A (sort of) Normal Week

    Is it strange that, even after being back in the US for three months now, I still get a kick out of hearing American accents? It’s wonderful! I love the dialects and how you can find ones that sound elegant, casual, disgustingly colloquial, or anything in between! Yes, you get that in England, but I love being surrounded by familiar sounds! What I’m not too fond of is being surrounded by a single familiar name: Matt. My dorm, and most of the campus it would seem, is plagued with people named “Matt.” Just in my dorm I think that there are twelve of us, though there may be more! People have started assigning nicknames to us because no one can remember our last names, but then there are multiple nicknames for a single Matt. Furthermore, there are Matts that many of us have never seen and thus we can’t assign a face to the name! For example: I’ve been dubbed British Matt, Fake British Matt, British Boy, and just plain Brit, though that one died away pretty quickly. People are still saying “Oh, so you’re British Matt!” when they’re introduced to me! At least mine sort of makes sense though, even if it is incorrect! There are others called Generic Matt, The Original Matt, and God knows what other Matts there might be! Next I’ll find someone called Tropical Smoothie Matt or Androgynous Matt or something else absurd!
    Anyhow, some time ago I began working for The Daily Collegian, our school newspaper, and my first assignment was to review some of the group workouts offered in the recreation center on campus. I’ve always been partial to group workouts. Exercising with others is motivating because there are people you can pace off of while you are spurred on by the embarrassment of slowing down and looking like a lethargic slug. The banter before and after is always fun and, for guys at least, there’s even more motivation if there happen to be cute girls hanging around. As the time drew closer to when the 30-Minute Body class was supposed to start and packs of girls filed in, though, I began to realize that no guys were going to materialize. Upon this realization, I thought Oh, shit, what’ve I gotten myself into? Well, at least I’ll have the chick motivation. Even so, I became all too aware of my hairy, trunk-like legs and lack of muscle definition. If you’re a guy, then just by showing up to these workouts you’re really demonstrating your security and open mind. When I took the job, I was hoping to act as a phantom workout reviewer, blending in with the crowd and then disappearing right before the review appeared in the paper. That idea disintegrated as soon as I noticed how many ladies there were in the class. I was about as inconspicuous as a badger surrounded by calico cats. Once I submitted the review, however, I tasted the frustration of the editing process for the first time. The editor not only changed the article’s format and thus disrupted its flow, she also chopped up many of my sentences and removed much of my sarcasm and original voice. My personality barely shows through and this butchered editing job makes me look I'm in junior high! Oh well. Hopefully the editor for the arts section will be more understanding with my review of “Dracula Untold.”
    I’ve been here long enough that I’ve settled into some semblance of a routine. Between homework, gym sessions in the morning, and classes, I’ve started taking my breakfast around two or three in the afternoon, unless you include a protein shake right before class. Then there’s the regular fencing and film stuff and yadda yadda yadda. I’ve got a system. Enough said. A piece of advice: I’ve found that there’s no way to really excel in life, especially business and school, without having some sort of structure to adhere to that can organize and push you. Granted, that structure jumps out of the nearest window as soon as the weekend arrives and the various “activities” begin again, but it works. The strange thing is that the sign of my week returning to normalcy is when most of the people on my floor get together on Sunday evenings to watch “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver and there is nothing normal about him except for his journalistic investigation.
    Normalcy was once again broken, however, by a whole slew of birthdays in my hall. I decided that, since four were occurring within nearly a week of each other, I would order a cake for the lot of them. I managed to organize it so that everyone on the floor except for the birthday people knew about the cake and ensured that they would all be there for when it was presented. However, I emphasized how I did not want these four to know that I was the one who’d done all of this. It just makes me feel awkward when people are particularly grateful. It’s almost as if they have some debt to me when I just wanted to make their day better. Anyhow, my involvement was leaked, as all good secrets are, despite my conscripting a couple of others to deliver the cake. When they asked why I had not had any until I made sure that everyone else had had some and why I didn’t want to take credit for it, I was actually a little confused. It occurred to me that I might have grown up with a different philosophy than most. I believe that you do not partake of the gift that you give. As the giver, you only partake of the joy of giving the gift and seeing the results is enough. Perhaps I took all of that Christmas and Santa Claus stuff a little too close to heart.
    On a more interesting note, that evening my friend Kai managed to slice his head open. As a group of us were making our way to dinner, Tanner noticed Kai walking some ways behind us. As Tanner was a human and Kai a zombie in UMass’s infamous “Humans vs. Zombies” game, Tanner charged after Kai. Shocked out of his reverie by the sound of pounding footsteps and our cheering, Kai staggered back, trying to dodge the ball of rolled up socks that Tanner threw to stun him for another ten minutes. However, while trying to evade the fluffy projectile, Kai tripped, fell, and slashed his head on the curb. We were all laughing as he got up, as we hadn’t seen the impact and he seemed fine. Then he touched the back of his head and I noticed that his hand was covered in blood. “Oh shit!” I said in tandem with another guy as we sprinted forward to aid him. Long story short, we called an ambulance, I got to practice my first aid training from the Boy Scouts, and Kai was carted off to get stitches at which point a couple of us had to go and scrub his blood off of our hands. On the bright side, he dodged the ball of socks.
    I’m aware that this entry did not have much in the way of a theme or cohesion, but every now and then a casual collection of anecdotes can be enjoyable. I hope that everyone has a great week! Next time I will let you glimpse the English Society’s initiation, subject you to my laments over mild betrayal, and then some gossip because I feel like acting like a teenage schoolgirl. See you around!