And then there were whistles...

During O-week there are lots of forced interaction activities. I don't typically like these at home and I don't for the most part like them here. They had games on Sunday for all the new Jaffys (just another f**king first year) as we're all known. I did one, but snuck off when they started doing things involving shoving your face in flour to find jelly beans. Just not my idea of a nice way to get to know people. A bunch of people went down to a bar then that night, but I didn't go because I was tired and there was a guy I had met who had left his id back in Melbourne and I felt bad for the poor fella so I invited him to hang out with Jill and Jamie and I - I think he might have been better off on his own, but hey, we didn't force him to stay.

On Monday we had a mix-up at a bar called Max. When you walk in each guy and girl get a number. Then they kept us seperated for a couple hours to build the tension or something. Finally you're allowed to go mingle and find the guy/girl who has your number. Lucky #64 turned out to be Aman, a guy from Washington that I had already met. It was actually pretty fun though and I chatted it up with some people I hadn't really talked to before so it was fun. There's a guy from Oregon (he was actually matched up with one of my friends) and we had a pretty good time mostly just arguing about the various merits or lack thereof of our respective states. For the record, Oregon's got nuthin' on Kansas. When we got back home, Jill and I sat around talking with a drunk first year Aussie. It was wonderful because he was interesting and had a bowl of mini M&Ms to which I helped myself quite liberally. I finally went to bed at 4:28 am and fell into a nice deep sleep only to be royally pissed off at 5:00 when the RAs started blowing whistles, banging on doors and playing music at obnoxious levels. If you know me, you know I am not a big fan of things like this. I ignored it for awhile thinking it was a bunch of dumbass 18 year olds. But after 10 minutes I could take it no longer. There were very violent thoughts coursing through my brain. Most of them centered on using the whistle to strangle whoever was blowing the damn thing. If someone had taken a picture of me at this moment, camera, film and person would have all probably been turned to stone. I was not wearing my happy pants. In fact I was wearing the angriest pair of pants I could find.

What followed, was probably, by definition, minor hazing. And I do use that term tentatively. No one was hurt, no one was verbally abused or humiliated, but people did do things they wouldn't have done in a normal situation by choice. We tramped across campus and at some point things were thrown at us. Flour, water balloons, and eggs where the projectiles of choice. I didn't get any direct hits but my pants did have some nasty egg stuff around the bottom. Then people were pushed into doing things such as chugging a bottle of maple syrup or tabasco sauce, eating a clove of garlic or a whole onion and they kept telling us that no one can leave until everything is done. I suppose it was "all in good fun" and I'm not trying to indict anyone, I just think it was dumb and my life would have been better if I could have skipped the whole damn episode. They didn't try to make me do anything which is a good thing because I wouldn't have done it and probably would have made "a scene". The fact of the matter is, they couldn't force us to do anything. They couldn't have physically kept us there if we had all just walked off, so by that standard it was voluntary to a point, but I still just think it was the dumbest thing I've ever stood around and witnessed.

I apologize for the somewhat bad tone of this post, and maybe I should have spared everyone the details of this but it's all part of the experience I guess, so now you've all heard about it too. I still am having a wonderful time and I love being here, but I think this was one event that was in very poor taste.