After weeks of waiting, refreshing your email inbox, and eagerly awaiting housing assignments, the day has finally come. “You have been assigned”, reads your housing application page. Totem Park is going to be your home for the next 8 months. So, you’re wondering, what are you getting yourself into? With 37 days left until you move into Totem Park, here are 37 things to look forward to experiencing in the upcoming year:
- Arrive at your new home on Opening Day! Be promptly greeted by a swarm of people in blue tshirts who are way too excited about emptying a car full of stuff.
- Storm the Totem caf for your first dinner with your house.
- Plaster your pristine white walls with posters you bought at the SUB’s poster sale.
- Raise your bed up so high you need to take a running leap to get into it. So much room for activities!
- Paint your face and lose your voice at Colour Wars.
- Become insanely proud of your house. Even if it comes last place in every inter-house competition. I still love you, Kwak!
- Perfect the art of the 30-second shower during the Do It In The Dark energy-saving competition.
- If you’re in a heritage house: harbour an unyielding, burning jealousy of HMSM and QLXN’s rooms.
- If you’re in HMSM and QLXN: enrage your heritage house friends by complaining about the stresses of having a massive room.
- Win the TFL season. Have your floor go down in history as the most epic football team West Mall has ever seen. Songs will be written about you for centuries to come.
- Alternatively, lose each and every TFL game but have an awesome time while doing it. Or fall somewhere in between.
- Miss a TFL game because you’re too “tired” from the night before. Saturday mornings are hard sometimes.
- Dance in your fluorescent best at NEON.
- Go to a frat party. It has to be experienced eventually.
- Realize frat parties aren’t always as fun as they’re made out to be and never go again.
- Stay in on a Friday night and make an epic blanket fort with your floor instead.
- Deliberately avoid eye contact/pretend to not speak English in order to avoid speaking to promo booth people in the commonsblock. “Just grabbing dinner, but I’ll stop by later!”
- Get woken up by a fire alarm. Extra points if there’s multiple in one night. Extra, extra points if there’s one going off in every house at once.
- Make conversation with the promo booth folks and discover a really cool event or opportunity on campus. It can happen!
- Shave your head at Balding for Dollars. For the children!
- Become thoroughly confused by the Totem caf’s musical selections Flo Rida followed by Celine Dion followed by Vampire Weekend? Totem, what are you doing?
- Be further confused by some of the food items the Totem caf comes up with. Chipotle chicken French toast?
- Eat dinner with plastic cutlery because the caf has run out of silverware. AKA the Totem Cutlery Challenge.
- Go to every station in the caf searching for an Eco-to-Go container. Eventually give up on the environment and grab a paper one.
- Experiment with veganism or vegetarianism. There are so many delicious veggie selections anyways!
- Get way too dressed up to eat off of caf trays for the Totem spring and winter formals.
- Develop an addiction to some sort of UBC Food Services baked good. For me, it was the marshmallow covered brownies. Omnomnom.
- Ask silly questions (or helpful and important questions) at Talk about Sex with your Residence Advisors.
- Perform at Coffee House.
- Fall in love with a performer at Coffee House.
- Write a sonnet about your newfound love in the Coffee House notebook.
- Act/sing/dance/play a tree in the world-famous Totem Park Musical.
- Cough up coloured paint for a week after Totem Holi.
- Buy your advisor and shamelessly humiliate them. Hey, it’s for charity!
- Attend an event exclusively for the free food. (For the sake of whoever’s running it, at least feign a little bit of interest!)
- Meet your new best friends who will stick with you through the next four years.
- And if one year in TPark just isn’t enough, come back as a Residence Advisor or council member and do it all over again.
My future Totemites, get ready to experience all the excitement, craziness, and fun that Totem Park has to offer. It’s going to be an amazing year.
