Friday, 14 September 2001
Where’s the Beef?
Joey becomes a grill-seeker after Kimball cuts on weekend brunch.

Friday, 21 September 2001
The Campus Reconnected
Joey celebrates the real benefit of construction's end.

Friday, 28 September 2001
God’s on Our Side
Joey explains why the Cross is a safe bet against Yale this weekend.

Friday, 5 October 2001
The Good Old Days
Joey waxes nostalgic, pining for the halcyon days of 2000.

Friday, 19 October 2001
Holy Cross: Gotta Love It
Joey reveals his love-hate relationship with Holy Cross.

Friday, 26 October 2001
Making Up the Grade
Joey investigates the History Dept.'s weird grading scale.

Friday, 2 November 2001
The Suite Life
Joey blames his laziness and other faults on environment.

Friday, 7 December 2001
Where the Heart Is
Joey will yearn for home especially hard this month.

Friday, 25 January 2002
Chill on the Hill
Joey is not the only one surprised when winter comes to Woo.

Friday, 1 March 2002
Living Dangerously
Joey reflects on the fragility of life while riding Red Cab.

Friday, 12 April 2002
The Naked Campus
Joey is frightened by the re-emergence of the female form this spring.

Friday, 19 April 2002
The Man, the Legend
Joey tells his life story, as if you cared.

Friday, 26 April 2002
Passing On
Joey says goodbye to Holy Cross campus life forever.

But there is a sinister underbelly to the Quad Culture, and the aught-threes, aught-fours, and aught-fives should take notice -- all is not fun and games in Carlin and Alumni. If you or anyone you know is considering becoming an upperclassman, we at The Crusader strongly urge you to take heed of the sad testimony of one Joseph M. Brocklesby '03, but be advised -- it is both disturbing and disheartening.

Joey was once like some of you, a happy-go-lucky Hill resident, enjoying the small pleasures of a stroll down Easy Street from Hogan to his Hanselmaniacal lodging, or his room's unparalleled vista view of Lehy. He complained, as you do, of the long walks to Stein and the grueling seven o'clock trek uphill from Kimball dinner. "If only," he would sigh, "I lived on the quad at the bottom of the Hill."

Then he became like some of you others, a proud substance-free resident of the House That Iggy Built. La Vida Loyola was relatively enjoyable but still too far from the academic buildings and his non-non-alcoholic friends; splitting time between the Hill and the Infirmary meant long winter days of barely keeping balance on Campion Road. "If only," he would sigh, "I lived on the quad, close to classmates and classes."

Nearly unique among his peers, however, he was granted his wish a year early and became a Carliner in only his third year of study. He was joyful, he was merry, he was written up for the substance-full shindig with which he celebrated. Little did he suspect that the Four-Man Experience would have unintended consequences, rendering the very instant of his room selection a bitter suite moment.

Instantly upon entering the world of Dorms With Bridges, a foul malaise descended upon Joey and he has been held in its paralyzing grip ever since. He has lost his sense of adventure and his taste for active diversion, replacing them with several cases of Coors Light and an N64 deck, respectively.

No longer does Kimball food meet his muster; almost daily he eschews the Kimball lunches or dinners of which he so gladly partook in previous years, demurring that "it's such a hassle" to leave the dorm, even for the one-minute walk to Upper. Even classes, proximity to which was allegedly one of his prime motivations in joining the Quad squad, have been feeling the cold shoulder as he scorns them and curses them for making demands on his time.

Like a Jesuit-educated, New England-born Jabba the Hutt, he lounges day in and day out, setting time trial records on Mario Kart 64 while the great world outside passes him by.

Tell me, underclassmen who have read this sad story, do you still want to travel the lonely and pathetic road that Joey has trod? Do you still hope for suite success, in light of what you have learned here? If, despite all odds, you still do, then know this: Joey himself, pitiable mass of sloth that he is, will not even defend his own lifestyle. Your intrepid correspondent, willing to do anything and go anywhere to get the story, ventured as far as our common room to ask whether this suite potato was proud of what he had become.

"Listen to me," he said, trying to look menacing with eyes bloodshot from long nights of playing Goldeneye, "I'll break your arm if you make just one more pun on the word 'suite,' okay?"

Yes, gentle reader, he is not only indolent but also insolent. He is so ashamed of the wretch that Carlin has made him that he instantly and violently changes the subject whenever someone remarks on his unwillingness to do the simplest tasks such as walking to Hogan to check his mail, visiting a friend still trapped in the hinterlands of Mulledy, getting up to turn off the lights, etc. Bereft of the personal contact that hiking our hill once afforded him, Joey -- mark this, underclassmen, and judge whether he is a role model -- slouches all day, a willing captive of our beer-stained, school-issued, couchlike furniture thing.

Not that the beer-stained, school-issued, couchlike furniture thing is a bad place to slouch; quite the opposite, our suite holds in very high regard both the aesthetic value and comfort level of our various couchlike, loveseatlike, and chairlike furniture things.

While their school-issued nature and questionable past (it's like school mattress roulette: you don't know what's been done on any given one of them -- all you know is that you don't want to know) makes us wary to elevate them to full "couch," "love seat," and "chair" status, preferring rather to hedge with the "-like" suffix, we love them nonetheless and wish them the best of care after we graduate and forget about them.

To be honest, pretty much all Holy Cross furniture and pseudofurniture gains high accolades in the notebook of this reporter. From the Stein student lounge to Hogan 2 to the renovated Healy Basement, the caliber of our settees is unparalleled in the entire Patriot League -- perhaps in all of Division I-AA.

And unlike some colleges that admit and give scholarships to unqualified stuffed chairs, purely on the basis of their plushness and soft, velvety feel, and completely without regard to their scholastic acumen, Holy Cross' dorm divans are well-educated and prepared for the rigors of serving the backsides of students attending a school ranked as high as No. 32 by U.S. News & World Report. Take, for instance, two items from a recent Public Safety Blotter:

Weds., Sept. 19: "Smith Hall: New chair from second floor lounge reported missing."
Tues., Sept. 25: "Maintenance: Furniture missing from Maintenance storage room. The furniture is believed to be seeking the whereabouts of the lost chair from Smith."

Clearly demonstrating an intelligence far superior to that of the ordinary inanimate object, furniture in the storage room had embarked on a valiant quest to seek the whereabouts of a chair which had disappeared from Smith Hall!

Teamwork, concern, and leadership ability -- these are qualities not only of the fine students at Holy Cross, but also of our underappreciated lounge fixtures. And to make this quest in Smith Hall, a wild and woolly environment still largely unfurnished, in which "larceny" had been reported on Monday, Sept. 24, makes this quest both dangerous and selfless. Can anyone doubt that we are truly a campus of Chairs and Couches For Others?

It is easy to get carried away, of course, and to lose perspective. The simple ability to form a posse and search for a missing comrade is hardly proof of a keen intellect (unless, of course, one of these vigilante couches were to produce an SAT II report to verify its potential genius). In fact, repeated attempts by your faithful columnist to seek his desk chair's help in a number of Poli-Sci papers have proven unfruitful.

Perhaps, however, we are simply not asking our furniture -- our gifted furniture -- the right questions. Joey, for his part, has been engaged in what he claims is an ongoing telepathic conversation with the beer-stained school-issued couchlike furniture thing for about a week now (he has cleverly disguised their most heated debates as naps). He claims that the very presence, the very moral support of his three-cushion couchlike thing has allowed him finally to embrace his demented dream of doing nothing all day long.

So it is an enabler, I said to him, a false prophet that uses its unnatural intellectual aptitude to issue a siren's call that pulls students away from the strait-and-narrow path to which they once, in Hill-dwelling days, adhered. Perhaps this was the secret of the Quad Malaise. Perhaps it was the couchlike furniture that was responsible for Joey's rapidly deteriorating study habits.

"You know," said Joey, pausing his Nintendo game only so long as to shoot me a dirty look, "if slacking off is such a bad thing, how come you're not in your room doing work?"

He had a point.

This article appeared in the 2 November 2001 edition of The Crusader, on pages 11 (front page of Features section) and 15. The "Comments on the Passing Parade truck" graphic was absent for the third time in a row, but Features Editor Tim O'Coin did provide us with a nifty picture of the Hill Dorms, captioned, "Freshmen: think twice before giving up this paradise."