Serra

We had the Serra end of the year dinner tonight. Really interesting. At any rate, everyone on the dorm got an award, and our 1st floor RA was extremely sarcastic. For example, one person got the “If he’s at this dinner, I’ll be really surprised” award. The description for Charlie and Edward (who got a joint award) was hilarious. He’s all, this award goes to a couple people; they’re seniors, and still found time to get really involved in the dorm. I know you all know who I’m talking about, it’s Charlie and Eddie. Yikes, super-sarcasm. So they got the “Who?” award.

For the record, I got the “Gift from heaven” award. I don’t know how they knew.

So I’ve been thinking about it, and I think the flak that Christians have gotten in Serra for everything is not entirely deserved. I’m sorry, but I have to keep comparing this year Serra to sophomore year Serra, which in my opinion, was much better. At least in terms of the 1st floor. And what constitutes better, anyway? I guess how much people talk and whatever. Anyway, the 3rd floor gets along pretty well this year, but that’s mostly because it’s Asian dominated (not Asian Christian, just Asian) but the 1st floor was horrendous. I mean, it was very clearly split into groups who almost never interacted.

Anyway, yeah it’s our faults and everything, but not totally. Because you reach a certain point where there are just differences between Christians and non-Christians that are just irreconcilable. For example, there is one person who lived in this dorm this year who’s idea of a good time was drinking, and anyone who didn’t like to drink sucked. So to him, Serra was lame because there were so many people who didn’t want to drink. To me, that’s an irreconcilable thing. I mean, we can be as nice and whatever as we want, but we just don’t drink, so we’ll be lame to him. Anyway, this guy’s attitude was indicative of a lot of non-Christians in Serra this year. They were just really into drinking and other stuff (pot, fighting) that Christians just don’t do. So there were certain irreconcilable differences that just weren’t our fault.

So on other floors where the non-Christians were less into this, the interaction was fine. It’s just the hard-core drinkers that totally hated it here and made that attitude spread.

Anyway, I’m thinking what’s the difference between soph year and now, and yeah, the Christians seem to care a lot less about each other now than before, and for the dorm, but more than that I think it’s the freshmen who were different. The freshmen in our dorm sophomore year were pretty much cool guys. Sure they drank but it wasn’t their all in all, and they really were cool guys. And the losers I always get along with. I really liked my floor sophomore year, with the exception of the junior guys draw group there, who refused even to say hello to people. So really, it’s more the freshmen that made the difference. And even that year, the hard-core drinkers didn’t really like it here as much as they would have somewhere else. But I think all in all, people liked it here sophomore year. As I recall, it made some people sad to go back.

So I guess I think yeah you can get on the Christians’ case a lot and it’s justified, but it’s not totally our fault. I can’t say anything about last year, but based on this year and 2 years ago, that’s the feeling I get.

As we all know, Serra was the worst house in the housing lottery. People want to live here as much as the want to live in Mirlo, the SLE dorm. So I wondered why that was. My feeling was that Serra developed a really bad reputation among white people (who make up the majority of Stanford! Open your eyes, L.A. people!) this year thus the result. Dave Hong’s take is that the difference this year is that Christians didn’t draw into Serra. Meaning, this is the expected draw number, it’s just that Christians coming into here jack the number better each year. When they don’t do that, it will be this low. Meaning this bad draw number is the default, given no Christians drawing here. With the implication that people at Stanford want to live with Asian Christians as much as they want to live with SLE freshmen. Ouch. Go FiCS!