I did not start writing this blog post until 4AM in the morning.
I was busy attending to other things; applying for jobs, putting away laundry, exercising and talking with one of my old fraternity brothers, Cheshire, before working on a blog post and email for my fraternity’s alumni association.
Originally, I wrote that sentence with the word unfortunately. But that is not the right word there. It expresses some sentiment of regret. As if these were all inconveniences before working on a blog post. That could not be further from the truth.
I am fortunate that I can say that, in place of a job within the capitalist machine, I have the opportunity to finish household chores, exercising, chatting with a brother from another mother (sorry, I had to) and then work on some tasks for my college fraternity.
You might ask if I’m too old to being doing things for a fraternity. I wouldn’t scoff or roll my eyes——it’s a valid question——those undergraduate years have long gone past. I’m almost a year past thirty. Why would I keep working on these things?
I think the clearest answer I have is that, as I age, the better of a brother I become. Or, at least, I believe I become a better brother.1
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I’m not an “active” brother in the strictest sense. I’m not a student. I’m an oldballs, as we affectionately say among my generation of membership. It’s kind of endearing and endlessly silly, but if you’ll forgive my crudeness, my nuts stay within the county line whenever I travel. However, I do remember there being a time when that was not the case.
The house I lived in was built in the Sixties, and most of the guys who built that house were largely the ones involved in the alumni organizations up to the 2010s. Moreover, being a small, local fraternity meant that there wasn’t much of an infrastructure for maintenance, communication and organizational health between the active and alumni membership up to that date. Nor did I think I would really have much involvement once became an alumni.
By my senior year, I was ready to get out of dodge and begin my career as an aspiring radio host. Then I was elected President.
Everything changed. I became literally responsible for the outward facing image of an entire group of 20 guys. Delegating and diplomacy became a part of my duties. I had to learn, pretty quickly, how to deal with those same, sometimes cantankerous, elder alumni.2 Most of all, I had to change my degree.
There was no possible way that I could have written a thesis, completed a capstone project, presided over a fraternity and managed the local radio station. Thus, a major in Mass Communications became a minor in Media Studies.
In some ways, I could have become exceptionally bitter about it. And I probably was, passively, for about a semester.
It was unfortunate. It was not what I wanted.
But as my penultimate term of college progressed, I came to realize that there was so much more I could give to a plucky little fraternity I called home for two years. While time in university was limited and I had to make the most of it, a community like a fraternity can go on forever so long as people who care about it tend for it.
It’s this lesson that I carry with me in all the things that I do. From managing the Casual Ramble website and Patreon to doing the same for my fraternity’s website; from being an active member of the Alumni Association to keeping up with my family and friends.
So much of this is a case of waking up and realizing the tasks that I “must do” are actually projects that I am “privileged to do.”
And in that way, I hope I am role model for the student members of the organization. I won’t pretend to say that I am. I just want to get better at what I am privileged to do, and hopefully that inspires community, charity and compassion.
Alright that’s enough of the sappiness. I’m gonna go pass out. As they say, you can drag the man out of the fraternity house, but you can’t drag the fraternity house out of the man.
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1 This is kind of funny actually, consider I just wrote about Stay True by Hua Hsu. In the book, he rolls his eyes at his friend Ken. How Ken does the stereotypical American things of listening to Pearl Jam, going to Abercrombie and Fitch, and joining a fraternity. In many ways I sympathize with both Hsu and Ken; I love Pearl Jam, I joined a fraternity, but I also despise fast fashion like Abercrombie and Fitch.
2 I still can’t believe that one could build a house, fraternity or otherwise, on the back of spaghetti feed fundraisers and a small bank loan to hire an architect. This was a time before computers, before digital archives, and a group of young men literally built a house together over the course of a decade. It helped that there were 60 members at the time, but even that is no small feat. That’s a lot of coordination.
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