Jamnfest

Janfest starts today (tomorrow to me, but today to you faithful blog readers). This will be my 16th Janfest, including when I was a high school student. That's just sick.

For some reason, a misguided rural Georgia mom yearly mis-pronounces or misspellz the name of this festival as the following: Jamfest.

If it was called Jamfest what could possibly be going on? Here are some possibilities.

1. 800 lovers of preserves, jelly, and other fruit-based sweets would descend on Stegeman Coliseum for three days of tasting, sharing, and critiquing one another's homemade jams. You can be certain to encounter much frivolity, and probably a fair number of insulin injections at this event. What fun?

2. 800 flannel and Birkenstock-wearing (well, that's kinda me, minus the flannel) part time musicians would join at Legion Field to hear Fish, what's left of the Grateful Dead, and various other jam bands. Special clinics around campus include "That's Just Parsley: How to hide your stash of pot in a guitar case without drawing the ire of the TSA," "The Fourth Chord: Expanding the horizons of your harmonic language," and "Who's Counting: Successful methods for making your songs under twenty minutes in length."

3. 800 athletes with pain on their faces meet at the Woodruff athletic fields to compare seemingly minor injuries to their digits. While most of the event normally consists of this pain-sharing, the much anticipated highlight of the weekend is the appearance of some dude who knows how to pull on a digit in exactly the right way to unjam it. Non-participants should make it a point to avoid the Lumpkin at Carlton Street area at this point in the event, as the residual effect of this much finger-pulling can tend to be nauseating to the weak of stomach.

4. 800 urban-dwelling optimists converge on the 10 Loop at College Station Rd. at 7:45 AM every day for three days. Feeling that voluminous traffic has received "an unfairly negative reputation," these individuals meet to set the record straight and embrace the positive effects of traffic jams. Each session should be assumed to start 15-40 minutes behind the published schedule due to... well, you know.

Considering these possibilities, what kind of parent would possibly consider sending their kid to Jamfest? It's more than a mis-pronunciation, it's bad parenting.