A Big Fat Wad Of Spirit

by Jeff Lagasse

Spirit Week is a funny time. Its a week in which everybody's Mr. Hyde takes over their relatively placid Dr. Jekyls and makes them do "spirity" things, like paint their faces multiple colors, chug soda until it triggers their vomit reflexes, and turn their hallways into frenzied, drunken Disneylands. The whole week is rather surreal. Here I am walking past a big green sack filled with paper shreds; there I go stepping on Big Bird's cardboard foot; here I am banging my head against a rabbit dangling from the ceiling. And this is just crossing the hall to my next class.

Spirit Week, they call it.

I have nothing against the school, but I don't have what you would call a healthy amount of "school spirit." I'll participate in a few events, but for the events themselves (hey, regurgitating carbonated bile is a guaranteed good time), not because some blue-and-white devil drive inside me compels me to do so. This is why, even though the Week has a certain kind of nostalgic charm for school enthusiasm, I'm kind of relieved to see it end. Let Big Bird wait until next year to get hall wanderers nauseated from his glue.

I participated in Spirit Week more this year because I'm a senior, and I supposed I'd splatter the walls with some of my cartoon drawings before I left, perhaps try to derive some pleasure from a week that had, in previous years, seemed like nothing more than an outlet for large people to mess up the Freshmen hallway (tip for next year's freshmen: lace the streamers with flesh-eating chemicals).

I did get a little more pleasure out of it this year. If nothing else, I was proud of the fact that the decorations I helped to make lasted longer than anyone else's (which was roughly through second period of the first day). Now that I'm more familiar with the student- motivated force behind the Week that used to drive me batty, I have a few suggestions that would make next year's Spirit Week even better.

For one thing, some of the promotions and outlets for school spirit offered during the week seem to leave out certain groups of the student body. For people who belt their pants with metal chains, perhaps the school should open up a tattoo parlor for the week. That way, instead of adorning themselves with paint that will have been washed off the next day, they can have a tattoo of the Blue Devil beating the Red Eddie branded on their chest and display their school spirit the rest if their lives... or at least until they retire and the tattoo has become a colorful mass of wrinkled confusion.

For another thing, I don't think hallways should be judged on how good they look. I think they should be judged on how long they last Hallway Beating Contests can be held after school, and then the age-old question can be answered: which will last longer, the Juniors' chain mail ax murderer, or the Seniors' Mike Tyson statue made from titanium alloy?

Lastly, it should be made mandatory that the losing class should pick up after everyone else's hallways. Nine times out of ten, this class will be the freshmen (except for this year... sophomores, what happened?), and staying after school with trash bags and rubber gloves will teach them to show a little more spirit next year.

'Cause nothin' says spirit like a big messy hall.