// rohitsrealm.com / archive / 2003 / 08
Sometime during the fall of 2002, after an uninteresting weekend spent with a hopeless tool, a friend from high school, Ali Dalal, and I postulated on the increasingly widespread phenomenon of toolery that seemed to be consuming everyone around us. Having seen an inordinate number of our male friends succumb to social isolation, moody behavior, and unbridaled angst, we developed a theory, which came to pinpoint an epidemic disease spreading rapidly.
As I posted a few days ago, I have recently come across a couple documents on Acquired Tool Syndrome that were produced as a joint effort by Ali Dalal and myself in late Fall 2002. Below is a letter we wrote introducing our efforts to the populace:
I haven't written in my blog in a while. There is a reason for this. I have been busy with my life outside of the internet. Not busy as in "oh look at me, I have lots of friends and places to go to." Not really. More like, "oh, I have a lot of work and physical labor to do." Anyway, whatever it was - it prevented me from writing in my blog.
I met one of my future residents last night. Today I met another resident. It was pretty weird, considering I had been living in isolation (or at least with random people) for the last few weeks, so interaction with actual residents was kind of weird. We also did room checks and welcome kits today, which was a tiring task. As I walked through the halls of empty rooms, I realized that in about 12 hours, all the rooms would be packed full of fresh and energetic freshman, all excited about college and being away from home. EW! What the hell am I doing here?! How will I be able to live with freshman again, especially now that I am not one!? I also ran into about five people in the course of the day who were in my CalSO groups over the summer. "Hey Rohit! How's it going?" For the most part, I didn't even remember their names. The faces were vaguely familiar, but that's about it. It's probably only going to get worse. I did a quick survey of all my resident's names, and none ring a bell from CalSO, but what's worse is that some probably were in my group or in my co-facs and I have no idea, so when I meet them, they will know me and I won't know them.
Ah! Berkeley in the fall time. School's just started. Confused freshman running amock with their heads buried in campus maps. Old friends reuniting after a summer of being apart from each other. And amidst all this positive energy is the one downer that plagues year-round. The stupid people out recruiting for their stupid groups that no one but stupid people will join. Of particular note are the idiots from illicit fraternities and sororities walking around Sproul Plaza as if they were in a bad rap music video from the late nineties, projecting an image of "cool" that no longer exists. It is these dumbshits that I will choose to focus my rather concentrated anger on for today. This is a topic I've remained silent on for a couple of years now, primarily because the issue was nothing more than a minor annoyance that nagged me every autumn and then stopped as soon as rush week ended, but finally I decided that I could be taciturn no longer. Something had to be said!
