The Last Days

As you may have noticed from my recent posts, things are getting a lot more relaxed around here. On Wednesday we dropped with our Juniors. What was supposed to happen was we were going to "air them out" a Corps term for a surprise wakeup call, usually applied to fish. What really happened was we started yelling and busting open doors, only to realize there was no one there. The Juniors promptly came upstairs from one of the third deck rooms and started smoking us. It's apparently a Falcon tradition. After a couple of hours of PT, we dropped with our Juniors, and can now call them by their first names.

Another thing that happened was that the Sophomores earned their white belts. That means that they can now legitimately laugh and make jokes in front of us. It's actually pretty annoying, because one sophomore in particular likes to just stand in front of me and grin. It's impossible to not crack up when that happens. Just yesterday they were in front of the dorm playing golf with fruit. Some of them are actually pretty good at it.

On Friday, for training, we had "fish interviews". Basically, we were informed that this would be an important part of our Corps career, and that we should take them seriously. Uniform was Midnights with service cover and white gloves (the best possible uniform for those not in the band). We were told that everything had to be perfect, so many people spent all day working on uniforms, and most of us went to the length of getting our shoes re-tapped to make them completely perfect. Then we get to the interview, and one by one, every five minutes, a person was called out to go downstairs and be interviewed. When it was my turn, I arrived downstairs and was greeted by most of the upperclassmen, grinning, yelling, and asking questions such as "who is the best-looking senior, fish, junior, and sophomore". At the end, they asked me who I wanted to chew out. Upon my answer, that person stood up and I got to chew him out. You have no idea what awkward is until you get to chew out an upperclassman. It's just plain wierd.

Many things are being passed down in the Corps these days, one of which is the Aggie mascot. I have a class with the new Mascot Corporal, so I se Revielle a lot these days. She gets into class and promptly falls asleep. Apparently the things required to become Mascot Corporal are some of the toughest sets of PT and character analysis in the Corps. Some of the things I have been told about include some serious paper-writing, interviews, and a lot of PT (duh).

By the way, Peter, if you tell any of this to your buddies if and when you're a fish, you're personally smoked. It ruins the experience for both us and you.