Skirv at IRHA

Starting my sophomore year, I was involved in Allen Hall Council. I spent much of my junior year arguing with Susan Landau, then-President of the Council; I had half-heartedly run against her for President the year before, and she wasn't entirely sure what to make of me. She did seem to kindof like me, though, or at least respect me; as such, she decided that I would be a good second person to go along to the IRHA conference, held at UIC that year.

For some reason, I went along.

IRHA is the Illinois Residence Hall Association - ie, a higher-up version of the Res Hall Association back-home. RHA is just student council for college students; you can imagine what this is like. It was all about "leadership training" and other such things; personally, I think that it's all about padding resumes and keeping the perky people out of the hair of the non-perky. Anyway, they hold an annual conference, and several people from each of the member schools go, bringing a banner and a presentation.

The main point of the conference is yelling really loud, or "spirit" as they like to call it. While I'm quite good at yelling loud, my school spirit has historically been quite low (or at least not in the same sense as most). While most everyone was shouting out things like "I! L! L!", I was shouting out "CTHULHU!". When others were shouting "I say orange, you say blue! Orange!" and expecting "Blue!" in return, I was returning "Green!" and "Purple!". Etc. It was like this for the whole conference, though I don't know how many people noticed... it wasn't easy to hear what any given person was saying.

Our theme this year was "Viva Illini", which involved lots of mock-Elvis singing. I spent far too many hours, against my will, helping with the banner, which I don't even remember anything about. I got a free t-shirt. And the most memorable experiences were:

• Susan telling me I looked like Leonardo DiCaprio.
• This really hot blonde walking up to me in the elevator and asking very seriously "why are you wearing that Darwin Fish button? Everybody knows that evolution didn't really happen!".
• Some session where we were supposed to decide whether or not to kill some guy to bring about world peace, where nobody figured out except me that it was a trick question.
• The hugging session, where we learned how to officially do the "I'm Not Gay!" hug as well as the "crush the person in the middle" hug.
• A lot of candy.

They did try to get me to go to the GLACURH (the Great-Lakes Affiliate of College and University Residence Halls) or NACURH (National Assocation of...) conferences that year, as well. I declined. One was enough, though that one was fairly amusing and memorable...

Sorry, there's really not much of a story to tell here. I went, it was odd, I came back with a t-shirt. If I could find the program or something on the web, I'd link to that, but...