Living for the weekend

This past couple of weeks, our class seems to have messed up a lot of things. First, it was Campusologies (campos for short). Campos are those facts about Texas A&M that all cadets are required to know, and generally learn during fish year. We have been assigned three per week since the start of the semester, and we have not yet managed to memorize all of them by the end of the week. Our Sophomores finally got mad enough about it to start making us push every time we mess up. Last training, we messed up almost every campo we were asked. That would have been the hardest training we've had yet, but we had to get ready for a march-in past Dr. Murano's (the new A&M president) house.

Also, we've been consistently messing up with the Guidon. The Guidon is the flag that is held in front of our outfit whenever we march in. The Guidon Bearer is a sophomore, and the fish are not allowed to go anywhere near him while he's holding the Guidon. You would think that a six-foot-someodd Sophomore holding a six-foot flag would be hard to miss, but he somehow manages to hide at the end of the hall behind some of his buddies. I'm pretty sure he does it intentionally, too. Guidon smokings are the hardest we've had, and we're in for some more on Monday.

On the other hand, the good bull is starting to rack up. On Tuesday night, we gave Mr. Schubert, one of our Juniors, a swirly to commemorate his birthday. While we were dragging him out of his room, Ross handed me one of his uniform parts to bargain for privileges with. This kind of dealing is called reconning, and it's something to take pride in. Usually, it's started by the fish, but I think Ross thinks we need to start pulling this kind of thing out more often. Unfortunately, we have to earn the right to bargain by doing PT. The way it goes (or so I've gathered, we haven't actually done the bargaining yet) is we push for however many privileges we can stand. Monday's going to be rough, but at least it'll be worth it.

Also, this morning, instead of normal outfit PT, we went to the Rec center and did our PT there. It was a choice of whatever you could do at 5:45 in the morning, so Ross and a couple of other upperclassmen started an indoor soccer game. That was probably the best game of soccer I've played in years. When we were done, Mr. Martin, the head yell leader and one of our Seniors, gave me and a couple of my buddies who couldn't walk very well a ride back to the dorm.

I've not had any time this week to do anything, thanks to a couple of papers I have yet to get right. I've gotten to the point where I've told Mr. Towns, the Sophomore to who I owe the papers, that he's just going to have to wait until I can can catch up on my homework. Fortunately for me, in our outfit that's a legitimate excuse. Mr. Porier, our Commanding Officer, has announced that we're pushing for the Joleen award this year. The Joleen award is the award that goes to the outfit with the best scholastics. It's very hard for our outfit to get, being an engineering outfit and still taking training seriously.

This is probably the first time this week I've had to actually goof off, so I'm enjoying it thoroughly. We also got Junior privileges from one of our Seniors because we agreed not to tackle her after Arch Yell. That means I can listen to music and play games, not wear fish dress, not get on the wall, walk in the hallways, talk in the hallways, and generally act mostly like a normal human being. It's great.