and just lay down for about 30 minutes. I didn't get that much sleep last night.