Losing my Cameron Virginity

I finally lost my Cameron virginity

Ok, I have a confession, no wait two confessions.

1)   Until the National Championship game last Monday night, I had never been inside Cameron Indoor Stadium…and I’m a sophomore.

PSA: For those who don’t know (aka non Blue Devils) Cameron is Duke’s stadium used primarily for basketball and also volleyball games. It’s a typical bleacher style affair and looks pretty much like any other except for the National Championship and former star players’ banners hanging from the ceiling. 

      2)  I also didn’t know you could have or lose your “Cameron virginity” but apparently it’s a thing and I definitely lost it. Though my friend Christina called me “the world’s worst Duke fan” for having not been before, I would like to defend my previous lack of experience with Cameron. I’ve never been into sport, none of my close friends were down to line up for hours or even sleep in snow-covered tents for a game and I never really bought into the hype.

Until last Monday.

After realizing that watching the game in my common room was a terrible idea I decided to go watch it on T.V in Cameron with friends from my sorority. You may remember, however, that I live at UNC this semester, Duke’s rival school. So it was glad in full Duke gear, devil hat and all, that I left my dorm at UNC to watch the game. I was spotted. I was booed. Let’s move on.

Arriving at Cameron where my best friend Shelby had saved me a spot in line, I got instantly pumped. I was surrounded by a wave of blue clad students, dancing and chanting whilst many of them swigged the usual cheap alcohol. We didn’t have to wait long before we were let into Cameron. The team coordinating entry was trying very hard to maintain control but quite honestly a few Cameron Crazies were ready to charge.

We got our spots on the lower level, showed off our best Blue Devil spirit for the cameras and prepped ourselves for what was going to be A Very Important Game. Duke had not won a National Championship since 2010 and everyone was dying for us to steal this year’s.

The game began and quite honestly I got sucked into what is very clearly a cult. A super exciting, energizing, consuming cult. I shouted “De-fense”, held my arms out in front of me for good luck on free throws, booed the ref and screamed and clapped with the rest of the stadium. And you know what? It was so much fun!!

At some point I said to Shelby, “I would rather we lose and have an exciting, close game than it be a steal.” At halftime with a score of 31-31 I was beginning to deeply regret those words. I mean what? I would rather an interesting game than have us win by a mile??? Don’t worry I’ve learned my lesson.

As the game continued Wisconsin started pulling ahead to a 9-point lead and I was getting very, very nervous. I looked at the packed stadium around me and imagined all these defeated, blue-painted people sadly filing out of the stadium…not a spirited picture.

Then Duke really kicked into gear. Freshman, Grayson Allen who was in my 12-person class last semester (I'm cool by association) seemed to score over and over again. As the time ran quickly out we were pulling ahead and a win was so tangible it was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. The score had danced back and forth so much that it was only then, in the final 3 minutes that I think the stadium truly collectively thought “I Believe That We Will Win”.

You could sense it all around you. People were screaming, jumping up and down, looking at each other and saying “oh my God”, “Oh my God”. With those three minutes left people started preemptively storming the bleachers gathering just below the T.V on the court. I think everyone’s heart was beating as fast as mine. Things can change in seconds in basketball and that’s what we were down to. No way could we let a win, so close we could taste it, slip through our fingers. 

With Duke in the lead, the entire stadium shouted out the countdown to the buzzer… “3-2-1”. Then everyone completely lost it. We all stormed onto the court, hugged strangers, sent snaps, jumped up and down and snatched at the News and Observer’s front pages floating down with our victory spelt out.

That’s the thing, it really felt like our victory. No matter that I’ve barely touched a basketball in my life, no matter that everyone in Cameron was miles from the live event and no matter that we didn’t spend years training for this game. As we burnt benches in traditional-celebration style with helicopters overhead and reporter’s on the ground, as we made the Shooter’s club owners obscenely wealthy in our celebration, as we abandoned homework and sleep – we felt like collective champions.

Duke has many issues that can divide and challenge us, one of which I shall discuss in another post. This game cannot and should not negate that.

However, that evening connected us as a community of Blue Devils. Yes it is somewhat superficial, yes it is just a game and yes there are more important things in the world… but bleeding Duke blue and bearing witness to a great moment in Duke’s basketball history thrilled me, connected me to a campus I’m not even living on this semester and gave me hope that if we can unite with such fervor over an orange ball and a number on a screen… maybe we can mobilize that sense of community for greater things.

***

I have two confessions:

   1)   I risked my life going to class at UNC the next day wearing Duke gear #sorrynotsorry  I missed the first bus back...no time to change

   

2)  I’m no longer a Cameron virgin… but most definitely a Cameron Crazie

As always,

“Work hard, Play Hard”  

Bid Day - One Year On

Though it may appear that I abandoned the blog forever, sorority recruitment (rush) has brought me back. 

After 3 weeks in my amazing home in Sydney I came back to America. I wasn’t even coming “home” here, I was starting at a new university, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (or UNC). I will be at UNC for the semester as part of the Robertson Scholars sophomore “switch” (which I will discuss soon!)

I didn’t really get a chance to settle in before sorority rush started. This time, however, I wasn’t trying to show different sororities why they should want me but rather show PNM’s (potential new members) why they should want to be in Zeta Tau Alpha.

Rush is no less weird from the other side. You meet innumerable amounts of girls and try to have interesting conversations with them in about 7 minutes. You evaluate them and they evaluate your sorority based on the 4 maybe 5 girls they met that round. All members in the sorority will wear identical outfits each round eg: blue jeans, neutral wedges and black shirts. My hair was straightened, makeup carefully applied and nails painted. We chant… as in peppy American movie “Go Zeta!” style chanting. We complain of sore feet, lost voices and tiredness, much as we did last year.

The difference was this year I had 100+ girls with me on my side that I love. We danced in between rounds, shared lipsticks, took innumerable selfies and laughed at each other and the whole process.

I fell in love with my Zeta sisters all over again. They are fun, vivacious, hilarious, caring and crazy girls that in so many ways define my life here in America. As our (now former president) said in her speech one round, these girls make you feel like a strong, independent and powerful person.

It’s funny because Bid Day last year I wouldn’t have thought I’d feel that way at all. I wrote about Bid Day at the time but I was very cautious. I didn’t want to offend my new sorority nor seem bitchy or ungrateful. The truth is when Bid Day came Zeta was not my first choice, in fact it was my last of three.

I cried on Bid Day.

At the time I felt a bit ridiculous. I went into sorority rush for fun, promising myself I wouldn’t make it a huge deal like a lot of ‘Americans’ do. Now I was staring at a bid and was crushed. It wasn’t that I disliked the girls in Zeta, not at all, I just had liked one other better and had gotten caught up in the social standing of another.

I was late to my own Bid Day because I didn’t want those nice Zeta girls to be insulted by a look of disappointment on my face. When I arrived however, my Bid Day Buddy was waiting for me, all alone outside. Katlyn, the girl that I loved from the first time I met her, the girl who would become my Big, inspiration and role model, ran into my arms and shrieked with happiness. I instantly felt loved, and accepted as every girl, both a new member and a current member, made me feel so welcome.

Though I had fun those first few days, I didn’t forget my disappointment completely for a few weeks. It was funny, but falling in love with Zeta crept up on me and then hit me all at once. Now, I cannot imagine myself anywhere else.

In Zeta I find myself constantly accepted, encouraged and welcomed. These are the girls with whom I have wiped away tears, laughed until my sides hurt, danced at Shooters, shared clothes, secrets and aspirations. These are the girls that make me forget that a sorority seemed like a remote American-movie concept and that I am so far from home. Our symbol, the crown, isn’t inconsequential but rather a reminder that each girl here is the queen of her own life.

I have had to find ‘home’ in different places since leaving Sydney, but in Zeta I think home found me.  

Race in Mississippi

Racism in Mississippi did not present itself to me in the overt way that I had expected. All of the people I worked with and interacted with were deeply regretful of Mississippi’s past and expressed the desire to have a continually more cohesive future. Many made the point that the state of Mississippi has seen greater change in race-relations in the last 50 years than any other state in the U.S. Many consider other states’ finger-pointing at racial-inequity in Mississippi as a means to deflect attention from their own racial injustices. Some don’t see Mississippi as any more racist than other places in the world, they see it as merely a state with a terrible history of racial discrimination.

I cannot say that Mississippi is more racist than anywhere else I have been especially given Australia’s past and present discrimination of Aboriginal Australians. However, I have never seen such clearly racially segregated living as I did in Cleveland. 

A train used to run through the centre of Downtown Cleveland, cutting it in half. Though the train no longer passes through Cleveland its divisive quality remains.  On one side of Cleveland is (with perhaps a few exceptions) the white population who live predominately in affluent to middle class housing. 

On the other side of the tracks, in East Cleveland, it is a whole different world. Here virtually everyone is black and while there are upper and lower middle class houses, the majority of the area is defined by poverty.

As I walked through the area it became very obvious that white people rarely venture this way.  Shouts of “Hey white girl!”, “What you doin’ white girl?”, “What you looking for? You want a ride?” greeted me everywhere I went. I had never before felt so conspicuous and guilty for my 'whiteness' as I did that day. Though I did attract those shouts and some suspicious glances, everyone in the area spoke to me with typical Southern charm. I met a fascinating man who had grown up picking cotton on his grandfather’s farm in Cleveland. We sat talking in Mississippi’s sweltering heat and learnt a bit about each others lives, Sydney was as interesting for him as Mississippi was for me.

After leaving East Cleveland I never really saw the area in the same way again. It is very easy working downtown, living with scholars and interacting with locals of similar economic status to completely miss the cycle of poverty and disadvantage that still rules Cleveland, and probably a lot of Mississippi. 

Mississippi in a lot of ways is no more inequitable than many other places in the world, my two homes, Sydney and Durham included. Seeing such inequality through my ‘outsider’ eyes highlighted for me just how easy it is to pass over entrenched racism in our everyday lives. My Community Summer then, taught me not only to open my eyes to Mississippi, but also to a different and more perceptive way of thinking and seeing the world I am in.

Communal Living

Now as interesting and important as Mississippi is, one of the key parts of Community Summer is living with other scholars. Though most people have a roommate freshman year, there is something very different about living with around 7 people for 8 weeks straight. For only-child, small-family me, constantly interacting with so many people was both unusual and fun.

There were 14 scholars in Mississippi randomly divided into two houses. There were 7 in my house (or the ‘Apartment’) and 7 just across a car park in another house. My ‘apartment’ was more of a small add-on to a long-abandoned dorm building, which was lovingly given the title “The Sketchy Space” and thoroughly checked for possible squatters.

Given that most of the 14 of us only had basic cooking and cleaning experiences, Cleveland didn’t offer much in terms of nightlife (or arguably day-life) and rare few of us would ever be described as passive, the summer made for some interesting, reality-show worthy moments. Arguments over who ate whose food, who let the mosquitos in and who used the last of the toilet paper…again were coupled with barbeques, card games and lots of long late night chats.

Things that become apparent when you live with people:

• Somebody always leaves the toilet roll empty and the tap dripping, but surprisingly no one is ever to blame. My sincerest apologies to my mother and father for the years at home where I was that person, you were right, it is annoying.
• For some reason BOTH packets of bread, ham, cheese or spinach will always be open at the same time, for no good reason.
• People who like to sleep early, or sleep at all (luckily not me) are in for a rough time, there will always be people awake talking or singing along with the guitar – no matter what time.
• Even the pacifists who resist killing cockroaches and spiders will surrender under the pressure of the bug onslaught, and even lead the mass-mosquito extinction.

All the different houses and locations had a different living experience this Community Summer so I can't speak for everyone. For me, living with Charlotte, Rachel, Brooke, Sebastian, Christina and Griffin made the summer an amazing experience. I could not be more grateful for their fun-loving natures, willingness to pitch in, interesting conversations and loving personalities.