On my floor, we have a motto. Our motto is “Sweet Moo Meat, eh?”
Don’t worry, we don’t know what it means, either, but I will explain where it came from. Our D’lions had painstakingly decorated our lounge, making carefully prepared construction paper letters and decorations to add a sense of personality to the floor. And we appreciated it, but we just couldn’t resist. When you have a whole bunch of individual letters, and nothing else to do, eventually people decide to start “getting creative.”
Start with the letters in the phrase “Home Sweet Home.” Unfortunately, one of our H’s got accidentally discarded, so we were down to Home Sweet Ome. Well, that wouldn’t do, so we grabbed the “T” from “Tiernan 4” in the stairwell, and proceeded to work with “Home Sweet Tome.”
People with patience, creativity and insight are able to immediately spot clever ways to rearrange letters. Since none of us had those qualities, we went to option B ? the Internet.
People have Web sites dedicated to finding clever ways to rearrange the letters in different words. For instance, my name, Lewis Powell, anagrams to “Wow, I’ll Sleep,” which is a surprisingly accurate indication of my attitude.
After fooling around with Home Sweet Tome on the Internet for a while, we realized, “Hey, our R.A. has the letters ‘R’ and ‘A’ on her door.” She wasn’t around for us to see if it was ok to borrow them, so we assumed she wouldn’t mind. Note for all freshmen ? this was a bad assumption.
It is important to note that none of us were under the influence of anything more powerful than aspirin at the time, and that this activity could only be labeled drug-induced if you were to call “boredom” a drug. If so, then we are all junkies.
Well, having acquired an “A,” we now had the potential to spell anything with an “A” in it. You would be surprised how many words require the letter “A.”
This is when our group developed a creative conflict. Some wanted a “sweat”-based message, while others wanted a “meat”-based message. Needless to say, meat beat sweat, primarily because it lends itself to humor more effectively.
The concept of sweet meat was a natural next step, which left us with “oomeh.” Since “Sweet Oomeh Meat” wasn’t particularly amusing for English speakers, we were forced to split it into “Moo” and “eh.” Luckily, we all speak enough Canadian that we could insert the “Eh” into the piece as a question, making it bilingual. We formed punctuation out of other decorations, and made a cow out of a smiley face, six ice cream cones, a cookie and three popsicles.
I tell you, it made us feel like MacGyver.
OK, so if we created a scale with, for instance, “Habitat for Humanity” at one end, and “Telling children there is no Santa Claus” at the other end, that evening’s activities were nowhere near habitat levels of productiveness or morality, but at least we didn’t ruin Christmas, and any day in which we don’t ruin Christmas, or partake in any other Grinch-like activities, is a successful day.
This column was brought to you by Tiernan 4’s immense boredom, and the letter “A” ? although we did have to give it back.
Powell can be reached at lpowell@campustimes.org.
