PUPPET MASTER and PATSY recall freshman year

First semester, freshman year can be the best and worst time of your college career. You're living on the same hall with the opposite sex for the first time, but that thrill is often offset by a freak roommate who looks at female bodybuilders on your computer when you're not around, then blaming it on you when your friends are there. When that comes up on your Internet Explorer history bar--guy or girl--your sexuality will rightfully be called into question. You learn lessons as you go along into your second semester, some fun but far more of them painful. I don't mean the kind of painful that can be cured with a band-aid or a bag of ice, but rather the kind of painful that an orgo test can inflict upon your nether reaches, one that requires at the very least both a band-aid and a bag of ice.

The only way to fight through the maelstrom of the Duke academic and social scene is to acquire a group of friends that lack exactly what you provide. This allows you both to find your niche in Duke society and to find others to deflect your insecurities upon. I, myself, wandered aimlessly through freshman year doing keg stands until I found my counterpart. My first interaction with the PUPPET MASTER consisted of me accidentally urinating out his window, followed by an impromptu, poorly received rendition of The Foundations' "Build Me Up, Buttercup."

He was caught off-guard as he tried vainly to put the finishing touches on his Starcraft game. After quickly dismissing him as a potential residential adviser informant, I came to one of those rare epiphanies that you only remember in the morning if you write them down. As I read it off a Domino's cheesy bread box the following morning, the message couldn't be clearer--1) This PUPPET MASTER kid needs your help. 2) You could walk onto the field hockey team with minimal effort and a few well-timed political maneuvers. I dismissed the second part, though intriguing, as senseless drunk talk. But the first part of my ramblings stood: I could mold this arts dorm reject into someone who could at least function in social situations.

Although the PATSY, my myopic, bed-wetting old freshman hallmate seems to delight in portraying me as some sort of brainy, highbrow dweeb, nothing could be further from the truth. (After all, as I have angrily told the PATSY on many occasions, I only rushed Arts Theme House freshman year with the hopes of grabbing some free sushi at sign-ups and, more boldly, thwarting Bill Burig's forthcoming campaign to give me sophomore housing in a rudely-constructed tepee on the outskirts of K-Ville. Now let us never again speak of my follies with rush.)

Rather, I am merely a rare Duke student who understands that true humor consists of timeless subtleties like irony and understatement--not obscure references to '80s sitcoms. (The encyclopedic knowledge of which is a useful arrow in the quiver of social skills that every Duke student should possess. Ideally, a well-orchestrated frat party will eventually devolve at endgame into a late night sing-along of ancient theme songs, and if you can't remember what you get "when you take the good and take the bad," then boy are you gonna feel like a jackass.)

To be honest, the relationship between the PATSY and me started off on a rocky note. We first met in my room at 4 on a Sunday morning freshman year. I was within moments of my first Duke hookup (a lovely member of the field hockey team) when the PATSY entered and relieved himself out my window while mumbling drunken gibberish about body-builder porn. The mood was ruined, I never got my hookup, and under the guise of friendship, I have been exacting my revenge upon the mentally inferior PATSY ever since. We grew closer, and after his dreams of fraternity life were crushed by a universal blackball resulting from surfacing rumors about a one-man interpretive dance routine featuring a scene with Nan Keohane and Gail Goenstenkors, we decided to live together.

Our friendship was forged over the following semester as the PUPPET MASTER saw his way out the backdoor of the ultra-competitive Arts Dorm, Round Table and Prism rush gauntlets. I myself didn't quite make a fraternity supposedly because "some of the seniors disapproved," but in truth because I didn't adhere to the agenda of latent homosexuality enforced by beer games and other means. Me and the PUPPET MASTER decided to live together and entered the lottery hoping to land on West. Six months later, we found ourselves in a Trent triple with a Railroad Video patron and his blow-up doll. The desolation of Trent was offset by the constant gyrations coming from under the boy's covers with his inflatable companion being taken to task.

It all comes back to the essential lesson that Duke University teaches you: Bill Burig is evil, and he will do anything within the power of his supreme malevolence to make as many people as possible live in uninhabitable living spaces. The only way to survive at Duke is to know who your friends are. And despite all of our disagreements, at least the PUPPET MASTER and I know that we won't come home to a computer screen littered with female bodybuilders. And as the PUPPET MASTER says, with all of the weirdos out there living double lives as well-adjusted, Chronicle-reading Dukies by day and twisted sexual deviants by night, can you really ask anything more?