Campout, survived

Duke has this lovely tradition for grad students called "Campout." It's the ONLY way to get season tickets for basketball. Campout means you sit outside in a parking lot for 36 hours, drinking beer, eating crappy food, playing games, not studying, and waiting for the awful sound of the air raid siren. When the siren rings, you must run to a check-in tent, and show your checker your id, all within 10 minutes. If you don't make it (either don't hear it, or don't make it in 10 minutes), you're out. If you do make it through, you're entered into the lottery for basketball tickets, and have a 40% chance of winning.

Seems not too bad, right?

Think again.

These shenanigans are run by other grad students - who automatically get tickets - which means they like to inflict all kinds of pain on the 2,000 others who are camping out. We had over 28 checks in 36 hours, with the majority of them between midnight and 4 a.m. both nights (sometimes multiples per hour!). This ensured no one really got any sleep. We had an RV, and thankfully the weather has turned, so it wasn't too oppresive. But after 36 hours with about 6 combined hours of sleep - this on top of a not-so-good sleep schedule last week - and I was completely wrecked. As was everyone else.

The upside: 5 people in my group of 9 got tickets, so we'll share them for the season. Coach K came to talk to us for an hour on Saturday night, which was really pretty cool. He showed us a video from the summer Olympics, and talked about how awesome it will be to win a gold medal AND a national championship within a year. Duke is going all the way! He is also a complete cheeseball, and hearts Beyonce, but hell, he's Coach K so he can pretty much do whatever he wants and we'd think it was great. The t-shirts for the weekend even had a line that said "Land of the free and home of the K." Oh yeah.

Meanwhile, I am still not sure how I will catch up, since the Fuqua express waits for no one. But I'm better off than my section-mates who spent 36 hours playing beer pong, and were still hungover yesterday!