>>> Text-Heavy
By staff writer E.E. Southerby
Volume 21 – March 2, 2003
I'm so exhausted from this week that I don't even have the energy to write something witty at the top here. This begs the question: Why do I even HAVE something at the top here? It's never funny, insightful, or necessary. Another question, slightly less pertinent, but intriguing just the same: Do you think liquid soap and shower gel are really just the same product in a different bottle? Because if they are I'm seriously reconsidering my support for the personal hygenics industry. One last thing: In British Columbia, the legal drinking age is 19. Not that this stops anyone who's underage from drinking. It's just that this will become a key piece of information later on in this newsletter. Unless I forget all about it and don't write the joke pertaining to that fact, in which case I guess the information won't be key after all. Whatever. Here's what happened:
-We went to the Victoria casino, which holds the record for “World's Smallest, Most Depressing Casino.” There's no bar, no coat check, just 50 welfare bums with dirty fingernails playing blackjack for an extra carton of cigarettes. It was a pretty bad scene. At least we college students were playing for something noble and worthwhile, like tuition money, or a keg.
-After the casino, we decided we had earned a trip to Burger King. Of course, it was late, and only the drive-thru was open. None of us had a car, so we walked up to the drive-thru window and asked them if they would take our order. They said no, citing some lame-ass excuse about how if we got hit by a car they would be liable for us. Of course, we were standing in the car lane arguing with them for a good 15 minutes, during which time a total of zero cars came through. If they had served us we would have been gone a lot sooner, the Burger King Corporation would have money in exchange for food products, and we wouldn't have had to moon them out of spite.
-It's weird how, at the beginning of the year, everyone was friends with everyone else in the building simply because nobody knew who anybody was. As the months went by, people started picking and choosing who they were better friends with, until eventually every single person became a part of a trifecta. I don't know why these cliques always come in groups of three, but they do. You've got your jock trifecta, those are the guys who go to the gym 6 times a week. Then there's your drinker trifecta, they're the ones who go the bar at 2 in the afternoon. Of course, there's the pothead trifecta, that one's pretty well self-explanatory. Finally, there's the loser trifecta, three guys who came together not because of common goals or interests, but because their application to every other trifecta was rejected. I'm president of this last trifecta, and I'm still waiting for some other applicants.
-There are some people in this building who are so irritable, it's a little bit frightening. Specifically, I'm thinking of the guy who lives immediately underneath me, one floor down. One night he went and woke up the RA at 3 in the morning on a school night to file a noise complaint because my footsteps had woken him up. You know you're a sorry excuse for a human being when you pull crap like that. I hope this kid's parents can afford the therapy bills, is all. I mean, seriously: Complaining about me walking around in my room? Anne Frank made more noise than that, and I hear she turned out all right.
-I promised a friend of mine, Sam, that I was going to skip the class we had together later that day. Then I changed my mind, and decided to go anyway, but I couldn't find Sam anywhere. Rather than look like a liar, I snuck in through the back door of the classroom and sat in the back corner, right behind someone tall, so that Sam (who was sitting in the front row) wouldn't see me. Then the teacher asked a question and nobody raised their hands but I knew the answer but I couldn't yell it out because then Sam would know that I had betrayed him, so I bit my tongue so hard I started to bleed. This is the story I'm going to give when they make a TV movie about me, and they will, and I'm asked to describe my most irrational injury.
-It's against residence policy to throw up from overdrinking. Something about abusing alcohol. If you do, you get what's known as an incident report (IR) and you have to go to a meeting on your habits as a resident or some such bullshit. Of course, if you've got to puke, you've got to puke. It's really not a negotiable point. Would they rather if, instead of puking, I held it in and died of alcohol poisoning in my sleep? Wouldn't that be hilarious? I wonder if that's against the rules. I'd probably get an IR posthumously.
-There's all sorts of rules these dorms make up just so they can exert some sort of Stalin-esque control over us. We had one vacuum to split between everyone in the building, and it got stolen a week into the school year. So my friend John, in an act that would earn a Purple Cross for courage if it took place anywhere else, broke into another building late at night and stole their vacuum. It was pretty spectacular, he went through a window and everything. He got an IR for it, and the vacuum cleaner was confiscated. Apparently cleaning your room is against the rules here, too.
-Now Playing: “The Seed 2.0” by The Roots featuring Cody Chesnutt. At this juncture I haven't yet been evicted for misbehavior so my music selection is rather upbeat.
-So my friend Todd celebrated his 19th birthday this week, and he's the kind of guy who hasn't drank much before. So our plan of action was to get him as licked as humanly possible as quickly as we could. I think our plan was a success. He threw up at one beer, before eight o'clock.
-We got Todd a stripper. I don't think she was expecting to have to dance in a tiny dorm room with 15 guys standing around the perimeter. She handled it pretty well, though. That is until Todd had to run out of the room mid-lap dance to go throw up again (2 beers). Afterwards, as she was cleaning up, the stripper submitted this very hurtful Quote of the Moment: “Well I guess SOMEBODY's never seen a naked girl before.” Not one as dirty as that, I bet. Seriously, this stripper had a bad case of Butterface. Everything was good about her, but her face.
-The next plan of attack for Todd's birthday celebration was to do a Centurion. For the uninitiated, this is where you drink 100 shots of beer in 100 minutes. This is harder than it sounds. Hell, just keeping time when you get that drunk is a feat. Since my room was already dirty from the stripper and her whipped cream, we decided that it would be the perfect place to host the drinking. I bet you didn't know that another irrational residence rule is that you're not allowed to have drinking games. Something about promoting alcoholism. Anyway, we crammed 40 people inside my room, and every minute we'd all start screaming 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-DRINK!!! while music blared so loud that the head of residence actually came over to see what was going on. I've got to tell you, though, the night was epic. We broke every single residence rule, and they'll probably even have to create some new ones for next year (Rule 208: No Adult Entertainment). I'd do it again in a heartbeat. At least, that's what I'm going to say at my meeting on alcohol abuse (“Let's start the meeting in 10-9-8-7…”).
-We come up with these horribly demeaning nicknames for girls we like who won't give us the time of day. Among my favorites are “Baby Spice” because she looks exactly nothing like the Spice Girl of the same name, and “Baboon Face Tight Ass” because, well, I think you get the picture. I can't even begin to fathom why these girls don't like us. I thought females were supposed to be irreversibly attracted to smart, mature college guys like us.
-And, finally, a bunch of my friends managed to convince a couple of girls in the building that they were lost and in trouble in downtown Victoria. I don't know why they did this, I think they just wanted to perpetuate a clever hoax. Anyhow, the girls got all worried that their friends were in serious trouble, and when they found out that they had been lied to, they went into the guys' rooms and stole all their underwear. This is the kind of crap that you find funny only after having completed a Centurion. I just hope this isn't my last memory of dorm life before I get evicted.