My column is entitled Casual WTFery. At some point you might have pondered what the hell that even means. Quite simply, it’s the most accurate description of my life that I could come up with. If you’re skeptical, keep reading to see how I got to be so casually WTF. I’ve already told you all about the escapades of my baby bottom, and after starting out with a minor shitocalypse you know that it can only get better from there.Maybe it was middle school that did it. Although I know preteen years suck for just about everybody, it was particularly awful for me. Tall, chunky, super bookish, with a vague mullet, braces / retainers and going through a goth phase all at the same time is certainly enough to make a social pariah out of just about anybody. It was at this point in my life that I accidentally microwaved my retainers, which coincidentally made them erupt into flames and caused a very weird phone conversation with the dentist’s office. The receptionist laughed so hard that I could barely get a word in. Apparently not only am I a pediatric record holder, but I’m also infamous at the dentist’s office. I’m pretty sure they use my story to console girls who destroy their orthodontics in less badass but more fixable ways. On a separate note, I did synchronized swimming in seventh grade. I like to bring that shit up in Never Have I Ever because who the hell else do you know that has ever synchronized swam? Exactly.It could also be my family. Any of my Twitter followers are sure to recognize my hashtag #theDeans because I tweet about their weirdness all the time. When I describe #theDeans to people, I generally refer to us as domesticated rednecks, but sometimes “nuts” works its way in there too. Whether it’s my grandfather kicking a cop in the balls during a diabetic reaction, my uncle giving my brother frozen deer testicles for Christmas, my Grammy asking if I’ve “sexted” anyone lately or telling me my ethics paper topic sounds “bullshittable,” my mom describing to me how she’s been teasing my brother about the size of his “package” or my other grandfather microwaving my cousin’s stuffed toy to dry it off only to have its voice box explode 30 seconds later, #theDeans just serve to make me think that ridiculosity is genetic and I got the lion’s share of the outrageous genes. Normal conversations in our house go something like this: “Well, I don’t get the difference between a chicken and a pig.” “Mammals have TITS AND FUR DAD. Tits and fur.” Or the occasional misunderstanding of Will Smith lyrics: “Huh? Eatin’ chickens with it?” “No Dad. That would be ‘gettin’ jiggy with it’.”Maybe it’s just that Cornell allows my unique brand of nerdy-weirdo-with-social-skills to flourish. There was freshman year when I got J.A.’d at a drag party in the townhouses and awkwardly had class with one of the officers who wrote me up (it was totally worth it for the BAC card, thanks BASICS!). There was the night sophomore year when my bra fell out of my pocket in C-Town only to resurface on the front steps of my friend’s house. Soon after that I dyed my hair — along with my entire body and Eco House bathroom — pink. My butt was dye-striped like a Lisa Frank zebra for at least a week. There’s also the day last year when I accidentally sat on a frozen possum for 10 minutes in the middle of a blizzard. I believe the possum encounter happened around the same time that I got a six-minute mohawk in a mens’ bathroom for a scavenger hunt. And then there’s last fall when I blacked out for the first (and only) time and woke up to four simultaneously sprained fingers (try explaining that to Gannett) after having apparently bitch-slapped a door. Somewhere in this timeline I ended up standing on the streets of downtown Philly in my underwear and was forced to fake an orgasm on stage at Drag Bingo … twice. This semester has been no less WTF, involving the surprise acquisition of a vibrator named Rumbleroar, a giant meat needle and multiple piñatas. With the exception of the J.A. and finger accident, I was totally sober for all of this. What that says about me, I’m not really sure. I’ll leave it up to you to decide.I hope I’ve cleared up any questions about where Casual WTFery comes from, because even armed with the above paragraphs, you still don’t even know the half of it.And with that, I’d like to give a shout out to #theDeans who are just now finding out that I tweet about them all the time, that all my friends think they are hysterical, that I own a vibrator and that I got J.A.’d freshman year. Super thanks to Ruby and Dani for letting me write about some ludicrous subjects and for choosing me as an opinion columnist even though I wrote about Power Ranger porn in my application (seriously). If you’ve ever emailed my sun email, thank you for making me feel almost famous. Mad props to the Lynah Faithful who now sing the words to MYOC. Muchas gracias to The Melon Stand for being enabler and to Eco House for saving me from what was almost a heinous apple bobbing incident. Holla at my boss Dave who has only fired me a mere seven times, and my favorite conscience Sarah who accepts nearly every crazy-ass thing I do with an impossibly straight face. Last but not least, cheers to the Big Red Horn section, who put up with my excessive talk of bodily fluids and so much more.All I can hope for now is that Ruby replaces me with someone equally as zany; someone who is never going to give you up, let you down, run around or desert you. The verdict? Stay crazy, stay casual, use the Force and always keep a little WTFery in your lives.
Sam Dean is a senior in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She may be reached at [email protected]. Casual WTFery appears alternate Thursdays this semester.
Original Author: Sam Dean