O-week

I've been spending the last several days doing stuff for Rice's O-week, the orientation week for freshmen and transfer students, as a part of the MOB. It's been pretty awesome so far. We've gotten to play for the freshmen twice, first at Matriculation in Stude Hall with concert band pieces which were mostly marches, and also last night at the Rice Rally teaching them the fight song and all of that good stuff. Brian Henderson is incredibly happy that the extended fight song is coming back this year.

I also got to thinking about something after a lot of people mentioned it in conversation and Mithun touched on it in a comment to my last post. I think I may be trying to become acquaintances with too many people, and very close friends with too few people. Nathan and Reagan have been mentioning that I know "everyone at Rice," (a bit of an exaguration), but I think that it takes a lot more than knowing someone's name, face, and college to actually know someone. I don't think I truly "know" anyone, not even myself really. I would say that there are maybe 4 or 5 people at Rice that I am comfortable talking to about almost anything, and who would help me out with anything if I asked them. And then there are another 40 or so that I would feel comfortable calling up and asking if they want to hang out somewhere or go out to eat. Maybe rather than trying to talk to every freshmen I can once, just long enough to learn their names and maybe hometown or major, I should focus on just really getting to know 4 or 5 freshmen at Jones first. Find out their interests, what they did in high school, what they want to do in college, major, their heroes, just really get to build up a good relationship with these few people.

I've already got enough acquainances. Maybe it's time I got to really know some people.