Orientation was a decidedly anticlimactic affair. You expect that it will be nothing like the boorish fraternity infested image of ‘college’ that American movies have so thoroughly imprinted on your brain. At most it might be a pathetic watered down version of this, completely infected with the short-comings of your own country, but at the same time desperately longing to have that carefree communal atmosphere of the American college scene.
Wrong.
You are confronted with 8-foot high white Hollywood Hills style letters on the front lawn of the residential district, proudly proclaiming its ghetto-ised nickname. People run around half dressed, sit around anywhere haphazardly, and tell you in the introductory sessions that every night all week they have been out getting blind with their roommates. Strings run between the buildings with torn banners on them. Ugly music blasts from windows. Hardly anyone is in the library. In the welcome speech by the Vice-Chancellor announces that the uni has something like 80 clubs and societies. Posters are everywhere, some of them do actually allude to real live secret societies. Mostly it’s the Marxists. A permanent Marxist marquee stands in the public square; a plague of them and their advertising. I’m all for political freedom, but on the scale at which it operates its less like that, and more a blight on the landscape. The radio stations hold O-Week tours and celebrations where the younger presenters challenge each other to join as many of these weird clubs as possible.
It’s too ingrained in society. The lecturers command forced socialisation in our first meetings; it’s too much for my taste. It would be laughable if it weren’t also so necessary for most of them.
It is so much more like America and high school rolled into one than anyone could have predicted. No-one talks to you, no-one moves, still no-one cares.
You feel a sick sense of satisfaction that you predicted it was going to be this vulgar, but it does not outweigh the heart-breaking disappointment brought on by all those promises that it was going to be different; intellectual, fascinating, focussed, mature, refined. Subdued is the best compliment you could give it.
It alternates between boring and stressful most of the time.
There are no nice looking guys.
There are no awesome girls.
The pizza is good.
The gardens are nice.
The Thursday market was interesting.
The lecturers are OK.
And on it goes…
Tuesday 7 April 2009
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The problem of Orientation is that it's full high schoolers and ruled by second years who are not remotely better. It is what happens if you let a kid in a candy shop without surveillance, or if you let your teenager the house for a week. It is the pure manifestation of the "it", and all of its ethanol paraphernalia. And part of me is actually surprised you could not enjoy it, not now i know you a little better. You probably wasn't in your right alter ego this day. Oliver would have probably liked going to have a drink (well, if he could have), and then hanging out doing crazy things, and taking up challenges. MJ would have probably visited most of the clubs with enlightenment, and found all these new people potentially interesting, and sat on the grass with other students chatting away. That's how i see it anyway. Probably Des was frustrated with being just a tool in a party she hadn't made or wasn't the queen of, and was legally barred from anyway. Pestering at the vulgarity of them while wishing to be more vulgar and shock them all in their conventionality. Jane was probably looking at this with reprobation and one eyebrow raised, sighing when thinking of her dreams of intellectual discussions, soft, refined, drinking wine in wooded, candle lit settings, while debating the last lecture subject.
ReplyDeleteor something.
Then again it can be useful knowing there are also introduction parties to the graduates. Once in Melbourne Uni, I came across a guy who congratulated me about my hair, and then chatted with. He invited me to their introductory party, graduate philosophy. There was champagne, toasts and people with high intellectual pursuit. You'd probably like it.
But then again, there can be a decadent pleasure in bathing yourself in the stupidity of some of the undergrad celebrations. And if you can't (legally) or can't (morally), there are always the clubs... some of which actually contain some of the moral and intellectual fiber you might have hoped for. They don't always take that much time you'd think, and they can have great repercussions on your social life.
Just saying.
But I liked your description. I was there too. It was decadent and hilarious, preposterous. The marxists are a constant uni pun. They kept me amazed all year with their constant layers of posters for hilariously biased conferences. It was folkloric. Over the top. A ray of ironic sunshine somehow.
They do force socialization because they try to repair their own regrets with the new generations, which never ever works. Once O week gone, it gets very difficult to socialize, and then you wish you had done it another way. Which, of course, doesn't work that way, because you would have still despised the hell of those other specimens.
But at least the pizza is nice. The food at MelbUni was quite awful.
And the lecturers will get better with specialization. Few are the great lecturers who are wanting to take on 101s.
I hope the glass will get half full at one point.