September 5, 2000 — Don't cheer, don't smile, don't fuck

So go my aspirations for frosh week, in addition to the normal straight edge behavior. I doubled the "don't fuck" part because it seems that doing the opposite is a popular thing this week. We'll see about that.

These last days have, for the most part, been so tremendously horrible that they're beginning to blur together, so I don't know that this is going to be a very chronological or a very accurate journal entry. But I never promised that for any of my journal entries, now did I? I also wish I had a thesaurus on hand to look up synonyms for words like brutal, horrible, pathetic, and ridiculous; but alas...

September 5.

This was to be my first real day of frosh week, and the day of our convocation. Horrible.

Prior to convocation, we were taught a number of offensive, hurtful, or otherwise ridiculous cheers. A selection:

"I'm an artsy/I'm an artsy/I'm an artsy drinking beer/But I'd rather be an artsy/Than a fucking engineer."
"Suck my Vic!"
"Drop your pants!"
"Vic once, Vic twice/Holy jumping Jesus Christ/Wham, bam, God damn/Son of a bitch, Shit/Yah Vic!"
"Build a bridge and jump!"

And I think that about covers it. I very much disliked the ongoing trend toward making us all out to be drunks, and to think that this is a good thing. I also found the references to the WWF and the swearing-is-so-cool part to be rather lame. Kim, the one Victoria student we've met up to now that is tolerable, was offended more by the taking-the-Lord's-name-in-vain part, as she's into the whole christianity thing (which is her reason for not drinking, as well). To make a long (LONG) afternoon short, her, Johnston, and myself didn't cheer any of the abovementioned cheers, choosing instead to make up anti-Victoria cheers and to chant them in an attempt to demoralize the frosh leaders. Kim and Johnston seem to have less of a desire to have everyone hate them, so I ended up doing most of the actual anti-Victoria cheering. But still.

Convocation was boring, and our new president was bubbling with happiness and seemed very proud of himself.

Engineers are fucking stupid. I don't buy this competition bullshit, but dying yourself blue and trying to get a water balloon catapult to work when throwing them would be easier both seem good signs of a lack of basic intelligence. The concept of hazing makes me shake my head in wonder.

We then had to bond with our fellow frosh week people in a brutal ice-breaker game that made me want to hit people. While playing, one would switch partners a number of times and then play completely uninteresting games. For the argument game (ripped off of a Monty Python sketch, I like to think), I was matched with a frosh leader who turned out to be one of the more intelligent frosh leaders I'd met. He just said, "I'm guessing you're not too into this, so we don't have to do any of it if you don't want to," and we ended up talking about the entire university social experience. He doesn't drink either, and said that the main thing he's learned is that it's best to just not attend any of the parties with drinking since you won't have fun and people will be annoyed with you for not getting wasted. So now I feel I have a completely valid excuse for not going. Ever.

Later on in the evening I met the second frosh leader I didn't dislike in a large number of ways. (There are a good 50-75 of them, so it's not that great that there are so few that seem worth tolerating.) We were on our way to watch a collection of skits about the whole university experience and were stuck waiting outside for a good 30 minutes; the other frosh leaders were trying to organize games which they admitted were designed for eight-year-olds, while Johnston and I sat on a bench and refused to participate. The frosh leader in question seemed less than keen about the games as well, so she talked to Johnston and I as we made fun of the goings-on around us. And isn't that wonderful?

I admit I'm pulling at straws here; there's not much that I enjoyed that I can take our of September 5th. The skits had their moments, but were definitely a bit more swearing-addled than I'd like. The entire week feels like it's targeted at the lowest common denominator, so it feels weird to see so many people finding it right up their alley.

Once again, I'm going to end up a day behind, as our spare roommate has arrived (we have to have an extra kid in our room until the weekend; fucking frosh week) and I don't want to be too too rude.

But to go back to the title of this one, which I'd hoped to incorporate into my journal for September 6th that I won't be able to type up until tomorrow morning: one of my ongoing thoughts for the day was regarding the prospect of never having sex. Not in some self-deprecating, no-girl-will-ever-fuck-me kind of way; I mean because I won't want to. I remember feeling this way about alcohol back when I hadn't tried it and had yet to decide to never try it; I went for the latter. And it worked out well.

Anyways -- I've definitely decided I never want to have casual sex. As of yesterday and today. (I was always leaning towards this, but I had moments in which I'd have second thoughts and think about not waiting; everyone was doing it, of course.) And the way things have been feeling lately... I don't know. It will be a miracle if I can find someone to fall in love with who can tolerate me and who I can tolerate. It's been so long since I've really cared for someone that I get the feeling I've lost the ability to become attached to a person and that I won't be able to do it anymore.

Or maybe I should read less Douglas Coupland.

I'll post a September 6th entry tomorrow morning, hopefully. It might make more sense than this, too.