So, the baseball game started at around 7, and I drove because I knew that I would be the one not drinking. Plus, having the van is good because in case people need me to drive them home if they were too drunk and everything. A lot of the grad students and faculty were there, and we were chatting and eating and people were drinking since we also had two kegs, I think. It was a fun time. I actually talked a lot with some from the older cohorts, which was awesome. One guy in particular I stuck by; he is a third year and is absolutely fantastic. I was telling him about The Room and Adam West's Batman movie and how awesomely terrible they are and he (and others) seemed very interested in watching them. So we might choose to soon have a screening of those. Because they are wonderful.
Anyway, post-baseball game was where action started, really. We tried to go to this one restaurant/bar, which was hosting a party thrown by our
(Sidenote: they really are the fucking worst. Recently in the elections, a referendum took place asking whether or not the mandatory fees should actually be voluntary. It was voted that they should be, and now the officers are trying to host a new election for that referendum and are all fucking butthurt over the fact that their very nicely paid positions will be gone. They're ignoring senators and blatantly going against the GSO constitution and don't really do anything for us at all. They even said it was a 51%-49% split, meanwhile it was actually only around 30% or so of the population who voted to keep the mandatory fees. They counted the fucking abstentions as yes votes. So the poli sci department has allied with the math department and some of the other STEM fields, because we all recognize this bullshit. The GSO executive board is full pretty much of sociology people and they're all friends and it is crap. A senator representing the mathematics department claimed that there's a reason math and political science are the two fields spearheading this whole thing against them: because 1) the math department actually understands how numbers work, and 2) the poli sci department understands who government is supposed to work. I found that hilarious.)
Alright, back to the story. So we were told that, despite being graduate students and everything, that we could not get in because we did not RSVP. Only after we pointed out that there were a fuck ton of slots open did they say we could maybe go in. But we had guests who were not grad students, so we still could not go in. We migrated to a different bar, but one of the third years stayed behind, because he, being a lawyer, was going to keep going until we were let in. Eventually we were called back to him, and we were let in. Many things happened between all this but it was not as fun as what happened when we returned.
So, two of our department members went out to have a smoke, and returned with some news: that they overheard pretty much the entire GSO board laughing about how we all (the graduate students in general) do not have a vote at all. When certain people heard this, they knew it was on. Not that much later, a third year went up to the GSO president and started talking to her. He opened with "so I study terrorism..." and it was just a giant shit show from there and it was glorious to watch. I was recording everything, because I wanted everything documented if something damaging was said or done. I missed some stuff because someone started hitting on me and it was awkward but I know that my department people were asking about the referendum and talking about how having a revote is bullshit and nonsense and the President and her cronies just kept yelling and saying that this wasn't the venue for this discussion and blah blah blah, meanwhile the venue for the discussion was at the meeting they held the day before where they refused to let anyone speak other than their supporters. Dissenters and people who were angry were not allowed to say anything and were interrupted and talked over.
She also pulled the "you're doing this because I'm a woman" card, which was really angering to me as a woman, plus you know...someone who was arguing with her was also a woman. But she just kept saying that our guy was being sexist, meanwhile he never said anything sexist and was just as angry with the guys so I saw no need for that. It really upset me, because it is people like her who pull that shit where it just isn't relevant at fucking all who make the rest of us look bad and when we point it out in very relevant situations, we are often met with scorn and ridicule.
Eventually she and her posse stormed away, but they got more cronies, who then wanted to start shit, and kept telling our department-mate that he was calling the President a terrorist and everything and they were yelling at each other and it was fantastic and I recorded everything for reasons.
After, we roamed around a little bit, and then I eventually took 5 people home. My roommates had separated from us, and I didn't know where they ran off to. So I took people home since I was one of the few who was sober. The guy that I had been hanging out with most of the night was the last one I dropped off, which I kind of liked a lot because he and I started sharing some personal stuff and it was nice to have that heart-to-heart with him and all. He told me things about himself and I shared some things about myself and he was really supportive and awesome and understands some of the issues that Americanists especially have in that department.
It was a nice day filled with nice conversations and heart-to-hearts.
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