>>> Text-Heavy
By staff writer E.E. Southerby
Volume 6 – October 20, 2002
Hello again, everyone. Another week, another column. Hope everyone is having a good time at school or work or wherever you go to keep yourself busy during the day. I'm having the time of my life out here, despite my semi-coherent weekly rantings you all enjoy so much. This was a slow week, with everyone except me focusing on schoolwork, so I took the time to think about all the things that bother me. This column is the result. Enjoy! Here's what happened:
-Ok, I admit it. I can't cook. Not even a little bit. Did you know you need a colander to make Kraft Dinner? I sure didn't. I don't even know what a colander is! I tried to make Chef Boyardee, but I couldn't find a can opener or a microwave-safe dish. I got so hungry that I just stabbed the tin with a knife a few times and then drained the tomato sauce right into my mouth. Note to kids: It's even better raw.
-You haven't heard loud music until you've spent a night in the dorms. One guy will be playing acid techno really loud with his door open, driving everyone crazy. So his neighbour will get mad and crank up his gangster rap in an attempt to drown out the other's music. Pretty soon you've got 35 different sets of speakers all cranked up to full blast shaking the foundation of the building at 3 in the morning. Do you have any idea what that sounds like? A lot like ‘System of a Down', that's what.
-The only thing worse than people who play music really loud are the people who play porn really loud. I'll be sitting in a friend's dorm room and I'll hear this moaning coming from a few doors over. So I figure someone's getting laid and I, of course, go over to see who it is. But, alas, it's just some idiot with his pants around his ankles watching “Shaving Ryan's Privates”. I'm like, “can you at least close the door? We're trying to watch Jackass, jackass.”
-Quote of the Moment: A girl named Teresa, after finding out that I'm an amateur comedian back in Ottawa: “Could you tell me some more bad things that have happened to you so I can laugh?” She meant well, but I still hate her.
-My rich friend Laurie and I went car shopping a little while ago. She wanted to buy a Volkswagen Golf. We drove to the car dealership to check out the new models, and she just happened to have her golf clubs in the trunk of the car we drove in. Turns out you can't fit a set of golf clubs in the trunk of a Volkswagen Golf. What kind of marketing strategy is this? I hope they never come up with a Volkswagen “Ski”, it would probably look like a matchbox on wheels.
-Back home, we have normal traffic signs. Take this one: “Fire Lane – No Stopping Any Time”. Sensible. Very Ontario. In Victoria, the same sign says: “Fire Lane – No Stopping Any Time Except Fire Trucks”. Do the fire trucks really need permission to stop? Suppose there was a fire, and the firemen are racing to the scene: Are they really going to stop and check to see if they're allowed to park there? Suppose you were the cop who gave the firemen a parking ticket for stopping in a fire lane. Could you sleep at night? Come on, people, it's just common sense.
-Ever notice how when you did really badly on a test everyone always asks you how it went, but when you ace it nobody ever gives a shit? You always sit there smiling like an idiot, pretending to review your test and waiting for someone to come and ask you how you did and when they never do you start bringing your score up in conversations in an attempt to get to blurt out your good mark. It's absolutely pathetic.
-I listened to 2 guys have an animated conversation about the term “to ace a test”. One believed this constituted getting an A, the other thought you had to get 100%. They both made some good points, but I'm pretty sure the concept was hypothetical. Neither one will ever achieve either, in my opinion. Morons.
-Ever notice how travel agents are often pregnant? You will now!
-If there's one good thing about living off-campus (sigh), it's the bathroom situation. I share a good, old-fashioned bathroom with one person. It's clean, there's towels in there, and it doesn't smell like death. In residence, you get 4 toilets to split between 40 people. Nobody ever cleans, and there's no soap by the sinks. No wonder people are always getting sick! You go in there and you see 20 guys getting naked together, snapping each other with towels, pouring bleach all over the floors for some reason. It's like stepping inside a Village People music video.
-I've noticed most girls form groups consisting of one hot girl and 4 ugly girls. This means that you only have a 20% chance of hooking up with the hot girl. And even if you do, there's an 80% chance that one of the ugly girls is going to break it up. A note to ugly girls out there: Leave me alone. It's not my fault your mom took LSD while she was pregnant.
-There are so many obstacles to hooking up. I managed to beat the odds and separate a hot girl from her pack. I start talking to her and then my drunk friend Rick comes over and throws up on her shoes. Thanks, Rick. Way to cockblock.
-Now playing: “Romeo and Juliet” by Dire Straits. If I'm not going to get any I might as well listen to music by and for people who are.
-Last week I was talking about how I got stuck tutoring people for free. Well, the situation has just worsened. Now people are asking me to do their homework for them, thus freeing them up for more important things like whoring themselves out in overcrowded dance clubs. In a way, it's actually better for me. It takes me less time to do their homework for them than to teach them how to do it themselves. Give a man a fire, he'll be warm for a day. Throw a man in a fire, he'll be warm the rest of his life.
-There are basically 4 kinds of drunk people: You got your angries, they're the ones who go around picking fights with everyone. You've got the pukers, they're the ones who always end up in the bathroom before midnight. Then there's the crybabies who always whine about how terrible their life is. Finally you've got the real party animals, who get drunk and seem to know how to have a good time. I haven't met any from that last group, but I've heard legends.
-Maybe it's just the way I was brought up, but drug dealers really piss me off. There's this one guy who sells out of his dorm room. One time he told me if I ever need anything, just write my request on his whiteboard, but to make sure he doesn't get caught I was not to use entire words. Like if I wanted 4 grams of mushrooms I was supposed to write “4g of mush”. Good code, asshole. I just pray I'm around when the “poli” put him in “priso”.
-I was telling someone in my writing class about how I feel really left out of college life because I don't live in residence. They told me I shouldn't feel that way because I'll make plenty of friends in my classes. This, by the way, is a lie. Nobody makes friends in class, it's just not possible. Maybe if the professor would shut up for a minute so I could have a conversation, but no, they just keep talking. Almost as if they have absolutely no regard for my social life.
-When I asked the girl who told me I'd make friends with people in class if she wanted to be a friend of mine, she actually said (without irony) “I'd love to, but all my friends are in residence. Sorry.” What, is there some kind of rule about mixing on- and off-campus friends? I am SO not doing her homework for her the next time she asks.
-The university photocopy centre is open until midnight every day. Judging from the number of advertisements I've seen this is a pretty big deal. I've never had a photocopy emergency at 11:30pm. I don't really think anyone has. My guess is it's kind of like the “pet shops” during the prohibition. When they say “photocopy late” it's really code for “come smoke pot with us”. I haven't yet verified my hypothesis, but the residence drug dealer could learn a lot from this kind of subtlety.
-When all the cool people who got a residence room moved in in September, each door was equipped with a clean whiteboard and a marker. Now, when I walk the halls, I notice that all the whiteboards have crude pictures of genitalia drawn in permanent marker and all the markers are gone. This is a real shame. Now how am I supposed to buy 4g of mush?
-Hermits are weird. You know the kind of people who never leave their rooms except to pee and eat? I'll see them walking from the bathroom, go into their rooms and close the door and then you don't see them the rest of the day. What the hell is there to do in a dorm room by yourself for 16 hours at a time? We were curious, so we knocked on a hermit's door to try to find an answer to this baffling question. Next thing you know we're walking in on a hermit watching porn on his computer with his pants around his ankles. Turns out they're not that different from you or me.
-And, finally, you haven't seen scary until you've seen a girl after she's been up all night studying. I had breakfast with this one girl, you should have seen her. She hadn't showered, she was wearing dirty clothes with armpit stains, her eyes were bloodshot red with giant bags underneath. I told her she looked like a fifty cent hooker on a five dollar night. Turns out really tired girls have no sense of humor. Now I have to do her homework for the rest of the year.