An Inside Look at Fraternity Emails

Every Sunday, one of the girls in Kappa Kappa Gamma sends out an email to all her sorority sisters reminding them of chapter on Monday. Invariably, she gets twenty plus emails back with snarky comments meant to frustrate and/or amuse her. Last night, instead of replying directly to the sender, one girl accidentally sent her fun filled and private response to the whole chapter. Someone let me read it. I'm paraphrasing here:

"YO YO YO YOU GURL I SEE YOU DROPING THAT THANG WEARING THEM BELLS WITH YOUR ECKO WHITES! WE BE GOING TO CHAPTA TOGETHER TONIGHT!"

It went on for several sentences. When she came into lunch, all the girls stood up and yelled, "YO YO YO." She was embarrassed, not only because the chapter read it, but because somehow it got sent to the head of their National Advisor, an older woman who sits on the National Council. She had to explain what Ecko whites were. To me. I didn't know.

I'm going to cheat with this post and copy some emails that I sent to the chapter in preparation for our Laser Quest. I realize 75% of my reader base is fraternity brothers, but this is for the four friends I have that aren't in BYX. Pertinent information includes our fraternity's Mom's Day was Saturday, and also I can say whatever I want because I'm a senior.

Is your mom not coming till Saturday? Does your mom live in Fayetteville and you don't necessarily want to hang out with her on a Friday night? Then put your face next to my shoe because I'm about to give you a kick in the teeth!

Tron here. I've reserved 10 spots at Laser Quest this Friday from 8 to 9; I need fellow soldiers. I'm talking about LASERS - the kind they use to create fractals and experiment on turltes with. It's going to be BIBLICAL, but instead of trumpets, angels are blowing LASERS out of their mouths and making Venus implode! Imagine that - there are few who can.

It costs 14 dollars a man. For 14 dollars, we get two twenty minute games in a huge arena involving thirty puntable children, and we also get our own party room for downtime. Like a birthday! But instead of a cake, we're eating LASERS and putting a kid's head in a toilet! BYX RULES!

This is a BROTHERHOOD EVENT WITH LASERS! The last time this happened, we had to invade Iraq. Great job Saddam! If you want to go, email me directly at dctrumbo@uark.edu. I need to know by tomorrow night. If we don't have 10 guys, we can't do it. We'll leave Fayetteville around 5, and we'll be back by midnight.

Tron McKnight

This was followed three and a half hours later with another email.

OMG THIS JUST GOT REAL. I just got off the phone with J.C. who works the desk at Laser Quest. That's right - Jesus Christ himself runs that light show. Talk about a sweet retirement gig. It turns out in the two hours between calling him, thirty beautiful girl scouts booked our 8 o'clock time. THIS PLACE IS THAT HOT. It's like that time your cat accidentally crawled into the oven with the meatloaf. Or was it put there?

Nevertheless, our time is now six o'clock on Friday - and this is great news. We'll meet at 3:30 at the IM parking lot because we have to be a Laser Quest in Tulsa at 5:30 for briefing! You can still come if you wear boxers, but prepare to pee in them. AND GUESS WHAT - we're up to twenty people now. To give you some perspective, that's how many skulls are in my basement. That's a lot of laser tag participants!

We're leaving from Baum at 3:00 because I want to be safe - that's how I've been able to keep those skulls in my basement (if you put skeletons in your closet, someone is going to find them. Don't be a moron). If you're leaving before 3:00, text me so I don't have to track you down, retrieve the seven dollars, then put your skull in my basement.

I've attached a pictoral representation for Jessie Green. If he sees it and wants to go, open an email and let him make his mark. He deserves equal treatment.

Jessie Green is our current treasurer. Before he got elected, I started a smear campaign that painted him as illiterate. Though he was still elected, I count the campaign a success because many new members honestly believe he has trouble reading. In the picture he is depicted as a yellow dinosaur.Tron

I Left My Mark on Pi Phi

The housemom at the Kappa house asked me to throw away two bottles. These were spray bottles, like Windex, but filled with dye. You can see the bottles sitting on the grill outside the dining room (which I call the Kappateria; no one else calls it that). They've been there for a year and a half.

I put them there. My junior year before Owl-o-ween (the Kappa Halloween function - apparently they like it when they come up with the puns), my date and I tie dyed shirts. As a Halloween function, a couple goes as anything matched. I've been a robot, a tattoo artist, and even a unicorn. That year, we were professional function goers, because we were good at dancing. We were really good.

When I told Mom Shanks that the bottles were mine, it wasn't apparent whether or not she was mad. I get away with many things because I'm now the senior houseboy. Ringo, who's a year older than me, left last Tuesday. Afterwards, I was late to my shift, and when scolded I told the chef that washing dishes was like Top Gun, and I was the Maverick of KKG.

My sophomore year I worked at the Pi Beta Phi house. They paid us there, but they only employed five houseboys, so you had to work five meals as opposed to two. It evens out. Trust me - I was a math major. I worked with a few fraternity brothers, which made it fun, but the head cook was this old harpy named Wilma. We hated Wilma. When she was a kid, people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, and she said, "Ugly and mean." She smoked like a chainsaw.

The housemom, Mom B, may have had Alzheimer's. I say this because in the spring, I studied abroad in Rome for a semester. I just worked at Pi Phi for the fall; when I got back, Mom B had given my job away because she thought I was Heath Mitchell, another houseboy. A month later I was working at Kappa.

I tell this story because, like the tie dye, I left something at Pi Phi, too. When I was gone, somehow one of the girls got my picture printed onto posterboard and pasted it on the wall in the kitchen, above the buffet line. It was probably an 8x10 - a good sized picture. After I left, no one took it down because if they did, it would strip the paint off the wall. They left it there for two years.

It went down earlier this year. By that time, none of the girls who lived in the house knew who I was. I still get stopped between classes by girls who say, "Oh my god! Yours is the face who haunts me! Tell me your name, spirit!"

Worst Christmas Ever

During lunch at the Kappa house, everyone went around the table and told what they got for Christmas. A nice camera was the most common gift - all girls think they are great photographers. Don't tell them I said that.

One girl was a little bitter. She said she had a list of five things she wanted, and she only got two, along with several other gifts she did not want. I can sympathize. My mom's family all live on farms, and every year I am given a pocket knife by someone. The knives are all very swell, with real bone handles carved by the area hermit. There's only two hundred of those, I am told. Great. That will really increase the resell value.

I don't carry a knife. I've found that anything I would use a knife for, like opening packages or arteries, I can use a pen instead. And a pen has other uses. Some models, if clicked three times, explode a person's shirt. There was a James Bond marathon on Spike over New Year's Day.

The worst Christmas present I've ever been given was for Christmas my senior year of high school. I had just finished with my last game of football, and was undecided whether or not I would play in college. I asked for a box set of the works of C.S. Lewis. Instead, I got all of C.S. Lewis' works in one volume (how am I supposed to read a book that I can't hold up? It's like thumbing through an atlas) and a gift wrapped CD.

A CD? Maybe it's a good one. If not, I can always return it. And anyway, a Christmas gift never hurt anyone, except when Uncle John gave Pa Will a Remington. Pa Will had a cat infestation in his cattle barn that Christmas. He cleaned it out. It was horrible. My mom still refers to it as the Kitty Kat Massacre.

(Years later, only one cat survives from that event, and Pa Will has taken it in as a pet. My mom calls it Beyonce, because it's a survivor.)

I unwrapped the CD, and found that it wasn't a CD at all, but a picture inside of a clear plastic CD case. It was a picture of Jessica, the personal trainer at the Fayetteville Athletic Club. That night, I had a dream she was under my bed.

Jessica is the only woman to have ever thrown shot put and discus in the same Olympics. She lifted more weight than I did in any activity we practiced, and once she stood over me laughing as I vomited Mike and Ikes into a trash can.

I mentioned her before: I hated working with her so much that my sleep schedule derailed, and I would wake up at odd hours, get dressed, and drive to FCA, not bothering to check the time because I was too busy regretting my Christmas present.

But that's my family. When I was in eighth grade, I found out my dad bought me a weight vest for Christmas - the type of thing used for endurance training by collegiate athletes. When I made fun of it, he took it back and gave it to one of my friends who he thought would use it. I never regretted making fun of it.