Tag Archives: college

Law & Order SVU Drinking Game

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/23/12
Primary Language: English

The informant (21) is a Junior at USC. She transferred to USC for her sophomore year, and before that, spent her freshman year at Bennington College in Vermont.

The informant is my roommate and she wanted to contribute a drinking game to my folklore collection. This game is known as the Law & Order: SVU Drinking Game:

“The rules are pretty straight forward. You take a drink when you hear the “dun dun” sound, when a weapon is drawn, someone hits on Mariska Hargitay’s character, when there’s a celebrity guest, or when Ice T says “that’s messed up.” Whenever B.D. Wong is on the screen, you drink half your beer and when Stabler worries about his daughter, you take five drinks. Sometimes people make up other rules, but those are my standard ones. I learned this drinking game in Vermont, when my roommates and I got really into the show and watched pretty much every episode. By best friend there had learned the game in high school from another friend of hers. It’s a fun game and I play it because it’s an excuse to watch more L&O SVU, which is the single greatest show of all time and there are a million episodes so you can change things up during different ones. Also, drinking is the single greatest thing ever and can be done a million times even if you know that the outcome will be the same each time.”

Having watched Law & Order SVU, I agree with much of what my informant says. The game is a great excuse to watch more episodes and there’s a lot of freedom with the rules so things won’t get boring from episode to episode. Depending on the specific rules, sometimes the game is designed to get a person to drink a lot in a short amount of time, or even to prolong it. Drinking games that involve TV are also a great bonding experience because everyone’s watching the show at the same time, looking for the same things, and no doubt, as episodes go on, the side-conversations get more and more hilarious.

USC Helenes Welcome Night Ceremony

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/4/12
Primary Language: English

The informant is a Junior at USC. She joined the USC Helenes during the Fall Semester of 2010 and was elected as Vice President for the 2012 calendar year term in office. As Vice President, she is responsible for new member recruitment.

As part of the USC Helenes myself, I was in attendance at Welcome Night. I’ll briefly describe the event. Welcome Night is one of the most celebrated traditional events held by the USC Helenes. It is our initiation ceremony for the incoming class of Rosebuds each semester and it is a night that most Helenes will never forget. Technically Welcome Night is a mandatory event, so every active member of the organization is present. General Members and the E-board arrived at the Mudd Hall of Philosophy Courtyard early so that they’d be ready once the Rosebuds arrive. The Rosebuds meet up with our Membership Chair at a different location. To get to the “mystery location” they stand alphabetically, single file, blind-folded and hold onto one another’s shoulders as they are guided across campus to the location. Once they arrived, still blind-folded, the E-board positioned the Rosebuds along the steps outside of Mudd Hall so that they faced the courtyard. Silently waiting, all of the General Members of Helenes hold lit candles. The Rosebuds open their eyes and the entire organization cheered for them. Then, the Vice President gave a quick welcoming speech and the Membership Chair read the name of each girl, presenting them in alphabetical order. Each Rosebud walked forward when her name was called, receiving a rose and a creed from the President and Vice President. After all of the girls were presented, the Membership Chair gave a short speech about this Rosebud class, why they are so special, and why they were selected as Helenes above all others this semester. Finally, the President and Vice President will lead the Rosebuds as well as all of the members in reciting the organization’s creed, after which the Rosebuds are considered officially initiated as Helenes.

After the event, I interviewed my informant, the Vice President, asking her some questions about why the event is performed and what it means to the organization:

Me: How does it feel to welcome this new group of Rosebuds after having been one yourself? Is the initiation more meaningful this time around? In what ways is the night different by being on the other end?

Informant: Well, I think Welcome Night is totally more meaningful in subsequent years—more so with every semester. This is saying something because if you ask any Rosebud, Welcome Night immediately holds great significance and importance to them. But as a returning member watching a new group of Rosebuds crossing over there is more experience, wisdom, and personal reflection that one can make. All I can think about is the amazing journey they’re about to start. I look at the Rosebuds and that they’re going to be making so many life-changing connections now. I know their journey within the Helenes is just beginning. This is why the night is so different, and in my opinion even more meaningful, from the other end…I’m so excited for the future of the organization and the girls who hold it up.

Me: Why do you think the Helenes continue to have this ceremony? What does it mean?

Informant: For one, it’s our formal initiation of members. Logistically, it’s kind of something we need to have. But maybe more importantly, tradition is an incredibly important component of Helenes. This is our most traditional event—it’s how we’ve initiated members for years and years.  It is a common experience that all Helenes share with one another and it’s the way in which we continue to honor one another and our organization.

Me: What’s the ceremony mean to you personally?

Informant: The Welcome Night ceremony is mostly about just that—being welcoming and welcomed. It’s mostly for our Rosebuds, an opportunity for us to shower them with love and show them how much this organization will mean to them.

Me: I’m just going to assume that you like this event, but why do you like it?

Informant: Haha, of course I like the tradition! I like it because I get to see ALL of my favorite people in one place…and because it allows me to reflect on this wonderful organization and opportunity that I’ve been given in life and reminds me to be grateful for these phenomenal women I’m surrounded by.

I agree with almost everything that the informant had to say. The ceremony is definitely a formal initiation, but it’s also a great way to remember my own time as a Rosebud and cherish all the memories from that time in my life. It really is an incredibly important time in Helenes membership, and it formulates what the rest of your experience in the organization will be. Also, something that my informant didn’t really mention is the fact that because everyone goes through their own Welcome Night ceremony, the event acts a mutual experience every girl in the organization can reminisce about and bond over. By traditionally enacting the ceremony, the organization is perpetuating those memories that will be shared by each member.

Throwing Eggs and Flour — Japanese High School Graduation

Nationality: Japanese
Age: 47
Occupation: Housewife
Residence: Irvine, CA
Performance Date: 3/29/12
Primary Language: Japanese

In Japan, there is a custom whereby the graduating students of a high school, after the graduation ceremony is over, run into the main courtyard and throw eggs and flour at each other.

My informant spent most of her life in the city of Naha in Okinawa, Japan, and participated in this custom at the end of her three years at Shuri School. She said that all except the dullest of students participated, and that there were always a few students assigned each year to buy the eggs and flour for the entire graduating class. They’d throw indiscriminately until everyone was covered in doughy gunk. Friends would oftentimes chase each other around. My informant said that it must have been the freest time of her life, and a time she couldn’t look back to without nostalgia. There was all the anticipation and excitement for the future, she said, and she remembered how freely everyone was laughing, so incredibly happy if only because, deep down inside, they knew they’d be leaving each other soon. In a way, this custom would be the last ritual of high school they would be able to exercise.

But how had this custom come about? My informant said that it was probably because the graduates wanted to celebrate their new-found freedom from the school system. Japanese schools are traditionally very strict about their dress codes, requiring uniforms from pre-school on to the end of high school. The uniforms come to define the students by the school they go to, and are symbolic of their obedience and compliance to the educational systems of Japanese society. Many students, even back in the seventies when my informant when to high school, must have felt some frustration for these rules, and for the lack of freedom that this allowed their individuality. In most schools, my informant said, there were and still are, rules about the length of girls’ hair, and the color of students’ socks. Therefore, throwing eggs and flour after the graduation ceremony and ruining (if only temporarily) the uniforms that had defined them for three years is a form of modest, socially acceptable rebellion–all in good fun, the students’ way of saying to their teachers and to the school, we don’t need to listen to you anymore! Since there’s probably nothing that causes more of a mess and is as easily obtained as eggs and flour, this exact custom had come about.

Strangely enough, when I was telling one of my Korean friends about this custom, he told me that his friends in a Korean high school had done the exact same thing upon their graduation. It seems, then, to be a custom in some or all parts of Korea as well. Perhaps this custom is something that runs as a common thread between Asian countries because of the widespread use of school uniforms, and strict school policies. Similar to the way that American high school graduates throw their caps in the air after their graduation as a small form of rebellion and show of their independence, Japanese and Korean students throw eggs and flour at each other to mark their freedom from the uniforms that had defined them for most of their youth.

 

 

 

Toy Story Pencil — Japanese Entrance Exam Folklore

Nationality: Japanese
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Nagoya, Japan
Performance Date: 3/23/12
Primary Language: Japanese
Language: English

In Japan, unlike America, college admission is determined by one’s passing or failing of one entrance exam on one specific day. There are no chance for re-takes, and there is no alternate test. The rules are strict; if you happen to be sick on that one day, if you get into a car crash on the way there, you could either take the exam while sick or injured, or wait and study for another whole year to take the exam the year after. Furthermore, the rules dictate that you may only take one entrance exam per day. If two prospective schools are having their entrance exams on the same day, you are required to choose the one you prefer more. Students in Japan begin to study for their college entrance exams usually as early as their last year of middle school, studying for a total of four or more years (at school, at home, and in cram schools whose classes often go well past midnight) in preparation for one exam on one day. The rules are strict, admission to the four or five most prestigious programs that everyone tests for is notoriously difficult, and all the hard work may come down to being sick on the one day that determines the course of your life. The system, in a word, is merciless.

My informant lives in Nagoya, Japan, and had up until a month ago, been snared in this system. Having completed her college entrance exam and confirmed her entrance to Sophia University, she looked back on the past few years of her life and told me that it must have been the most stressful time of her life, but that she had her “Toy Story pencil” to help her out. Laughing, half-joking, she said that it actually must have been the pencil that had allowed her to pass the exam.

The “Toy Story pencil” had risen out of a legend circulated at her high school. A few years back, a male student from their high school had passed the entrance exam to Tokyo University, arguably the most prestigious school in Japan. This by itself would not have been legend-worthy, except that nobody had expected very much of him; he had begun to study for the entrance exam his final year of high school when everybody else had already been studying for years, and was ranked a little bit below average in his class. People knew of him, however, because of his obsession with Disney and especially with Toy Story. He watched all the movies, went full-out Woody on Halloween, had a Toy Story pencil case, and was apparently very skilled at drawing pictures of all the characters.

When word got around that he had been accepted to Tokyo University, the rumors and the legends began. He apparently had a pen that he had been using for years, a Toy Story pen that he had bought at some local stationery store. It was well known amongst his immediate classmates that he took pride in the fact that he had not lost that pen for his entire final year of high school, the year that he had finally begun to study for the exam. “He took that pencil everywhere,” My informant said. “I mean, it’s really hard not to lose pencils. I must go through at least like, ten or so a year. So it was pretty impressive, actually.” Thus, the younger students at the high school immediately latched onto the pen as a source of good luck magic in exam-taking, making it a sort of folk object–if you could use that pencil and only that pencil for your final year of high school, and you didn’t lose it and it didn’t break, you would be able to pass any entrance exam you took. My informant and her friends, who had not known the Toy Story boy but had long heard of the legend, had dutifully bought their one and only Toy Story pencil at the beginning of their final year. My informant used the Toy Story pen every day, careful not to break it, keeping track of it all times, and eventually passed the exam to her dream school, Sophia University. There were others though, of course, that used the pencil and failed their exams, but then again, said my informant, the pencil was more of a motivational tool than anything else–just having it made one feel more in control. Over her spring break when she visited me, she gave me a Toy Story pencil and told me that if I took care of it, I would probably see good results for the rest of the semester, and I am still using it now.

This intense fixation on an object for good luck, I believe, arises naturally from Japan’s merciless education system. In this system, the students themselves have little to no control. There is one exam per year; there is a pass or fail. “There are,” said my informant, “so many things that could go wrong. I could’ve gotten sick, and they would’ve just said, too bad, come back next year. I tried so hard for the week before the exam not to go out of the house and to eat healthy and sleep a lot, but still. Everyone gets so paranoid before the exams, and there’ve been stories of people sabotaging each other. There’s so much anxiety.” Anxiety, I thought, was the key word. The Toy Story pencil was a small but effective way to soothe anxiety that could give way to more anxiety. It gave people confidence, which perhaps made them study harder.

The Toy Story pencil reflects the intense collective fear and anxiety in the minds of Japanese students concerning the entrance exam procedure. Grabbing at straws, the students at my informant’s high school had clung to this legend, this folk object, to give themselves some semblance of control–and perhaps, strangely enough, it works.

 

 

 

“I’m gonna do so badly on this” — Student Folk Belief

Nationality: Vietnamese
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Irvine, CA
Performance Date: 3/23/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Vietnamese, Japanese

My informant is a Vietnamese student currently attending high school in Irvine, California in a predominantly Asian-American neighborhood. She was born in Irvine and has lived there all her life, and the high school she attends now, ranked in the top ten public high schools in America, is notorious for its rigor, and its extremely studious students. When I asked her whether she knew superstitions pertaining to her school, she jumped up with this one almost immediately:

I know it’s probably not just my school, and there are probably people that do this in schools everywhere, but I think it’s especially bad here because everyone does it and everyone really believes in it too. Like, before a test, you’re never supposed to say out aloud that you think you’re ready. Ever, like, it’s taboo or something. You’re always supposed to say, “Oh my God, I’m so screwed,” or like, “I’m gonna do so badly on this,” because otherwise, there’s this stupid superstition that you’re gonna fail. [Laughing] And it’s really annoying when the super-smart kids do it too, and you know they’ve studied for like the past week straight, and they’re saying things like, “Oh, I just started studying yesterday,” and I’m like, “No you didn’t!” Like, if you say you think you’re ready and you think you might do well, people kind of look at you like you’re being cocky or arrogant or something. And then people say all the time how once, they thought they were ready for a test and said so, and they ended up failing. And then the next time they like, lowered their expectations or whatever, and said they were gonna fail, and they end up getting an A-plus. Everyone does it. [Smiling] I mean, it’s stupid, but I do it too. What’s better than like, not having any expectations at all, you know?

In a school culture dominated by grades and academics, this superstition, which is, as she said, probably present in any high school, is intensified and ritualized. Saying, “I’m gonna do so badly on this” is a student trying to lower their expectations in case the test is more difficult than they had thought, and at the same time trying to disarm, in a way, “the competition,” as my informant put it. “People at my school are super-competitive.” She said. “It’s funny, like, there’d be people that would even argue about which one was more not ready, so that if they did get a bad grade it’d be justified or something.”  The lower the expectations, the less the disappointment would probably be–which is why it is such a good defense mechanism.

That these students even need a superstition like this seems testament to the immense amounts of pressure placed on them as high school students expected to advance to prestigious universities. By telling themselves and others that they aren’t ready for an exam, they push the blame for a bad grade on not being ready, instead of, perhaps, the scarier alternative, which is not being smart enough. A minor superstition, but its proliferation at her high school probably expresses a certain terror for not being capable enough–we can always try harder, but if we try really hard and we still can’t get a good grade, then where do we go? Are we just not smart enough? And that question is what these students seem the most afraid of.