The Memory Hole

bullet belt.

Circa fall 2004 - spring 2005.  freshman year.

We were playing airsoft at the time.  Evan was one of the regular players.  We went to the nearby CQB place, and I noticed Evan had a belt which he claimed had real bullets.  His dad was a cop, you see, and he had access to real bullets, or something.  Now that sounds fishy but apparently four years ago I believed him rather than figuring that more likely they were fake bullets from some hot topic belt, but I digress.

I snapped at him and gave him a ton of shit about how it was really dangerous to be playing with real bullets, how if the primer somehow got struck in the wrong way he could kill somebody, and I didn’t want to be involved until he took them off.

He took off his little bullet attachments.  I probably didn’t really care.

the weakest party.

Definitely 2004, Fall, Freshman year.  It was the Sunday before school officially started, my first semester.

I had a single apartment in Hale Aloha Ilima, Room 433.  I had no idea what to expect from college life.  I was living around a lot of friends from high school, and a lot of others that I had recently been introduced to through being a Regents Scholar.

So that last night before we would all begin our college careers, I invited everyone over to my room.  I don’t know why, I guess because it was supposed to be cool in college and it was going to be cool socializing all the time.

I can’t remember exactly who was there, because I believe some of the people I didn’t even know that well.  Definitely John, Evan, Fuj, K-Ching, and probably at least a few other random people from floor four.  Maybe Alex?  I remember also there were at least a few Regents girls there, I want to say Iris was there, I definitely know Jillian was there because I had to let her in from the Honors building (HA Lehua?), they even made us go through the silly “guest sign in” process and she even brought some drinks.

By drinks I mean Hawaiian Sun soft drinks.  We were pretty square.

All I remember was that it was kind of awkward, we all sat around my room and talked for like an hour or two.  And that’s how college began.

freaks, monsters, and raelians.

Spring 2006.  John, Patterson, and I took “Freaks and Monsters,” a general LLEA class that was about, well, uh, what people have called odd, strange, etc.  There are about a million things that could be said about this class, but here’s one for today.

The whole vibe of the class was that it was really wrong to make fun of “the other.”  That is, the name “Freaks and Monsters” was somewhat tongue-in-cheek.  As the professor pointed out on the first day, she was actually all about teaching tolerance.  We were learning that those who had been castigated as freaks and whatnot did not deserve such a treatment, and at the very least we should all respect each other as fellow humanoids, even if they were conjoined at the head or were pinheads…er, I mean, microcephalics.  Yeah, I still remember that.  So the professor did impart something worthwhile to me.  In retrospect, it really wasn’t a terrible class, but it wasn’t great either. It was honestly interesting subject matter, but it probably could have been better, but eh, I suppose the professor was trying and it was a 200-level lecture class, so it’s not going to be the best ever.

Actually, that’s neither here nor there, but that’s enough of a disclaimer of me not actually out to hate on the class or the professor.  That being said, that class had its moments:

Oftentimes in class I was gagging on the amount of “tolerance” that was crammed down our throats, and then suddenly one day there was a clear break.  I am almost certain it was the last day before Spring Break, because I remember thinking that I would soon be free, only having to tolerate one more period of tolerance.

The topic was cloning.  At one point the professor starts talking about the Raelians, which for those of you who don’t know, is some small UFO-cult that claimed that they had already successfully cloned a human.

The class had covered way “kookier” things than Raelism, but for some reason this small UFO cult that claimed they had cloned a human was the professor’s breaking point.  She started cracking a ton of jokes about how crazy they were.  I mean really, she spent at least a good twenty to thirty minutes surfing around their website, reading every claim they made on the site out loud, and mocking them.  It was actually rather vitriolic.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m no Raelian apologist.  Nor do I really have any problem with making fun of them.  I agree, they’re pretty much crazy and definitely a weird cult, but on the grand scheme of things I don’t know if they’re actually harmful or anything.  God/Rael knows I’m no expert on Raelian practices and beliefs, although I guess if I remembered that day in class more clearly I might have been, since she did go into them in detail.

Anyhow, so it’s not like I was really offended or anything.  But I definitely noticed it was a clear break from her “love everyone” mentality, and that makes it stick out in my mind for some reason.  I wonder if someone in her family was abducted by Raelians or something.

Then we talked about Alcor, the company that has Ted Williams’ body on ice, and well, then I went and ate lunch.

steak night.

Freshman year of university. The only year I was living in the on-campus dorms, which were different than living in the on-campus apartments, because you were required to have a meal plan.

The logic behind it made sense. In the apartments there were full kitchens, so it was plausible that students were cooking their own food. But in the dorms, they didn’t want students to starve to death, and even if parents just gave their kids a bunch of money to go buy food, very little of it would probably be put to that purpose. 99% of it would probably go to booze or illicit substances, with the remaining 1% spent on impulse-buy munchies at 7-11.

But in truth, the meal plans themselves were huge scams designed to line the pockets of Sodexo, our school’s food service contractor that ran basically everything that served food on campus. They were extremely expensive, if I recall correctly the cheapest plan was way north of another thousand dollars added to the already expensive dorm rental fees.

They were also designed so that they weren’t really that good of a value. Like, okay, if you spent $1000 upfront but could eat every meal every day on campus for free, maybe it would work out. But there were always weird rules, like you could only eat a certain amount of times per day, or only at certain places, or things like that.

The one my mom got me was pretty decent, I could eat two meals a day at the dorm cafeteria, I think all seven days a week.  But it didn’t stack, so I couldn’t eat one meal on Monday there and then eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Tuesday.  So if I ever chose to eat out elsewhere, that was a “lost” meal that I paid for but didn’t receive. I also didn’t get any allowances at any other of the Sodexo food vendors, it was the cafeteria or nothing.

The cafeteria wasn’t terrible, it’s been the topic of a few posts already here. After subsisting on it for a year, though, I can happily say I never wanted to eat there again. The food was also really greasy and bad for you, almost surely responsible for untold numbers of Freshman 15s every semester.

It was buffet style, and they had different stations, a pizza station, a grill station, a pasta section, et cetera. I think I wrote about this before in the vegetarian dinner entry.

Anyway, there was one shitty night. Thursday night. Steak night. For some reason, on Thursdays the cafeteria would forego its typical food for steak night. My first week at school, a few people told me about it excitedly.

“Oh man, just wait until Thursday. It’s STEAK NIGHT! If you eat at the cafeteria one night a week using your meal plan, make it steak night!”

These kids that told me this didn’t seem to be alone, either. Thursday night was the one night a week where it was pretty much a given that you’d be waiting in a line out the door to get in for dinner service. Sometimes, it was a really long line where you’d have to wait upwards of half an hour.

But I’m going to let you in on a little secret: steak night fucking sucked. After you waited in the long line, you were given a ticket for your entree. The cafeteria was usually all you can eat, but I guess steak is too expensive for that, so you were only allowed to get one serving.

Now, I’m not a huge steak fanatic, but it was pretty much in the same class as the other low-grade shit that Sodexo served every other meal of the day. I can’t honestly imagine that this steak cost much at all, since it had the texture and appearance of an abused tire. And it wasn’t just a bad cut of meat, it was also tiny as hell, I guess again due to cost issues. You got about three bites of meat, along with a potato, I think.

You did have an alternative to go for a chicken breast, and after a while I ultimately just began opting for that every week as the year wore on. Chicken’s chicken, it was nothing spectacular but at least it wasn’t a colossal disappointment like the steak was.

To make it even lamer, when it was steak night, the steak/chicken distribution took up one of the other stations, I think it was usually the grill (burger/fries/sandwich/chicken nuggets) station, which was typically my favorite station, so you not only had to eat your one little serving of crappy steak (or chicken), but you couldn’t get the other stuff that was at least decent.

I never understood why students would get so amped up about steak night, nor why Sodexo even bothered at all.

Fuck steak night.