Category: Memories

this year was my sec­ond best in col­lege, most­ly due to being on the fenc­ing team, which let me expel my — excess — ener­gies. i also declared my majors, Anthro­pol­o­gy and Film & Tele­vi­sion, and got firm­ly into the swing of my class­es. First semes­ter I got a pity D in my Clas­si­cal Greek 103 class most­ly because I was one of three under­grad­u­ates in a class of grad­u­ate the­ol­o­gy stu­dents, thus the pro­fes­sor struc­tured the class toward them and did not real­ize it until it was too late for myself and anoth­er under­grad. The third under­grad had tak­en Greek in High School and was the best in class at trans­lat­ing the Ili­ad.

I took an exis­ten­tial­ist phi­los­o­phy class, and real­ly got into that for awhile. I saw myself as an exis­ten­tial­ist of the Albert Camus school, except instead of being auto­mat­ic in my life of absur­di­ty, i laughed along with it.Thus, when the cam­pus sprin­klers would turn on and spray me, i could do noth­ing more than shake a rue­ful head. some things (the sprin­klers for instance) nev­er change.

i still lived in sec­tion 4B, and it was great to have a group of fresh­men in the sec­tion. We told them to do things and they did them. hehe. I also made a good friend out of Jere­my May, a new guy in 4B but a senior, who lived at the end of the hall. Through, him I also became friends with Steve Luke who spent inor­di­nate amounts of time in my room play­ing Playsta­tion (46 hours in one week that we kept track of).

Room­ing with Mike was pret­ty darn good, apart from his taste in music which i thought rather taste­less. Our room was the com­mon room for much of the sec­tion and it would not sur­prise either of us to come back from class­es and find some­one else in the room doing some­thing (usu­al­ly steve).

the foot­ball sea­son was much bet­ter than the pre­vi­ous year, we were 9–2 and went to the Fies­ta Bowl, a deba­cle where we were beat­en to death by Beavers from Ore­gon State. On the fenc­ing end of my sports life, i was work­ing my tail off, com­ing in ear­ly and doing drills, beg­ging for lessons, etc. I began to improve slow­ly, and my big break came when my cap­tain Jan had to be in Cuba for a fenc­ing tour­na­ment the same week­end of one of our tour­neys at North­west­ern. Thus, I got to trav­el, I did rel­a­tive­ly well for my first col­le­giate fenc­ing expe­ri­ence and by the end of the year I had man­aged to win enough bouts to mono­gram, a feat I was told was impres­sive for first year walkons. (PUFF PUFF EGO PUFF PUFF)

my love life sucked, but i also was­n’t try­ing that hard. I was sex­iled for a 17 hour stretch one evening/night/morning by my room­mate who let his girl­friend “acci­den­tal­ly” sleep past vis­it­ing hours and then told her she would have to spend the night. I spent the night on a couch in the sec­tion lounge. I then wrote about this in Harlem’s Hitlist, the vul­gar sec­tion newslet­ter i wrote for the sec­tion in place of the incred­i­bly spo­radic ‘Roos News. This newslet­ter, quite harm­less real­ly, picked on par­tic­u­lar peo­ple in the sec­tion each week, but the per­son picked on was always in good humor about it. except the RA, he took it upon him­self, and also the rec­tor, who hap­pened to read my most offen­sive ver­sion to tell me to cease and desist, i instead took it under­ground and dis­trib­uted it via email. i can­not be stopped.

I final­ly man­aged to get into the intro­duc­to­ry film course, sec­ond semes­ter of my sopho­more year, after jump­ing through flam­ing hoops and wad­ing through piran­ha infest­ed waters. i had declared as a major yet they (the depart­ment) still would not give me a spot. I even­tu­al­ly got a spot through the gen­er­al reg­is­tra­tion peri­od, but because of the Film depart­men­t’s extreme help­ful­ness, I was two semes­ters behind and there­fore I was nev­er able to take Advanced Film Pro­duc­tion or Pro Video Pro­duc­tion.

Thus endeth the year of the half-wise.