The Slant VS The Rec

The Rec center at Vanderbilt is what is wrong with America. There I said it. And yes, I mean the whole thing. Every Wal-Mart filled with obese children. Every Starbucks rife with teenage girls. Every street corner in Middle America littered with Tea-Baggers. All of them can trace their problems back to Vanderbilt’s Rec center. How? Here’s how:

First thing you notice when you walk into the Rec center are the two distinct groups of people coagulated at separate ends of the weight-room. If you don’t notice this, then you are probably part of one of the groups; may God have mercy on your soul.

First off there are the sorority girls. I’m not talking about your average girl that’s pressured to join sorority because if the don’t they’ll be “totally lame”, I’m talking about the hardcore foot-soldiers; the ones who come up with stuff like “D ClDssy Tribute to VeterDns!” and “Theta Loves to Hate Malaria!” You’ll see these ones on the Ellipticals. What is the reasoning behind this? Some of them will tell you it’s because running is too “high impact for my malnourished bones” and the exercise bikes are “all sweaty and junk”. In actuality the only thing the Ellipticals help you do is run through oscillating pits of sand, a challenge few of us will ever face. But hey, 99 problems right?

The second group isn’t connected by any higher organization like a sorority; instead the group itself acts as the binding force. These people love doing curls. Never mind that your body has many other more important muscles that you could be developing, everyone with half-a-brain knows curls are all that matters. This perception is bolstered by the fact that the girls who use the Ellipticals sometimes look to mate with guys who can lift heavy things from their waist to their shoulders, only using their arms. This is also how the choosing of a mate works in many isolated villages in Central Africa, the Amazon, and rural Kentucky.

Meanwhile, the people who actually know what they are doing have to wade through all these people. However, this is not the fault of either of the two aforementioned groups; the onus for that mistake lies on the shoulders of the university. In the construction of the facilities they seemed to forget that around 6000 undergraduates are enrolled at any given moment. This makes their choice to make the weight-room of comparable size to that of its high school counterpart, interesting.

Now, after all that, you would think that the Rec would finally get its act together when it came to the Intra-Mural leagues. Unfortunately for all of us, thinking this would be a colossal mistake. The scheduling and re-scheduling of games seems to be completely incongruous. “Oh you can’t play 1:30 pm on Mondays? Class? Ok, we’ll move your game to 5 am Tuesday then. Sleep? No problem, we’ll just move it to 8 am Sunday. Church? Well, you’ll have to forfeit then. By the way, you owe us forty dollars for joining the league, thanks”.

In closing, the Rec Center could use a little attitude change. I don’t know how it has contributed to the ills of American society. Sure, I could go for some metaphor that The Rec represents our moral and cultural deficiencies, and that such a tenuous metaphor the best evidence any of us will ever muster in our chaotic and materialistic lives, but that would take too much time. So here’s to you Rec center, thanks for giving the Slant a new enemy; I’d watch your back…