Well, that was a downer. For reasons that elude me completely, we ended up with no freshmen at our inaugural meeting. A few of our Shore Patrol were immediately dispatched to the docks to shanghai a few for the next meeting. Go figure. There are years when they show up in droves and then disappear and there are years when they show up in normal numbers and don’t change much (all of last year’s novices returned last night looking sadder but wiser), and there are years like this where they preemptively disappear before I even get a chance to forget their names. Things would, I imagine, be different if I taught at the school. This is one of the big problems with being a freelancer, that recruiting is totally out of my hands. So it goes.
The inaugural meeting of the year, freshmen or no freshmen, always marks the assigning of the positions. There is no greater joy than seeing the look of despair in a teenager’s eye when he learns that he has been appointed hardware engineer. I see this as a stepping stone to greatness, while others might see it as the last stop before the slough of despond. The Banana Republican was my choice for the job this year. He probably won’t smile again until 2011.
After we squared away the season’s jobs and whined about the lack of fresh blood (I will point out that we did get a clutch of sophomores, so all was not completely lost), we moved from the cafeteria to our usual venue. It felt good to be back, if for no other reason than that I got to write on the board. I haven’t done that in months. We kicked around Sept-Oct for a while; “Good Old ‘Alli’” reported on some things she had heard at Vassar, while Robbie proclaimed his newfound love for Peter Singer and I once again got to bloviate about the two train tracks (and, especially, the throwing of the galoot over the trestle as one way to stop the train). It felt like a real meeting.
Of course, if we really do get new novices, I’ll have to contend with recapping orientation next week. And we need to get started on Oct Pfffting. And I’ve got to round up hotel rooms for Monti and the Home of the Albino Bagel. And I’ve sent out a message to the Admirals, Ret’d, regarding Bump judging, and begun setting the tournament up on tabroom.com. And I’ve been working furiously on figuring where to eat dinner at Yale.
It’s good to be back in business again.
1 comment:
Please inform Young Master Grabowitz that I give a thumbs up to his love of Peter Singer on this topic. Practical Ethics, I assume?
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