Next Two Years in This Room

I haven't lived in the same room for more than a year since high school. Before college, my little brother and I shared a room in our basement. We called it the cave because it has no windows. I could sleep forever there, but not like death. Like, unless someone wakes me up I will not wake up because I have no concept of time in that dark little box. But since then I've been passed around, from dorm room to breezeway to master bedroom to the shoebox I lived in this past year. It wasn't really a shoebox; we just called it that because when I was reading my roommates would throw dress shoes at me and yell, "I want to see my face in the toe when you're finished!" They love to kid. But usually they weren't kidding.

I just moved into my new house in Ft. Worth. Did you know Ft. Worth is one big subdivision? This may or may not be true but all I've seen of the city so far has been a tollway and these five alternating house plans. My fraternity BYX owns one of these houses; it's the big kind. Along with all the normal stuff there's a tea room, an office with five desks, and a war room covered with whiteboards. Next year I'll be working from the house. I chose the middle upstairs room because it had the shortest commute to my desk.

I'm in meetings all day with the staff who run the fraternity. As a college student, I only saw these men when something went wrong. Whenever our chapter went off the reservation - and that happened every time we went to Oklahoma - they would come for a chat. I think most chapters associate the staff with these bad things, with friction or rules or that homeless man who lived under my bed. I told my parents about him but they said I was imagining things. Did I imagine our cat into the microwave? No - I put her there, because the man under my bed told me to do so.

These guys are funny. I haven't really gauged everyone's humor yet, so I haven't said anything racist more than twice, but they're funny. And they're my roommates. Before this weekend I hadn't seen the house or meet the guys I would live with. That's like seeing a movie before the preview, or signing up for a potluck roommate your freshman year and ending up with Thomas Tyler Bennett. We didn't talk much after he stole my nail clippers in November, but when I moved out in the spring I found them under my bed and had to write TTB an apology letter.

I'm only here for a few more days, but I'm settling in. I already hate the dog, and I feel like that means I have a place in the house. I'm the resident dog hater. My roommates said they needed another one because the last one just moved out.

First Job I've Ever Had

Last week I sent in a contract to work for my fraternity's national organization. I signed a two year contract with BYX Nationals as an MA, or Ministry Associate, which is what we call our national advisers. I'll travel from chapter to chapter and give make overs. Top two tips: tank tops and Audio Push.

I'm kind of serious about that. My chapter, the Xi chapter, is a little different from the rest of the chapters. The fraternity was started in Texas and had most of it's early growth in the mid-west. Fraternities in the SEC are a little different. We're a little more fratty. The chapters in the mid-west run great - they have their own style, and we have ours. What I'll be doing (I think - I signed the contract without reading it. They made me do it in blood, too. The notary present had horns and a tail) is bringing a little more SEC to national pledgeship and rush. And it all starts with tank tops and Audio Push.

I'm running into a problem here that I've experienced before. As a counselor at War Eagle, I was always the one to push the envelope. In fact, I was told that was my job. Once, in a skit in front of all 400 kids, I accidentally made a racial slur. My good friend Ricky Shade and I were acting out a scenario where we were at heaven's gates trying to get in, and I said something I shouldn't have. With skits usually I just make things up on the spot, and so here I felt a joke and went with it, but I ended up saying that all of Ricky's ancestors (Native Americans) were in Hell. Afterward, I apologized directly to the camp supervisor, and he said to me that it was alright; I was the counselor who pushed the envelope, and I was allowed a few mess ups in exchange for energy and creativity I brought to the table. Then he said this exact quote: "Now, if you had said something about Muslims, we would've had a problem." Apparently those people are worth more than Indians.

Now I'm on Top Staff at War Eagle; I got a phone call a few months ago from the supervisor strictly about the things that I did as a counselor that I'm not allowed to do now that I'm in charge. I will push the envelope no more.

I've been the envelope pusher for BYX for some time now. I do questionable things in the name of energy and creativity. Sometimes they work out great, and sometimes the officer core sits down with me and disbands the secret society I made up because of complaints from out of state chapters we pranked. And now I can't do these things before. I've been making suggestions to the Xi chapter on pledgeship activities (human television remote, campus rickshaw service, sorority lawn mowing with safety scissors) that I would never make as an MA. Those have hazing written all over them. So now I'm having to think inside the box, which I really hate. I spent my whole seventh grade year inside a box after I was kidnapped by gypsies, and I have some bad memories from it. I have some good memories from it, too, but overall, bad.

I'm moving to Ft. Worth, TX, on May 12th to start. I'll have five chapters in the fall, and then nine from January onwards. The first five are:

Vanderbilt
LSU
Flordia
Texas
Texas Tech