my first year of college, i thought i was going to major in teaching. my plan was, physics minor, teaching major. wound up going physics major, and then EE major, and it was just a thing.
anyway: my college, ASU, had this thing where first year students had to take a class on the college itself. ASU 101. and the class was actually pretty good. some of the stuff was non-intuitive and just unequivoically good like "here are all the different tutoring centers" and "here are all the individual study places on campus."
some other stuff was good, and necessary, but it felt kind of condescending. stuff like, "hey, did you know that in the last 4 years, 4 people have died after getting drunk and trying to jump over a bonfire? lets not do that this year. please."
and other stuff was just condescending. stuff like multiple choice quizzes with things like "you are stressed. do you A. drink B. have unprotected sex C. lock yourself in your dorm and refuse to leave or D. exercise and drink water and study hard and copy responsibly please pick this ansewr please i am begging you please.
for most majors, the class was meet twice a week, one hour each. for teaching majors, it was meet once week, BUT. in exchange. during one of the three day weekends, instead of staying home, you went to like, a camp? cabins and team building exercises and all that good stuff.
it was actually a really good deal. it was supposed to be a really fun experience.
instead heres how it went:
there weren't a lot of guys in the teaching major. so they put all of us together in one group, saying it would give us Camaraederie, and would make us more likely to stay in the major.
we were content with that.
the first day was supposed to be a bunch of like, team building exercises in this big rotating circuit thing. my group got put into this sort of paintball thing. the week before there had been a school shooting, and if the people running the camp had just cancelled the paintball, that wouldve made sense, and if theyd kept it going and said "school shootings have no relationship to paintball" that also would've made sense, but instead they gave us slingshots and paintballs and told us to have at it.
slingshots hurt so much worse than paintball guns. paintball guns are calibrated so that the orbs pop, and when they pop, they lose energy. with the slingshots, undershooting makes the ball transfer all energy to you, which hurts, and overshooting hurts because it is overshooting.
also the paintballs smelled like bad fish? the oil in them had gone rancid and because i am an idiot, i grabbed as many unpopped paintballs as i could off the ground and smeared them all over myself, because i do not have a sense of smell and i like making that everyone elses problem.
paintball match went on a while and was decent, but it ended early when someone on an obstacle course ahead fell off and broke their leg and have to get helivacced out. they cancelled the events for that day, and our group was particularly Stinky, so we got first dibs on the showers.
it was in AZ, which is always in a drought, and the camp had a water shortage so we were told to put all our soap on before showering. which we did. and then we went into the showers, and we turned the water on, and no water came out.
we went to the camp people, and it turned out that the camp had no water and they were supposed to bring some, and they didnt. they also, for god knows what reason, didnt bring water bottles. they did bring some kind of off brand gatorade which gave us a kind of faustian bargain.
we could keep our soap on forever, which would inevitably give us a rash. OR. we could rinse it off with gatorade. which would make us sticky.
we chose sticky. the catch we didnt expect was that the off brand gatorade was actually more like koolaid, and it turned all of us pink. so the all guys group wound up with pink skin and pink hair. we went from being The Boys Cabin to The Pride Cabin. which is fine - i want to emphasize that i am bi - but but a lot of the guys were already having a sort of masculinity crisis about being Men in Teaching and the whole being dyed pink think was not very helpful to this.
after this nightmare we went back to our cabins to chill and rest.
did not work.
there were like, 30 of us in the pride cabin, and there were like... 10 beds. so what we did was all shove our extra clean clothes and sheets and fabric items in the middle of the room and drew straws. winners slept in beds, losers slept in a not-gay-pink-cuddle-puddle amidst strangers underpants, and i alone was banished to the far corner of the room because i still smelled like bad fish from the paintballs. not even the gymsocks of strangers to soften my floor, not even the beer belly of frat bros to keep me warm.
i did not sleep that night. i shivered under a thin beach towel and stared in hot envy at a pile of pink men encrusted with underpants.
next day there were mini-classes on the difference between teaching elementary school, middle school, high school, and special ed. none of the guys paid attention. we all just kind of stared blankly into the middle distance like Shell Shock victims after Verdun. a woman that taught special ed kept wet wipes on her, and while she only had enough for us to wipe our faces off, we still would have died for her after that.
we left the morning after. in those two days, i slept maybe 3 hours. every mosquito that had the misfortune of going for a sip wound up just sticking to me. when i finally got home and took a real shower, my shirt crackled.
9/10 experience. not even why i changed majors, i just liked math too much. wasnt until my senior year with quantum kevin that i felt anything close to that level of community again. all 30 of us knew each others names, our hobbies, how many siblings we had, what states we came from. no smooth well run series of obstacles and fun will ever bond people together as strong as 72 hours of pink, sticky, sleep deprivation.
