Sorority: No fat chicks, minorities

I was one of those in the business who never went to college and, obviously, was never a part of the frat scene. And reading about it now, both the good and the bad, it doesn't seem like I missed all that much.

I joined the Navy, instead, which meant I got the camaraderie that everyone talks about from frat/sorority life. I got the life experiences and some of those lifelong connections that everyone plays up.

But what I didn't get, and thankfully missed, was the whole high school carryover. You know, that sense of social fragmentation and superiority that so many people carry over from high school. It's an attitude that seems to totally invade the frat/sorority life, at least from my outsider view.

And now that I'm in college (part time) what am I seeing? The same high school carryover. Only now that I'm 35 as opposed to 18, it all comes off as pathetic and empty. So maybe I didn't miss so much after all.

 

I was recruited a few times as a freshman, pretty heavily by a Jewish frat. Also a friend of a friend insisted he could get me in his fraternity without getting hazed too badly. It just never interested me.

I just didn't like the idea of paying to hang out with people. Maybe that's just because I've always been such an anti-social pain in the ass.

What always cracked me up was the guys who got upset if you called it a frat. "You wouldn't call your country a pussycat"

"No, but I have respect for my country."

I do still have a t-shirt from a sorority party. One of the sisters invited me on our first date. "You never know how far you'll go until you do it in the snow."

No comment.


Edit: I blew the line on the country-pussycat thing....oops

 

Case of the blue balls?

 

Well done, though no, she never left me with blue balls.

Besides, that was about 14 years, one marriage and one child ago. Blue balls may seem like they'll never go away, but eventually they do.

 

Really struggled to stay off this thread, but I gotta jump in here.

It's not EAT. It's SDT. Unfortunately, the greek letters for Sigma Delta Tau LOOK like EAT. Looks especially weird on the butt of shorts or sweatpants.

Most of the members (at least at my school) were Jewish and brilliant, some thin, some not, some gorgeous, some athletic, some rich, some not. For me, it was a blast--made a very large university feel smaller.

No doubt the Greek thing depends on where you go to school, but it's pretty dopey to say everyone in frats and sororoties are shallow and exclusive, or that frats=rape/drunken mysogyny. Pretty sure there's plenty of sexual assault and drunken mysogyny all over college campuses.

 

I made a sport of finding out fraternity secrets for other houses while I was in college.

The secret handshake, for instance, was pretty much the same for everyone on my campus. And for one of them with a certain non-northern origin, the secret "warning" signal for revealing house secrets was the doffing and donning of the baseball cap in rapid succession several times.

My fraternity was a hell of a lot of fun. We did all the stuff 15 years ago that today would be considered hazing (walkouts, lineups, pledge books, pledge paddles that had to be signed, etc.) I can see now why frats are disappearing. It ain't fun no more.

 

College fraternities? At my high school (in a particularly tony suburb of Indianapolis that is often the source of much ridicule) there were kids pledging already in some sort of junior fraternities. My high school was a generous suppliers of little sisters (i.e., underage skank) to college Greek systems. What I never got was that after these guys ran laps naked with jellybeans up their asses to get into the high school-level fraternity, they would still have to run laps naked with jellybeans up their asses to get into the college fraternity. I wouldn't put myself through that once, but what sort of glutton for punishment do you have to be to go through it twice?

Speaking of hazing, while Greeks get a deservedly bad rap for it, it seems like it's everywhere, especially sports. I'm waiting to hear of a chess club scandal involving newbies who had to run laps naked with rooks up their asses.

 

10 to 1 that's already happened at M.I.T.

 

On a side note, one of the funny fraternity stories came from another non-greek friend. She lived with a gal who was dating a guy as he was going through one fraternity's hell week, in which the pledges were barred from acknowledging any girl they were dating/friends with/associated/etc. She would come back to the room in a mess of tears every night because "He couldn't even say hello to me! Waaaaah!" The first night he could actually speak to her again they came back to my friend's room, drunk, started hooking up and we ended up accidentally walking in on them ... right as she peed all over the guy because she was so drunk out her mind. That habit ended up becoming par for the course for her.

 

Who was her boyfriend, R. Kelly?

 

Tell any military enlisted man one of these stories and he'll immediately wonder if the fresh-faced college grad now serving as his division officer was the one featured in the story.

America's colleges: Turning out more ill-behaved, drunken future leaders than a joint meeting of naval aviators and Young Republicans.