Man, it's been a rough several days, and I'm not even doing the obligatory whining about finals. My car was wrecked (was it my fault? Not important), my wallet and phone were stolen from the AFC, and I think my formerly perfect eyesight may finally be dulling after 21 pristine years. Lots to bitch about, but let's backtrack to that second point.
My stuff. Comfortably nestled behind a sweatshirt in one of those cubbyholes where everyone keeps their stuff, in plain sight of at least 40 people trying to look good and maintain their figures. This guy (girl?) just walks in, rummages through and takes what (s)he wants. Fortunately, he or she had the decency to leave the keys to my rental car. Thank you, seriously. Happened to another guy too at the exact same time. Now, I cannot say whether there were people actively watching this happen or whether it seemed strange to them. But if both of those were true, would they have actually done anything about it? Not saying I would have, either; it's that whole "I have no tangible reason to take a risk by questioning this thing that looks funny, whether it's social or physical. Besides, someone else will do it, because there are many people here."
I think the same things when I go to Mellow Mushroom trivia night every now and then, and peoples' cell phones light up under the tables like a muffled Christmastime between questions, everyone furiously texting their friends to hop on Wikipedia or something to grab a fact, date or statistic before that guy up front announces that it's time to turn in your answer.
There's a lot of debate out there on our honor system that never seems to go anywhere, just like debate about anything, but sometimes I wonder what it all really means. Are we really a more "honorable" place than others? The online OED makes me sign up or register or something, so I just went to dictionary.com to find the term defined as "honesty, fairness, or integrity in one's beliefs and actions." When I think of frat parties (a student ID and a solemn verbal confirmation that you are indeed "21" should get you in), when I think of self-righteous interest groups on Grounds getting all worked up over harmless jokes just so they have a cause to trumpet and maybe a blurb for their resume, when I think of actual malicious actions targeted at specific groups like that "not gay" thing at the football games (who actually does that? seriously?), and when the only tangible results I can remember hearing from our big bad honor system are that peoples' academic careers and real careers get majorly screwed over for one or two mistakes (at a place of learning, I was taught that you learn from your mistakes) -- well, here's what I feel:
We proud members of the University community should have just as much a code, council, proceedings, whatever crap against "sketchiness" (not that any of you need that term defined) and abject stupidity as we do against dishonorability. But Erik! You can't efficiently police against such concepts if they're simply indomitable parts of human nature, something that you can't make extinct! You'd be wasting your time. Same with honor. Same with terrorism.
I want my wallet back. My cell phone's probably in some sort of chop shop by now, under the knife. I mean, I guess that's what they'd do with a phone that got deactivated like an hour after its disappearance was discovered, right? Harvest it for parts, or something. Fortunately, I've managed to replace most things over the course of four days, which speaks volumes about how often people lose or misplace their various stuff in this day and age and about how much time one has to do stuff like wait in line at the DMV during the week when you're only rolling with 13 credit hours.
I digress, though. The main thesis, if you will, of this column, is the following: Slaughter Rec Center rules. I tell you, the only reason I went to the AFC in the first place was because Slaughter was closed on the last night of Thanksgiving Break -- a crying shame, if you ask me. It might be older and smaller, but 1) it's got something of a more personal, friendly atmosphere about it. No one there knows my name, but if they did, it'd be the kind of place where everyone knows my name. 2) It's less crowded. 3) They've got racquetball. Racquetball!
Well, I'm out. I hope you get whatever you want for the holidays, and, if you don't, just go buy it anyway. See you in 2008, suckers!
Erik's column runs biweekly Thursdays. He can be reached at silk@cavalierdaily.com.
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