Glen Davis

We had a wel­come brunch today for new stu­dents that we called, Bagels, Donuts, and Oth­er Holy Things, which I thought was a rather clever play on words.

Bot­tom line: it went great. Our return­ing stu­dents did an awe­some job of wel­com­ing and host­ing new stu­dents. This year is real­ly look­ing sol­id, and I can tell that our return­ing stu­dents are get­ting excit­ed about it as well.

Plus I just got off the phone with two fresh­men who want to go to church with us tomor­row who weren’t even at the brunch. How cool is that?

Pre­sent­ed with­out any con­text what­so­ev­er:

I’m from Malaysia–the big­ger the rat the bet­ter the food.

Stu­dent: What’s a sphinc­ter?
Me: I will spare you the gory details–suffice to say that the ques­tion was answered
Stu­dent: You say that so mat­ter of fact­ly. Is that com­mon knowl­edge?

Stu­dent A: You know, it took me days to real­ize that call­ing our brunch Bagels, Donuts, and Oth­er Holy Things was a pun.
Stu­dent B: Oh my God–I just got it.

Me at the afore­men­tioned brunch: Some of you may not have real­ized that Bagels, Donuts, and Oth­er Holy Things is a play on words.
1/5 of stu­dents: Oohh­hh.…

Also, I should men­tion that the sun­bathing sirens were at their sta­tions again yes­ter­day. Reflect­ing on the avail­able data, I’m offer­ing three con­clu­sions:

1. They real­ly want to be noticed.
2. They may actu­al­ly be frosh (note that this is a rever­sal on my part).
3. At least one is Cana­di­an, judg­ing from the white maple leaf on a red back­ground that cov­ered the left­most por­tion of her rump.

Which leaves me with one burn­ing question–why do they make biki­nis in Cana­da? Don’t they own ther­mome­ters?

Stats at the end of the third day of New Stu­dent Ori­en­ta­tion:

• Hours on cam­pus: 12
• Num­ber of new stu­dents who have expressed inter­est in Chi Alpha to the extent of giv­ing us their email address: 39
• Num­ber of mod­els who have signed up: 1 (real­ly)
• Num­ber of athe­ists I’ve had pro­longed dis­cus­sions with: 3
• Athe­ists who have helped me work the table and told those who walked up that Chi Alpha was real­ly cool, if reli­gion is your thing: 1
• Num­ber of Ph.D. can­di­dates who have helped me work the con­tact table: 2
• Num­ber of stu­dents I have told we are a trans­gen­der group: 1
• Num­ber of stu­dents I have told that sac­ri­fic­ing chick­ens is what makes us dif­fer­ent from the oth­er min­istries on cam­pus: around 10
• Num­ber who laughed: 9
• Sun­bathers I have mocked from a dis­tance: 3

Today while work­ing our con­tact table I saw a great t‑shirt:

My friend went to Iraq look­ing for weapons of mass destruc­tion, but all he found was this crum­my t‑shirt.

I don’t care what your polit­i­cal bent is–that’s pret­ty fun­ny.

As I was work­ing our con­tact table today on cam­pus, a fresh­man gal walked up and asked if we were a soror­i­ty (which makes me think I should wear some­thing less frilly tomor­row).

As we are not, in fact, a soror­i­ty I tried to muster the nec­es­sary words to com­mu­ni­cate that we wel­come both males and females.

The obvi­ous word is coed. What I should have said is, “No, we’re a coed Chris­t­ian min­istry.”

But I had one of those sud­den inabil­i­ties to remem­ber the appro­pri­ate word. My brain fran­ti­cal­ly raced up and down the halls of my mind to seize a word that would help her under­stand that Chi Alpha was both male and female.

I set­tled on trans­gen­der.

As in, “No, we’re a trans­gen­der group.”

Not my finest ver­bal hour.

As my brain slow­ly began to process the words that had come out of my mouth (which, dis­tress­ing­ly enough, appear to be the over­flow of my heart) I become less and less coher­ent as I tried to throw more words into the ensu­ing silence, not unlike try­ing to repair a bul­let wound with more rounds of hot lead.

In the end, I think she under­stood.

I sus­pect she also thought I was a sad, strange lit­tle man.