>>> Text-Heavy
By staff writer E.E. Southerby
Volume 8 – November 3, 2002
-This week was Alcohol Awareness Week at the University of Victoria. This seems kind of redundant to me. Everyone I know is already aware of alcohol. They brought in guest speakers and told us not to drink and drive. Who the hell has a car in university? I can't even remember HOW to drive. Next week they're probably going to give us a lecture on the dangers of chewing gum and walking. What? I fall down sometimes.
-I can't believe it's November already. At the beginning of the year I, as well as everyone else on campus, bought a dry-erase calendar from the university bookstore. It's juast a big laminated sheet of a generic month, that you're supposed to fill in the dates. The thing cost $12. Now, at the beginning of every month, I have to erase all the dates I had filled out for the previous month and write in the dates for the current month. I can never get it right. Is the first of the month a Sunday? A Friday? And how many days are there in the month? You'd think for $12 they'd help you out a little.
-The worst part about my dry-erase calendar is that I have no appointments and I write my homework in my daily planner, so the ONLY thing on this calendar are the wrong dates for every month of the year. I should just leave the bloody thing blank, then it could parallel my life: Monday, no date. Tuesday, no date. Friday, no date. Saturday, no date… sigh.
-The university gave me a daily planner for free, which really puts the $12 I spent on a dry-erase calendar into perspective. On the cover of the agenda is written, in giant block letters: REDUCE TUITION FEES. So I was like, “okay”. And then I did. Free tuition for everyone. Yay!
-Maybe tuition fees wouldn't be so high if they raised the prices of calendars to help cover costs. I mean, you don't really expect them to give this shit away, do you? Besides, the university demographic has money to burn. I should know. I read about it in books.
-I have it on good authority that university students, on average, spend 70% of their disposable income on drugs and alcohol. The person who told me this, some anal retentive dipshit who came to lecture us on alcohol awareness, told us this statistic as though it was the most shocking thing he had ever heard. I actually find it kind of comforting. It means 30% of our disposable incomes are being spent on something else. (Hint: calendars)
-We have a fruit fly problem in the house. Nobody knows how this could have happened, and everyone who comes over has a theory. Some science students came over and placed the blame on the weather and the time of year. Me, I'm guessing it's the giant piles of opened fruit that are always sitting around on the counters. But don't take my word for it. I'm not a scientist.
-Also, everyone who sees the fruit flies instantly thinks they're the experts on insect life and that they know how to get rid of them. One guy told me that the lifespan of a fruit fly is less than a day, so if we can get them to go a day without reproducing they'll all die out. Brilliant, Holmes! Now we just need to come up with a way to keep fruit flies from reproducing. I suggested blasting “Bump & Grind” by R. Kelly over and over, on the premise that not even insects could have sex to that. Everyone looked at me like I was an idiot. If you can think of a better way I'm ready to listen.
-The Victoria Church of Scientology has a giant marquee I always pass that contains the Virtue of the Week. The Virtue of the Week for this week is: CARING. What a stupid sign. I feel like a bad person, though, not caring about this sign and all. I don't know why I should. After all, I'm not a scientologist.
-Now Playing: “Shed a Little Light” by James Taylor. Why? Because it's not R. Kelly, that's why.
-The beginning of the year you always have “Club Days”. That's where all the clubs on campus set up booths and try to force you to sign up for their club. Here's how the booths are set up: On one end of the hallway, you got all the cool clubs like Ski Club, Topless Trampoline club, etc. On the other side you have The Dungeons & Dragons Appreciation Society. I feel like a king walking by the nerdy clubs, having them wave pamphlets and scantron sheets at me, just begging me to sign up. Of course, all that attention could go to my head pretty quickly, so I made sure to beeline to topless trampolining.
-I joined the photography club. The pamphlet seemed really convincing, so I put my name and email on the damn scantron sheet. I told them I had never taken anything besides family photographs and didn't know the first thing about photography. The girl at the booth said it was ok, that there were lots of amateurs. So I go to the first meeting. There's like 8 people there all using terms I didn't understand and bragging about their “Auto-exposure Bracketing” and “Rear-Curtain Refractive Index Synchronization”. What the hell? I just wanted to take pictures of topless trampolining. Help me out here.
-The cool clubs are meant for people with more money than me. I signed up for surfing club because I've always been interested in surfing (ok, I saw Blue Crush and I thought the girls were hot. Sue me.). Turns out a weekend of surfing when you factor in transportation, equipment rentals and lessons comes out to over $500. Who can afford this on only 30% of their disposable income?
-Doesn't anyone besides me have any homework? How can you just waste a weekend surfing? The girl at the surfing club booth suggested that I could drop a class or two if I wanted to free up more time for surfing. I'm like “You stupid idiot. I'm IN university. I didn't come to university just so I could drop classes so I can attend the university clubs. That's like buying a car so that I can have something to put gas into.” She didn't understand me, but that's ok. We can't all be heroes.
-This is kind of underground (that means top secret, for you old people reading this): The university has a 4:20 club. This is a group of people who come to the fountain outside the library at 4:20 in the afternoon to smoke marijuana. Gosh, they're cool. I had heard so much about this top-secret club (potheads aren't good at keeping secrets) that I just had to go and check it out. Here's what you see: 2 dozen losers wearing tuques even though it's not cold out, huddled around in a circle coughing and looking over their shoulders in case someone might see them being bad. If I sound bitter it's because they wouldn't let me join. Well, I'll show them. I'll start my own club. The 4:18 club.
-Halloween came and went. Weeks of preparation went into our celebration, and it was a huge letdown. We went to a corn maze, which sounded cool, except it was meant for little kids so we could actually see over the corn and find out which way to go. What a ripoff. So after we finished we sat around outside in the cold drinking and shouting expletives at the kiddies. What can I say, we're a classy bunch.
-You know what pisses me off (besides the people at the 4:20 club)? People who put an apostrophe in the word “Halloween”. I have no idea why people do this. What's next? Witc'hes and Pumpk'ins? Also, I have a strong dislike for the word “Spooktacular”. That one's really annoying, too.
-Quote of the moment: Overheard waiting in a really long lineup outside a danceclub on Hallowe'en, when it was really cold and everyone was wearing costumes that made them even colder, by some drunk girl to her (I guess) boyfriend: “This lineup is taking so long I'm thinking of faking an orgasm again, just to warm up and give me something to do while we wait.” Girls, not to be rude here, but guys don't give a rat's ass if you fake an orgasm. By the time you do it we're already finished.