You know that girl who convinced you that quirky is no longer cute? And that it really just means you’re making everyone around you VERY uncomfortable?
Yeah, that was me.
I made this realization upon entering university and deciding that it was worth sacrificing my “individuality” in favor of a real a life. The first step was making new friends, which is the obvious choice when your own mother no longer believes that “Ted” ate all the cookies.
A whole week’s worth of orientation and frosh-related activities meant plenty of ultra-hammered guys and gals to take advantage of…platonically, of course. My first victims were my roomie and floormates, who I hoodwinked on the last day of move-in. We had gone to a bar to celebrate. After they were appropriately inebriated, I mentioned to them that I had, in fact, made friends in my lifetime. This didn’t seem to strike them as suspect, because we talked, laughed, and drank for quite a while. The next day, once everyone’s parents had left, we went en masse to eat dinner. En masse did, in this case, actually include me, and thus the plan was working perfectly.
Things only got better when frosh arrived. Cheery group members would all too willingly trade phone numbers, and if the cheer wasn’t enough, the prospect of finding oneself alone, pant-less, and without contacts in Mile-End definitely encourages group communication. Suckers. I could track them down anytime, anywhere. I was constantly meeting new people who thought I was funny and agreeable, most likely because the alcohol-fueled debauchery had a mandatory 10am start time. At the end of the first week, I had 16 new numbers in my cell and 12 more Facebook friends. I considered un-friending one after she vomited all over my lap, but then I realized that she’s indebted to me, so I didn’t. Life was great. People seemed to like me and I had friends, now all I had to do was keep it up. And then came Thursday, September 3.
I was joyfully minding my own business, off to dinner with my new best friends when I heard mention of a quidditch team. “Quidditch?” I thought, as in that crazy game with the brooms, and the flying, and the capes, and $798 million books? Most definitely, I was told. It was at precisely that moment that all my work was rendered moot.
Come Saturday morning I had a broom courtesy of the dollar store, and was traipsing off to lower field ready to live my childhood dream. By the afternoon I had repeatedly humiliated myself (I’m not a good seeker), and been the subject of countless cell phone photos. It must have been difficult to take those photos in between the laughing, pointing, and inviting of more gawkers, many of whom were froshies. In less than two weeks my veneer of normalcy had yielded to freakazoid me yet again. Damn you, J.K. Rowling. Damn you.
~Jennifer Looi
