This is a re-post, but I am dedicating it special to Tink because I think that the editor in her will appreciate a celebration of anal retentiveness of this magantude. Plus, it’s really funny and I want to make her laugh.
Let’s see if Unc can resist making jokes about my use of the word anality.
Because I went to a small college, whether or not you went Greek had a tremendous impact on your social life. Neither my roommate, nor myself decided to pledge a fraternity. Fraternities where I went to school required heavy drinking as part of the pledge process, and neither one of us drank at all. I can’t speak for him, but I decided if they didn’t want me, then I had no use for them. As a result, we both made a ton of jokes at the expense of the frats. Then, we had an even better idea.
We decided to start our own fraternity! What’s more, we decided to limit membership to the two of us. We even took to calling our dorm room “The Frat House,” despite the fact that it was occupied by a Biology major and an English major who studied way too much. We began by organizing our own version of Hell week, which included things like studying for our Chemistry test for 6 hours, a YooHoo chug, and going to class wearing sweaters that picked up everything but women. Things were going well, but we were missing something.
We needed a name. We tried organzing Greek letters to spell something. We wanted NERD, but couldn’t figure out what to use for the N, despite both of us looking it up. We thought about becoming Delta Omicron Rho Kappa, but then a light went on. You’ll groan about that idiom in about a paragraph or two.
One morning, my roommate was getting dressed to go to his 8:00 class. I didn’t have class until 10:20, so he didn’t want to wake me up. However, he needed light, so he cracked the door and used the light from the hall. However, the guy across the hall kept getting up and shutting out the light. My roommate would then turn it back on. They kept battling back and forth between on and off until finally my roommate left him a note that said “Just leave the damn thing on.”
Later that day, he and I came back from eating lunch and the Ozzy Osbourne quote I had left on our whiteboard that morning had been erased and replaced with the following: “You guys are a pair of tight assed light dorks!” We had been named. A couple of hours later, a sign hung proudly on our door and the brothers of Tau Alpha Lambda Delta had been born!
Our next step was to establish a motto for ourselves. Our school’s motto was “Having light, we pass it on to others.” So, we decided to riff off of that and go with “Having light, we leave it on for others.” We then made our sign even better so that in addition to our letters, we had our motto and a makeshift crest with a lightbulb in the middle of it hanging proudly on our door.
We were serious about it as a frat, too. We held meetings, did organized nerdy things, and even petiotioned the student sentate for money so we could hold a pizza party for all new members.(request declined) Over the next two and a half years, our fraternity featured no toga parties, no drinking binges, and sadly no panty raids, but we did have a lot of studying, a lot of Star Wars nights, a lot of bad jokes (including a running gag about lime sauce), and a lot of hours spent playing trivia. Most of all, we had a lot of fun. Tau Alpha Lamda Delta shut down after we graduated, but for two and a half years, it stood for Anality, Dorkiness, and a well lit hallway.
