Chapter 72

Third year has begun. I was still in the same class with the same people. I have grown a bit closer to some of the friends I went to Moldova with but to be honest, that was pretty much all the different. Well, that and the fact that this year, I was extra determined to not relive the feeling of failing anymore. 

With that said, after year 2, the course load would be getting lighter and with that in mind, I decided to try and do a bit more hobbies again. My justification for this was that last year, my misery was really out of control and not a great time overall. Maybe if I had more hobbies I would breathe easier and therefore, maybe study a bit more efficiently? While some may say that me being part of acapella could be one of the reasons for underperforming in the winter term, I never blamed them for it. I mean, whenever there was an exam coming up, I would miss a lot of practice and for the most part, the acapella group was sympathetic to my cause. This made it so that they were a poor scapegoat for my underperformance in school.

I wasn’t going to go crazy about it though. I knew it was a tight rope to consider doing clubs when I had a history of struggling with studies. So, I adamantly told myself that I would only do one extracurricular thing. Just one. To that end, I decided to take inventory of all the hobbies I had and choose very carefully. I eventually decided to pick the hobby I would keep this term based on a process of elimination starting with the extracurriculars that I had loose ties with. 

First, I quit my job at the Waterloo Stationary shop. I was already only a part time employee now and it didn’t really make sense to keep working there. The money was just minimum wage and to be honest, not really worthwhile now that I was still living off of grandma’s car accident settlement money.

Second, I stopped going to UW breakers sessions. I mean, it was just a drop-in kind of deal already but even then, I decided to hold off on it in its entirety. The other reason why UW Breakers were not as appealing as a hobby was that at this stage, there were only a few breakers left. As I mentioned, I was a part timer for the breakers. While sustainable in nature, it also meant that I had to live through the UW Breakers transitioning from their golden era and into their current state. A state I deemed the desolate era. There were only a few breakers left. Turnout was very low and along with low turnout, was a low commitment to keep showing up.

This left me with just acapella as the only hobby to consider. 

I had done acapella last year but my acapella involvement was running pretty much all in the background. I had missed a LOT of practice for school exams and tests. So much so that I didn’t even think twice about using acapella as an excuse for failing a course. I was literally just there for the bare minimum. This year, I hoped to do it again on a similar level as to not get too much in the way of things. Also, I didn’t like the idea of repeating first year when I had close to no musical interactions at all.

The other reason to keep acapella? Now in third year optometry, acapella stood out again because out of all the hobbies I did in undergrad, it was only with acapella where I still had some friends who knew me. It was completely by luck that some of the acapella people from my undergrad days decided to do grad school, a minor in a subject or simply worked nearby and were still a part of the scene. 

I savored my time together with the old acapella friends because I knew that they would be leaving soon too. With their eventual departure, my experiences in the hobbies from undergrad would officially be over. This was a sad thought. As you’ll recall, I had joined acapella way back in year 1 of undergrad. Then, I had this on and off again relationship with it for about 7 years. 

During that time, I was there for some milestones in UW acapella history. Those events acted like real life lore to me and it was hard to not think back on them and feel sad. I still remember some of my most fondest moments from acapella even to this day. Like when I was fortunate enough to be in a group for the first ICCAs competition the UW acapella clubs joined. Back then, the ICCAs were in Buffalo and we had to plan a bus and a motel to take all the acapella people there. The difficulty in coordinating all of this was frustrating and yet gave the entire trip a better feel. It felt impromptu and more significant somehow that way. This was incredibly different from the present state of the UW acapella scene of today. I mean, there is now an ICCAs Canadian division that is hosted by UW every year.

Anyhow, I had decided to rejoin acapella one last time in my third year and honestly, it was just what I needed to balance out my schedule. There were some changes sure, but acapella in general still had a similar vibe. 

I wasn’t with my original group anymore. Previously I was from the Unaccompanied Minors. They were the mixed gender auditioned group that was pretty well known in the acapella circles. Now I was in the best known auditioned acapella group, known as the WaterBoys. An, at the time, all-male auditioned acapella group that had been around since pretty much the beginning of acapella. The reason for this change was pretty simple, my old friends were in this new group and I just followed them. Also, the Unaccompanied Minors had their rehearsal at a time that didn’t fit in my schedule. 

It was nice to be a part of an outside-of-optometry group. The cynicism I had developed in year 2 of optometry has not dissipated. Honestly, sometimes you just need to get away from all the problems with the optometry school and have something that reminds you that the optometry ecosystem isn’t the only system out in the world. I needed this. The optometry ecosystem did have some form of musical outlet but to be honest, they were lackluster in comparison to the acapella I knew from undergrad. 

If you’ll recall, I mentioned that in first year optometry, I learned about the only musical thing that I could do in the new program without leaving the school. It was “skit night”. A quick refresher on this was that this was an hour of skits and performances by each of the 4 classes (year 1 to year 4) in optometry school at the time. Another quick refresher on this was that in year 1 I did the parody on “with a little help from my friends” by the beatles and changed it to “with a little help from my lens” upon the suggestion by another colleague. Annnddd one more quick refresher was that in year 1 I also described skit night as more boring than cringey. 

While in first year, I thought it was just harmless fun that you can’t take too seriously, now in third year I saw it differently. It was meant to be light hearted fun poking at school oddities and such. But here’s the thing, it was also technically a competition. The classes were pitted against each other and there were even awards for best skits. For the faculty that was participating, they had a role in being the judges of the skits. Here was the problem.

When you are in a school where the professors have seemingly let you down with their part in your education, why would you want to get their approval over another aspect of your life? If you wouldn’t trust the professors’ judgment when it came to doing their jobs, why would you ask for their judgment for your comedic sense of humor or your musical ability to parody something? It seemed like a cruel joke then didn’t it?  

I’ve mentioned that I didn’t do skit night in second year for more time allotment. That was true but there was more to it. It was just very hard to have light hearted fun in skit night when you have so many frustrations with the school. Every joke that poked fun at some things suddenly became slightly too real and when that barrier was hit, we had to pull back. I think the school knew about the potentially toxic skits that could be performed. I suppose it was a good thing that the school audited all the skits before we were allowed to perform them. 

Between restrictions on how hard we can bash on the professors or the school and my growing animosity towards the shortcomings of the school, it made it increasingly hard to participate in skit night throughout all of second year. Art and music is about expression and yet, we’ve been censored. What the hell? 

In truth, I did at least try to participate in skit night in my second year. By this I mean that I had a thought on how I could find a way to enjoy skit night as a cynic with the musical background I had. In fact, it’s kind of easy when you think about it.

Simply ignore the restrictions on the skits. 

That’s what I did, I came up with a parody where I just roasted the school on its shortcomings. Then, I had it submitted to the skit night governing people. The result? Of course it was rejected. By pretty much anyone on the skit night management team. Also, my school’s dean and professors. Oh and also some of my peers. Most of them told me to never share that parody I made with anyone. Not because it had any profanity. But simply because it may have been too truthful.

With that said. Let me introduce you to my parodied rendition of “An Open Letter” from Hamilton. 

Excerpt taken from “skit night year 2: hamilton”

End of excerpt

Yeah. I know. This got a little cringey. But also very toxic. 

But in all honesty, this was probably one of the more positive outputs for frustrations in our school. No. Seriously.

There weren’t a lot of other things students could do to show our dissatisfaction apart from course reviews but whoever even reads those? When I made this parody I had thought that the target audience would be the school’s administration staff and that they would think something along the lines of:

“Wow! That’s a really cynical critique of our school! I’m glad it was under the context of skit night and not a real thing! Though now that I think about it, maybe we should think of changing a few things around here”. 

Unfortunately, this parody would live and die on the drawing board and not be performed. However, under the guise of being a piece of “art” that needed to be audited for optometry student consumption, this parody and the lyrics actually made it to the intended audience. 

I mean, the admin staff and dean of our school saw it and rejected it but it was the fact that they did SEE it that was the victory in all of this. I think this parody speaks loads about how the average student viewed my program and it really shows. 

As for the others who saw my parody and rejected it. I can also sympathize with them. While I initially lashed out blindly at them for not allowing for truthful feelings to be said during skit night, they were looking out for the greater good of the school. In reality, I was just being a menace. Add that to the things I’m not really proud of. 

Anyhow, most of the skit night people were just trying to keep things civil. Whether they knew it or not, the school was already in the process of changing things around. Punishing them for the past when they were working towards a better future was in poor taste and thinking back, I am glad that my toxic skit got rejected.

Speaking of changes in the school, it really was around third year when my class and I would first become aware of how the school was trying to change. Now, for the record. When I first found out about a potential curriculum overhaul in the school, I felt some hope. 

Between all the negative reviews our class left for the courses (which were just ongoing echoes of problems present even in the past), all the dissatisfaction that was rumored around the school, and (very speculatively, and I do mean VERY speculatively) my skit, which got rejected but viewed by the appropriate parties before it went into oblivion, it seems that all the suffering my class went through wasn’t going to be meaningless. It was going to lead to a better system for the generations after us. 

While our class, now in third year, could not benefit from the changes. We would at least be present when the changes came to be implemented into the school for the first and second years. 

Well. That’s what I thought when I first found out about the changes at least. I heard the information from some upper years talking in the library and to be honest, it wasn’t really information that was credible. It was just rumors. 

It wasn’t until later when I realized how upper years knew that the school was rearranging some things around. When I realized how the upper years came to know this information, I felt shook.
This was because…The upper years found out about the curriculum changes because a few of the lower years’ students had failed and needed to repeat a year of school.