An unedited ENDGAME, retrieved from doom
by Sara Wuillermin
(with divine intervention from William Smiley)

All right, so here it is, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the endgame. As if I even need to tell you, this IS the reason you exist. Wait a minute. I’m probably making my job a lot harder taking this road because, hey, I’m gonna have to deliver. How about … this is the reason you learned to read. (Kids, don’t ever be ashamed of lowering your expectations!) Don’t worry, I’ll be gentle. We’ll start this one out nice and easy by talking about something we’ve all dealt with. And no, I don’t mean puberty. Although, well, it kind of falls in this category. Instead, we’re going to talk about change. Now now, little Billy, quit shaking that piggy bank. We’re not talking about dollars and cents, we’re talking about life changes.

Basically, since the last time we’ve all come together and joined in good ol’ shameful and illicit fun, a lot of things have changed in each one of our lives. The classes we’re in are different, the rooms we’ve shoved all our stuff into are new, the posters we’ve paid too much for at the poster sale are still fresh and pretty on our walls, and life feels good. Well, except for the fact that we are all gradually resituating our lives so that we can come to terms with the greatest shift in reality: Wrap Wednesdays have officially entered the witness protection program, relocating to a later point in the week with the new identity of Fajita Friday. And so, might I point out, that some changes aren’t always so easy to deal with. (Keep this in mind for later, I’m going for a motif here.) For some readers, being at Washington College is a major change since this is their first year away from home. Thus, let us all take a moment of silence for those among us who never even experienced a Wrap Wednesday. Anyway, you’ve, I hope, all made the transition from being at home mooching from your parents to being in a 5 by 4 dorm room mooching from your parents pretty smoothly, and have become aware of all the dos and don’ts to college life. But just in case you were too busy searching for the keg instead of brushing up on the etiquette of college, let’s have a brief tutorial:

1. Liquor before beer, you’re in the clear. Beer before liquor, you’ve never been sicker … and don’t worry, you’re not the only one who mixes up the rhyme. That’s why the trash cans in your hallway are industrial sized.
2. No matter how nice the guy/girl seems, if he/she asks you back to his/her room to look at his/her stereo, chances are, you’ll be seeing a lot more than that.
3. Flavored condoms are for oral sex only … even the grape ones. (Ladies, you don’t want your crotch smelling like a vineyard, now, do you?)
4. College is not just about binge drinking or about random hook ups. It’s about finding yourself, which leads me to my 5th point, which is especially for the gentlemen in the audience:
5. If you’re going to masturbate in your dorm room, make sure the door’s locked and your roommate isn’t coming back anytime soon. It’ll save a lot of embarrassment for the both of you.

If I’m doing my job, then my little list gave you the same kind of guilty pleasure that driving slowly past a horrible accident or strolling through the back room of the Video Scene does. And why is that? Because these are our dirty secrets, the dark sides of our lives that we’d rather not talk about and just pretend don’t exist. They make us uncomfortable, but they also make us human. So, sometimes it’s necessary to address these things, because these are strange situations that might come up in the face of change, and it’s always good to have an idea of what to expect. Because sometimes you don’t have any idea what to expect at all and you’re left not only with change but with the confusion it brings along with it. And that sucks. How do I know? Because that was what I went through this summer.

On June 28th I dealt with one of the worst kinds of changes anyone can ever go through: death. My grandfather, who was going through a series of ups and downs with his health, finally passed away in his sleep. And suddenly I, along with my entire family, had to deal with something that seems virtually impossible: learning to live without someone we love so much and dealing with this pain it causes (and you thought this article was going to be about keggers and masturbation). This is not an easy process, believe me. It takes a lot of time and aggravation and a lot of tears and a few pints of Ben and Jerry’s and possibly some prozac (mmmmm… prozac), but at some point, although you don’t ever feel 100% better, you do reach a sense of understanding and acceptance.

And this idea of acceptance and coping is something that we’ve all undergone on a broader level. As we all know, the anniversary of September 11th has just come and gone, and, whether or not we were directly affected by what happened on that day, it was definitely an event that has altered many of the perceptions we have. Suddenly, the ideas we formerly had about our country, our safety, and ourselves have shattered (I know… I’m skating on cliché, and I apologize) and it gave us a heads up on how quickly the things we think can’t be changed in our life can be.

Ok, so I lied. I promised I would be gentle and then I threw you head first into a steaming pile of reality. But, then again, this is how reality works — just when you think you’re rocking aboard the carefree train on a one-way trip to Coolsville, some punk kid throws a penny on the track, derails the train and sends you and everyone you love to their fiery deaths, leaving no remains so there can’t even be a proper burial. Ok, so maybe it’s not that bad, but when the unexpected does come up it can definitely feel that way. It’s natural. I hope what we all can learn from this article (if you’re still reading it) is that these changes, while they can make us feel like we are being thrown to our fiery deaths, are actually the very events that propel us towards this thing we are supposed to encounter once out of college — the “real” world. Whether it be death, love, something that feels like love, something that just feels good, or even the ever-so-traumatic removal of Wrap Wednesdays, there is something we are all supposed to be learning from these changes. We must learn that we, ourselves, are supposed to be changing with them.