Tuesday, 13 May – Ice, Ice, Baby… its Varsity life.

TUESDAY, 13 MAY – Ice, Ice, Baby… its Varsity life.
Day Rating: 7.5/10

What made today great? 3 lectures… being very over all the tests I’m gonna fail on Friday… the fact that we saw blue sky in Newlands for the first time in a week (I’m not kidding, really) and the fact that I had some time to enjoy that wonderful thing called student life.

Being a student is like stepping into your favourite high school TV show. If you play your cards right, you can have the life you only ever dreamed of, free of parents and all other responsibilities (except for a collective total of about 42 days a year where you are forced to put ink to paper or study. But hey, you can’t have it all!)

Student life…. Suddenly, one meal a day supplemented by unhealthy snacks from the cafeteria becomes perfectly acceptable nutrition. If your parents didn’t supply 3 square meals a day it was child abuse, but now, freed from the shackles of parental constraint and given night-sweats at the thought of having to eat your residence’s idea of Irish stew, something clearly concocted out of Friday’s vegetarian option and something not quite dead, that single daily meal plus 4 bags of popcorn, coke, chips and those omniscient croissants seems perfectly adequate.

If you’re in digs, you suddenly realize how much food costs (and in my case, that you’re gonna have to figure out a way to nail your rents for a whole lot more money if you wanna drink and party without starving to death at the same time) You also realize that contrary to popular belief, food actually takes time and effort to prepare, and even more shockingly, that you cant make steak in the microwave. Also, that statistically, the time it takes to cook a meal increases proportionally with its tastiness. I think I do alright, but some okes I know are subsisting off braai, 2 minute noodles, fried eggs and bread. Which is perfectly alright.

Then there’s this misconception that students actually go to university to learn educational stuff. There are just far too many pitfalls for anyone but Indiana Jones (or the Grinch) to actually make it to lectures! I mean, what were they thinking putting a cafeteria filled with cosy tables and chairs and the smell of freshly brewed coffee on the way to every lecture theatre? You saunter in, spot a few of your friends, pull up a chair and the next thing you know you’ve been discussing rugby, varsity gossip and Grey’s for 2 hours. Woops.

But there are lesser reasons for missing class. For example, the fact that no sane person walks from middle to upper campus in the pouring rain. Or across upper campus for that matter. Nothing said in a lecture venue is THAT important. Even worse, if you’ve forgotten your umbrella, you can’t even go between a few buildings – what’s the point of getting soaked, catching flu and missing lectures anyway?! And then there are the late nights. How often has a student pulled an all-nighter on an assignment or piece of homework, only to sleep through the class its due for… or missed lectures because you just cant do 9am after a Tiger Thursday… or missed lectures because of a lesser hangover… or because you just had to get some new drum and bass/series from a friend… and then missed the next one sitting on the stairs talking to said friend… oh, the list is endless.

The list of what you do learn, however, is even more extensive. And this is not tertiary education, but life experience, the kind of things that you will use and pass on to your grandchildren someday (provided your liver can survive years of Tin Roof drinks specials). Things like:

• The fact that certain foods explode spectacularly when microwaved without a cover.
• You can make goldfish drunk by pouring half a shot of vodka into their tank.
• Textbooks are actually just very expensive doorstops, seeing as you pay R400 for 1300 pages and only actually need to read 3 chapters.
• If you should, however, try to subvert the system by not buying textbooks, the courses you take will automatically become completely textbook-based and you will fail miserably.
• You can open your car door with a wire coat-hanger/large pair of scissors/plastic ruler.
• Campus parking mysteriously fills up at 8am sharp. (Where all these people go and what they do there at 8am, nobody knows.)
• If you forget your umbrella, it WILL rain.
• There is ALWAYS a reason to drink
• Coco pops are perfectly acceptable as breakfast, lunch or supper. Or all three.
• Some things last indefinitely in the fridge. Milk is not one of these things.
• At Tin Roof, anybody and everybody can score for the price of a tequila shot.
• The only place to purchase a desk planner is the stationery shop, and they are permanently sold out of desk planners.
• Doing the dishes while drunk is a bad idea. Electrical kitchen appliances and water do not mix.
• The answer to EVERYTHING is on Google or Wikipedia. If you can’t find it there, it simply doesn’t exist.
• The floor gets so dirty that you actually have to dust your feet off before putting socks on or climbing into bed.
• The only way to find a missing R485 textbook is to buy a new one. Once you have, by some superhuman feat, managed to find the money to do so, the old one will magically reappear. This somehow causes the new textbook to drop to a fifth of its original value when you try to re-sell it.
• 24-hour pizza delivery is your friend.
• It is not unusual to miss your lectures because the closest parking you could find was 30 minutes walk away from campus.
• It is physiologically impossible to go out for “one drink”. Was this to actually happen, it would cause a rip in the fabric of the time-space continuum, but luckily, is not even near achievable by students at present.
• Attending rallies/protest marches means free clothing. Which means more space between laundry days. Which is another excellent reason to miss lectures.
• Lecture venues change at random. Lecturers do this because they are malicious and vindictive and enjoy your confusion. This is why they became lecturers in the first place.
• Boys can actually spend 12 hours at a time playing network games with other boys.
• On the few days that you actually do make it to varsity by 8am, lectures will be cancelled (unless you are a law student).
• You can NEVER have too much caffeine. A coke/coffee and an energy bar constitute a balanced breakfast.
• Series becomes your life – you miss lectures to watch Grey’s Anatomy all day. You invite friends over to miss their classes so they can watch Grey’s with you all day. Offering to share series with someone is a popular indication of one’s approval and desire for friendship.
• Students speak their own language and this is indecipherable to everyone from off campus. This is because in student language, the same word can have up to 8 different meanings depending on the inflexion, tone and accent used.
• There is a question kid in every lecture. You come to understand, through this kid, why things like the Virginia Tech shooting happen.
• Every bathroom on campus has a free condom dispenser. Except in the Geology department.
• It is normal to find that you have loaned/borrowed clothing to such an extent that you now have your roommate’s complete wardrobe.
• Dishes and laundry do not, in fact, do themselves.
• Hare Krishna pamphlet distributors are like vampire leeches and are completely immune to insults/brush-offs. They are faster and more agile than Bryan Habana. The only proven method of dislodging one once it has you is to claim that you are a Satanist and are only on campus to find a virgin sacrifice for the coming of the Antichrist.
• Drunken people do fall over balconies at digs-warming parties unless you tie them to the door.
• Your ability to parallel-park increases dramatically if you don’t have a parking disc.
• Chicken really does need to be cooked properly.
• Food poisoning is not fun. (see above)
• Members of the opposite sex do not find erudition sexy. If you waste an entire day on Jammie stairs flirting and catching a tan, your chances are WAY better than if you were in the library/at lectures.
• Your significant other will adopt a pattern of study/job that only allows him/her to see you after 11pm at night. This means that all early lectures are written off for the following 2 days.
• People like Napoleon Dynamite really do exist. They dwell in the Geology, Maths and Chemical Engineering buildings.
• Steam irons are ornamental things, for decorative purposes only. They look best in their packaging, in the back of a cupboard. Any item of clothing becomes un-creased enough to wear if you hang it long enough.
• Kittens and stationery do not mix. The stationery is always the loser.
• “Internal League rugby” and “informal water polo league” are in fact euphemisms for “excuse to get shitfaced drunk on Wednesday nights”.
• Power cuts generally happen (a) as you are about to make supper, or (b) as you are about to start writing an essay/assignment.
• You WILL run into the person you didn’t mean to make out with last night, and this will be while you are looking sleep deprived, badly dressed and hung-over.
• Printers malfunction in direct proportion to the number of people who have essays to hand in.
  
• Even if you make it to your lecture, the chances of you actually learning anything are minimal. Most lecturers are brilliant academics who have written at least 5 books and many more papers on their subject, and speak English as a fourth language. Then there’s the fact that on any given day of the week you are probably overtired and/or hung-over. Or, you are listening to awesome new drum and bass.
  
  If you take notes on a laptop, there is the temptation to play solitaire, a game so complex and engrossing that you are guaranteed not to take in a word of the lecture. If the lecture theatre has wireless, you sit on facebook and IM instead of taking notes, absorbing knowledge, as most students seem to do, by osmosis. Seeing as there are widescreen TVs in the food court showing all big sports events, you can keep track of the score all morning and afternoon while eating sushi and missing lectures. If you were actually awake by 12pm to get a seat, that is.
  
  Indeed, when you’re a student things like laundry and dishes and general cleaning only get done when there are no more clean dishes/clothes. Much like studying. In fact, another reason to miss class is taking the day off to catch up on all the work you’ve missed by skipping class. It is a well-known fact that on that day, every single friend you have will either drop by for a chat or have free tickets to something cool or phone you with a major relationship crisis, meaning that you pretty much get nothing done at all. Of course, your parents don’t need to know any of this. Nor do they need to know that more money will be spent on the destruction of your liver than on your eventual degree.
  
  But, it’s all worth it. Your student days are the best days of your life, something to remember and dwell on fondly on your old age. Well, maybe you won’t remember all that much….. But you catch my drift.