The title is a reference to Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot,” which premiered in 1953. Do you get it? I know how to read.
This weekend, the fraternity quad transformed into pre-industrialized 19th century Siberia. Women cried, the ground was frozen white, and the night sky was imbued with a deep grey most likely absorbed from the desolation of the people that walked the earth below it.
To my left, a girl shivering, her head repeatedly smooshed into the chest of a boy who looked like Scarecrow from “Wizard of Oz.” Her friend kept trying to speak to her, but Scarecrow didn’t allow it — he just kept smooshing. To my right, a couple in anguish, running around to yell at each other from different angles on the frat quad. “Literally don’t!” the girl screamed, but to no avail. The boy continued to do.
“I think we have a good chance of getting in,” said a boy on the treacherous steps of Sigma Phi Epsilon. The steps of Theta Chi contained a similar tense longing, with a group of girls asking the little stinkers at the door if they recognized her friend from Tinder.
Is this who we really are? Humans bound to each other by an unspoken contract: Give me your body or time and I’ll let you into my shitty basement. The alcohol is always mediocre, the tunes are middling at best, there’s always one person on the dangerous verge of collapse, and still, we continue to do it. We point our Party City laser lights at the crumbling ceiling of the basement, jump up and down, and hope that maybe tonight, we’ll go back to someone’s dorm and they won’t make us feel dead inside. Maybe tonight.
My friends and I did eventually get into Sig Ep, and it was fine. I don’t know what the theme was, so that gets a zero. There were a lot of people dancing and one guy was wearing a top hat, so attendance gets an eight. Atmosphere was humid, someone pushed me out of the way as I was trying to enter, but everyone looked like they were having fun, so that gets a seven. Sig Ep’s final score is a five. How nice for them.
Outside again, I was shivering. The chill in the air cut through my jacket, my sweater, and into the small part of me that wonders if I’ll ever fit in with these people. Could I ever make myself happy in that place? Dancing with sweating strangers who all want something? It could be sex or alcohol, wanting to defy their parents, or just wanting to feel something. My fingers were frozen and I didn’t feel anything. Dicks look like Goomba from Super Mario Bros.
