I went before the Student Senate tonight (last night) for two club charters, the third and fourth that I’ve participated in so far. Everyone is starting to remember me. 🙂

The Computer Operators Group (COG) was pretty easy. I expected the Societie Chaotique Brandeisienne (SCB) to be much more difficult. Boy was I in for a surprise.

I start off with an actual explanation, instead of my characteristic avoidance. Basically, it was something like this: “I have heard comments so I’d like to dispel some myths right from the start. SCB is not a club devoted to causing famine and strife. The best explanation is to go to the basic question of why bad things happen to good people, or, more specifically, why does shit happen?

“Discordianism recognizes that some things cannot be explained, don’t make sense, don’t have a purpose, and cannot be controlled. The secret is to learn to deal with it. Discordianism can be seen either as a religion disguised as a joke or a joke disguised as a religion. Only the truly enlightened can really tell. The religion was formed in 1958 in a bowling alley by two guys who were discussing order and chaos.

“We would like to form this club in order to spread the philosophy of discord through meetings and such.”

Okay, that was nice. Now questions. First, as a point, someone reminds me that the “S-H-I-T word” shouldn’t be used, as we are being broadcast live on WBRS. Which is cool, cause its the third time I’ve come before the senate and the third time I’ve been chastised for saying something bad on the air (the second time was for calling President Reinharz “Jehuda,” I can’t currently recall what the first transgression was, but I think it might have had to do with speaking out of turn). So, anyway, Josh Peck, student union president, raises his hand. Jon calls on him, and he asks, basically, what I’m doing there. Something along the lines of, “if your club discourages order and planning, why are you coming to us with this constitution?”

I answered, “there was considerable debate about whether we should come forward for approval. SCB does not recognize the power of the student union and we are only coming here to make you feel good. We figured might as well go with the system this time.” To this I got a lot of table banging, the parliamentary way of saying “I agree” or “you go boy!” Heh. I made fun of the Senate and they clapped.

Someone also asked when we planned to have our regularly scheduled meetings, as our constitution didn’t state. I told him that they would be irregular. Someone also wanted to know how we planned to keep order. I suggested that we would be perfectly happy with anarchy.

With that done Justin motioned to go back and vote by unanimous consent, but Wuhzeng “Woodrow” Fan, my arch-nemisis (in a playful way) objected. So they just went back and did a normal vote, and I passed by a vote of everyone (about 20) to 1 (Woodrow) with no abstentions. They didn’t even ask me about the provisions of the constitution that give the Chancellor complete power, allow him to appoint a Viceroy and a Chief Janitor, and remove all democratic process whatsoever from the club. Heh.

After all this I was still in time to catch the last production of How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, put on by the Undergraduate Theater Collective, which was pretty darn good. Go Brandeis! I love this school!