How can you be bored here?
Kate Rowland
Read this. It may save your life
Those four or five of you (thanks, guys) who are regular readers of my column know my opinion on blanket statements and frank, blunt proclamations of opinion. This week, I would again like to take advantage of this space to make another one. Ready?
Anyone who is still whining that there is nothing to do on this campus on the weekends is not trying hard enough.
This semester my weekends have been packed with things to do. These are not exclusive, seniors-only or over-21-only events; these are public events, open to anyone who opts to take advantage of them. And frankly, not enough people do.
Last weekend I spent Friday night at Late Night Olympics. I played volleyball, whiffleball, soccer and dodgeball, starting at 7 and going until past midnight. Had any of my teams been more successful, I could have been there until 4. I spent some time helping the First Aid team also, keeping watch on the JACC fieldhouse and the bloodthirsty volleyball games happening there.
Late Night Olympics is an amazing event; planning alone must take many hundred hours. It takes a lot of work to figure out a schedule for 14 or 15 different sports played by a dozen teams. RecSports checks people in, referees events where necessary and keeps track of the winners and losers. All you have to do to make it fun is show up with your running shoes on, and you will be recruited to play. If running isn't for you, you can play innertube water polo or go kayaking or ice skate in the rink. It's fun. When else can you play a competitive game of volleyball at 1:30 in the morning? And when else can you watch your roommate slide around playing broomball at 3 a.m.? The Special Olympics, beneficiary of the night and host of a fierce Olympian-vs.-rector basketball game, asks a dollar donation to get in, but if you lie and say you forgot your wallet, they'll let you slide. Attendance was good, but not great. As I walked in the front door of my dorm, I passed three women in the 24-hour space moaning about how bored they were. Naturally.
After leaving Late Night very early in the morning, I went home to bed and got up the next day to go to Ms. Wizard day. Ms. Wizard Day aims to sustain the interest of fourth- through sixth-grade girls in the sciences. It most influentially does so by providing examples and role models. I spent the morning listening to girls' heartbeats and then letting them hear the lub-dubs, too. I handed out rubber gloves, showed off my ability to stand on my head and answered questions about my love life (post-Valentine evaluation: it's slow). I poured juice and fetched 80 pizzas from Welsh Hall. We fed the ducks a boxful of leftover pizza crusts. It was great.
Both men and women participated, helping out with labs and behind the scenes. I heard all kinds of whiners that afternoon, grousing about how bored they were and how there wasn't anything interesting happening that weekend. Others lamented the lack of tickets to the Keenan Revue, as though that were the only event happening all weekend. As a Lyons Hall resident earning my keep as a cluster consultant there isn't much I can say about that.
Last weekend anyone who was bored was not taking advantage of Campus' Ministry retreats, free music at Recker's, basketball games, transportation to ICONN to dance, the NAACP formal (which was free if you could motivate yourself to get dressed), drop-in sports at Rolf's or the Irish Iron Classic. I personally availed myself of our hall retreat and the Irish Iron Classic. Our weightlifting team consisted of four people who have lifted before — once, at last year's IIC — and me, who not only lifted at last year's Classic but the year before also. We had a great time, despite the crack addition skills of the two Dillon residents manning the women's bench, whose repeated inability to calculate the amount of weight on the bar led to some seriously bruised egos ("Wow, she did eight reps of 85 before we started, and now she can't get 80. Wait a minute ... there's 105 pounds on that bar, not 80 ... Joe! Bear! Learn to add!"). The whole weekend was busy, and fun, too. The only work we had to do to enjoy it was walk to the JACC at 11:30 a.m. This was not a special, isolated weekend that just happened to be full of things to do. This happens every weekned on campus. It's a shame more people don't make use of the events on campus. They would have a lot less time to whine.
Now that I'm finished with this column, I've figured it out. When people whine that there is nothing to do on campus, they are actually complaining because the entertainer of their choice has not come to their personal dorm rooms to individually amuse them in whatever matter they would most enjoy. "There's nothing to do here" complaints stem from laziness. Pure and simple.
Kate Rowland is a senior Spanish and government major. Her column runs every other Tuesday.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Tuesday, February 15, 2000
