Unconventional procrastination. #IGTR

Finals: the time of year when everyone is trying so hard to stay focused, that they can't help but be distracted - where a five minute study break to check your Facebook turns into endless scrolling down the newsfeed.  In other words, the perfect breeding ground for memes.

This finals period, I noticed a lot of particularly funny memes spread through the Rice University interwebz.  Some were pretty generalized:

Evan A.

But soon, the majority of memes were based upon people's friends. 

Drew T.

Drew T.

Erika K.

Daniel E.

Drew T.

Graham W.

Graham W.

There were plenty more that I missed or did not collect here.  What were your favorite Rice memes from Finals '11?

Still studying?  Want to not be studying?  You can create your own Rice Owls meme here:
http://memegenerator.net/Rice-Owl

I can't get an LPAP. #IGTR

Twice a year, a frenzy hits Rice campus, flaring up in 15 minute intervals of panic, frustration, and occasionally, triumph.  While some Rice students have a calm registration experience ("I registered for next semester in 30 seconds.  Gee, that was easy."), others are not so fortunate.

The tension begins to slowly build as you wait for registration time to arrive, checking Schedule Planner every few minutes to see how many spots are left in your desired classes until:

Now what?  You check on your "back-up" classes.  Also full.  Great.  You open up the course catalog and stare blankly at the drop-down menus.  If you're an academ, you immediately rule out any subject that requires a lab, knowledge of computer coding, or upper level math.  If you're an S/E, you immediately rule out any subject that may force you to read something other than a textbook, write a paper longer than 3 pages, or anything with a class size small enough for the professor to notice when you skip it every other week.  So that leaves you with... hmm... uhh... well....  You'll just come  back to this later.  Right now, your registration time is about to be up and you've got to register for an LPAP within the first 5 seconds to have any hope at all!

You sit tensed at your desk, right hand poised on your click pad to hit register as soon as the time on your phone (most accurate clock you could find) flips over to the new minute. And YES, it's your turn!, it's your time!, nothing can stop you from getting this LPAP!!!

But wait!  There's a wait-list!  Surely seniors who are registered for more than one LPAP will eventually drop one and you'll be able to get in.  Yeah!  Problem solved! Except:

 

Okay, so admittedly you're over-reacting.  It's just an LPAP.  You'll get it next year.  ... Probably.

I love my body. #IGTR

Consent is Sexy.  Beer Bike is good.  Love Your Body.

There are many weeks or months at Rice that are focused on celebrating or educating people about a particular topic.  During Consent is Sexy week (conveniently, the week before NOD), students learn "what is consent?" and why consent is so important.  During Willy Week, we all come together and revel in how awesome it is to be students at Rice, and how people at lesser universities are grudgingly making their way through the week while we're blasting music, filling water balloons, and enjoying the antics of our RAs and Masters in the Beer Debates.

However, one particular cause gets not just a week, but a whole month.  All February, the Wellness Center schedules Love Your Body Month events that encourage students to develop positive body images and feel healthy and rejuvenated.  There's the Revitalize Day study break (free massages!), Yoga on the Lawn, Body Walks, the Love Your Body Monalogues, and more.  Plus, they give out those awesome sweatbands.

This is me hugging myself.  Because I love my body.  Like it says on my sweatband.

I recently talked to some Rice students about their conceptions of negative and positive body image, as well as Cristina, the Wellness Center Nutrition and Body Image Intern for 2011.  Take a listen:


Body Image at Rice University

[[If planning for Love Your Body Month is something you'd like to be involved with this year, contact Cristina at cbb2@rice.edu for an application to be a Coordinator or a General Committee Member.]]

I have more mosquito bites than I can count. #IGTR

If you haven't noticed from the swelling, red, itching welts that are likely covering your entire body, or swarms in the grove, in your college, in your nightmares; then you've probably noticed on Facebook:  Houston, we have a mosquito problem.

You've experienced bad mosquito evenings at Rice before.  There was that one time last year during Powderpuff practice when the mosquito clouds at dusk were so thick that you counted no less than 25 bites by the time you were inside again.  You experienced an occasional bite at one of the forced picnics.  But unless your college's zombie apocalypse defense plan can easily be converted to defend against these bloodsucking monstrosities, there's no way you were prepared for this.

They descended upon us during parent's weekend.  Beginning that evening as you sat on an outside patio at a lovely non-servery dinner, you began to notice there were more mosquitoes about than usual.  Your parents offer to take you and friends to buy mosquito repellant this weekend.  By the time you go to the Target on Main Street the next day, they are completely sold out.  Same for the CVS in the Village. On the third or fourth try, you finally locate a few cans at a Walgreens you've never been inside before.

You spray the stuff all over your clothes, but still the mosquitos taunt you, getting inside your car and under your skin.

 

It's like Rice students are especially delicious.  Our blood must be like the fine wine of the mosquito world.

 

You've considered more drastic solutions.  How could one feasibly keep a pet bat?  Bats are mosquito eating machines, and why don't we have more?!  Then you realize that the mosquitoes have got you acting like a crazy person, and you resolve to just cover up every possible inch (itch) of skin until the cold front sets in on Thursday night.

I am convinced my fire alarm is lying to me. #IGTR

I am convinced that if there is ever a real fire, I will die inside my residential college building.  I think the problem stems from how many false alarms (literally) are set off through out the year.  When I first moved back in from the summer, it didn't quite feel like home until the first inconveniently timed fire alarm went off.

They never occur at a moment when you're like "Hmm, I feel like going for a stroll outside" or "I think I'll take the stairs today!"  It's when you've been up all night working on a project and are now just finally closing your eyes to a well earned afternoon nap.  Or when you've returned home on a Friday night at 2am and want nothing more than to crawl into bed.

But nope.  The fire alarm goes off.

And won't stop.  This thing has literally been going off for like twenty whole minutes.  You were kind of silently hoping that it would stop within the reasonable amount of time during which you would be excused from not having reached the ground floor yet.

The thing is... you just live so far from the ground floor.  I mean... it's like a lot of stairs.  You probably have a better shot taking the elevator in a fire than trying to get out in time after taking thirteen flights of stairs. And the chances of this being a real fire are about twelve to zero.

You and your suitemates, who also haven't evacuated yet, meet in the hallway of your suite to deliberate.  Should we go to the ground floor?  It has been a long time since it went off.  And maybe if the fire isn't real, they would have turned the thing off by now.

You reluctantly put on a sweater (hey, it might be cold outside) and exit the suite.  You still fully intend to take the elevator down (like I said, lots of stairs), but when you get to your floor lobby, you notice that every single person on your floor has convened on the balcony.

That counts as outside, right?  Besides, this building is pretty much solid brick and concrete.  If it hasn't burned down yet, it ain't ever gonna. You decide that staying on the balcony is basically the same thing as evacuating to the ground floor.

You justify this to yourself by reasoning that if ever there was a real fire, you could probably be airlifted from the top floor balcony by a helicopter.

Yup.  You'll be just fine.  You wave to your friends down below.  Another fifteen minutes goes by (or two to three hours, depending or how badly you had wanted to sleep), and the alarm is finally off.  You learn that is was something completely mundane yet random, like welding in the basement. You go back to bed, silently begrudging the forty minute (or four hour) dent into your sleep schedule.

I am forced to picnic. #IGTR

What's wrong, you may ask?  Is the world ending? Am I the last human left on earth? Did Scar just kill Mufasa?  That's not it.  I'm being forced to picnic.

One person notices a flier sitting on your lunch table and innocently picks it up.  After a moment, they read aloud: "Campus wide picnic! 5-7. Free food!  (Serveries will be closed)"  and instantly, the entire table is grumbling and complaining like they're being thrown out of their dorm room for the night and forced to sleep in a tree surrounded by rabid squirrels.

How can a picnic go so wrong?  The concept is not completely terrible: Rice students are fun people.  In theory, getting a bunch of us together with lots of food and sunshine sounds pretty good.  Don't we all like Friday afternoon tailgates?  Of course tailgates don't shut down your servery and force you to eat food like this:

Picnics require effort.

First, you have to walk from your college to Founder's Court or the IM fields.

Then you have to get your food.

And then you've got to eat it.

Thanks for the free t-shirts, though. 

Thursday nights are Pub nights. #IGTR

Thursday night on Rice campus.  At this point you have either done all your homework or have consciously decided to put it off until the weekend (let's be honest, that's what Sunday nights are for, right?).  You're amped up and want to celebrate the start of the College Weekend (Thursday, Friday, Saturday).  Then you hear it.  The call you've been waiting for.

You are powerless to remain in your room.  Before you know it, you've joined a mass of fellow pub-goers and are on your way.  You head in through the back way and down the Stairs of Doom.

You ability to reach Pub is also inversely proportional to the height of your heels, should you be wearing them.

It may be a struggle, but you finally reach the door to the RMC basement, which experience has taught you that you can open without an ID card if you just try hard enough.  

Depending on how often you visit pub, you either hover awkwardly on the fringes, wondering how everyone else knows each other, or you know everyone.  If you know everyone, you're probably a Pub regular.  One time, you meet a friend of a friend at Coffeehouse and they ask you if you work at Pub.  You say no and they say, "Oh, I just assumed."  You wonder what that means about your life and your choices.

You remember the first time you went to pub as a freshman.  Not gonna lie.  It was pretty flippin' awkward.  You just sat with your suite mates and didn't talk to anyone.  But you actually know some people from other colleges now.  You have people to talk to other than your suite mates (although they're still pretty great).  You realize that knowing people at Pub is the key to enjoying Pub.  And the more people you know at Pub, the more people you meet at Pub.

You love Pub.  Any night of the week is worthy of Pub.  But Thursday nights?  Thursday nights are Pub nights.

I'm in beast mode. #IGTR

Quite a few Rice students participate in the hallowed tradition that is college powderpuff.  When you show up to Rice as freshmen girl, by the end of O-Week you probably hear your fair share of: "YOU SHOULD PLAY POWDERPUFF" and "OMG POWDERPUFF IS THE BEST THING EVER."  And after hours of convincing you that "it doesn't matter if you're athletic or not" and "you don't even need to know how football works" and "we'll teach you everything you need to know,"  you'll follow a group of rabidly excited upperclassmen out to the IM fields for your first practice.

Every position takes its own  kind of skill and training to be sure, but there is something uniquely terrifying about being thrust into O-line as a freshman.  While the defense and receivers are cautioned against painful finger jams, someone will undoubtedly bring up that one time your team's o-lineman broke her nose or received a concussion.  Everyone quickly hushes that person.  You're not sure what you've gotten yourself into.

Of course the coaches and captains will spend a long time explaining technique and how to properly block so that you minimize the potential for injury, but all you'll really hear is:

But you soon get it down, and learn that blocking is not actually that terrifying.  Plus, you like that you don't have to catch passes.  You're really bad at that.  You're even feeling pretty good about yourself until your first game comes along. Then you get to the field and your first match-up looks like this:

It also doesn't help that the opposing team is holding up signs that say "CONCUSS HER" on their sideline.

Eventually though, you begin to feel satisfied when you hit a good block.  You learn to embrace the bruises.  Instead of freaking out about them, you comment on them when they turn a particularly cool color.  You don't get worried about those sideline signs anymore: no one's gonna concuss you, not even close.  You got 'dis.  You're in beast mode.

I've been Baker 13'd. #IGTR

Rice has this lovely little tradition called Baker 13.  It's likely you heard about it before you even arrived for O-Week: it's extensively chronicled by college guides and Wikipedia as an example of Rice's unique culture and crazy traditions.   Yet nothing can prepare you for what it's like to be Baker 13'd.

The first time that I ever witnessed the event was as a freshman during our college's first council meeting of the year (also called "cabinet" by lesser colleges).  Since our council convenes at 10pm, everyone, including the upperclassmen had forgotten about Baker 13.

But Baker 13 had not forgotten about us.

The run only had about six people on it, all dudes, and they ran straight into the middle of our council meeting.  As they yelled, "Join us!,"  we all just stared and/or averted our eyes.  Realizing that no one was about to get up, strip down, and leave council, they moved on to the next college.  But not without leaving us some lovely Baker 13 prints to remember them by.

This is how it usually goes, or at least in my experience.  Rice students will be burrowed somewhere: in their rooms, Fondren, practicing on an IM field, and be completely oblivious to the nude crazies rampaging around campus (it's easy enough to forget about, especially on the 26th).  When they emerge later that night, or even the next morning, they find that everything has been Baker 13'd.

 

Bizarre things happen, I barely notice. #IGTR

Today, I was walking through the quad after my 9am class.

 

Then this happened.

Now, perhaps if you went to a different university, you might be a little surprised by your mascot chasing a gorilla through your academic quad for no apparent reason.  But the thing is, crazy things like this happen all the time.  In fact, this crazy thing has happened before.  When Sammy and the gorilla began wrestling, my linguistics professor from last semester, who happened to be walking through the quad, commented:  "I feel like I've seen this gorilla before.  I feel like I've seen him at Sid."

Allow me to take you back to second semester last year:

Here you can observe Sammy taking down the gorilla in the grove on the South side of campus.

I wouldn't say things like this are an everyday occurrence, but I don't think it's a stretch to say strange things happen on campus on a fairly consistent basis.  Daniel from McMurtry has a blog devoted to doing awesome, bizarre things on campus. And I mean, if you look at the video, practically no one even flinches.  One girl says "oh my god" and there's only one dude who does a double-take, but everyone else hardly skips a beat.

I guess we're just used to it.