choco_frosh | Realm: F-List Essays

This time, let’s start the story in the middle.

It must have been near the beginning of the year, for I was still eating in Baxter, the default dining hall for Frosh. Baxter was (by Williams standards) enormous, and archaic, designed for an age that still had wait staff. And so it is now no more: replaced, at yet vaster expense than anticipated, by an ultra-modern, green-built student center; no more will freshmen dine there. But I still remember the sun streaming in those great Georgian-revival-revival windows, onto vanished white walls behind our table near the juncture of the two halves of the place.

I was having lunch with

osirusbrisbane and his suitemate, Mowichleu. I only barely knew ‘Sirus: we had (rather predictably) met through WARP, but at that point the GURPS campaign in which we were both playing had barely gotten started.

osirusbrisbane has a quasi manic-depressive personality, that can be either very ennuié or very enthusiastic. He was enthuising to Mowichleu about the campaign.

“Oh yeah,” the latter was eventually heard to respond (when he could get a word in edgewise, I think). “My family used to role-play together. This one time, I was this giant warrior in spiked armor, whose trick was to grab opponents and crush them against me, doing 2d6 of crushing damage PLUS impalement…”

How does the Williams admissions office do it? They’d put these two guys in separate rooms in the same basement suite, along with two obnoxious, loud frat-boy types. Mowichleu, indeed, eventually gave up and moved out, after his roommate came in wasted one night and started pissing on things.*

osirusbrisbane toughed it out, and eventually became the only one in the entry NOT to get infected during the Great Freshman Louse Epidemic of 1997. But that was still in the future; the upshot was that Mowichleu joined the campaign, and we all became fast friends.**

Mowichleu, I think, played some sort of small, lithe swordsman. That goes with his image of himself, I think; and it’s actually pretty accurate. He looks like you could pick him up one-handed, but played hockey in High School, and can out-hike me. I’ve seen it happen, and some of you know why it’s a notable ability. Osirus, on the other hand, played a jester of the same name, also short and slight but no good in close combat; so he would take shelter behind Mmmm, our monoverbal equivalent of Mowichleu’s Guys in Spiked Armor.*** And this has forever colored my mental image of their respective players: I think of

osirusbrisbane as short and Art as tall, despite the fact that in reality Art’s only a little taller than Mowichleu, while ‘Sirus is taller than me. (Though he does stoop)

But other than that, it’s all pretty accurate.

osirusbrisbane makes the worst (or best) puns I have ever heard—and that’s including my father-in-law and his various friends and relations. Osirus became one of the speakers at graduation by default: nobody else got as many votes as he, though had people been allowed to vote against potential candidates, he would probably have gotten the most votes there, too. (Aren’t friends great?) Osirus is the only person I’ve ever known who could talk (simultaneously) in French, Pig Latin and Ob.

In fact, in some ways that’s how I really got to know him. Williams has this institution called “Free University” during the four weeks of Winter Study, in which anyone can teach a class and anyone can attend. Some guy from the local community comes on campus to teach a class (that I never got a chance to take, alas) on medieval siege warfare;

osirusbrisbane spent that first January teaching “Pig Latin: It is so a language”, and I was his TA. We had only a handful of students; but we held conversation practice, earnestly studied the grammar rules and the regional dialects, and watched Mel Brooks films. It was good.

Oh, there are many stories that I could tell about

osirusbrisbane, but I wasn't there for most of them, and he's told most of them anyway (and better than I could). I feel, though, that I should provide some background to the stories involving him and food. 'Sirus likes food very much, and is especially keen on the importance of cheese. However, actually cooking food was a rather a foreign concept to him when first he was first forced to leave dorm life behind. He, and Ramos, and I think BB were at some point living together in an oversized house, most of whose furniture was (for the moment) inflatable. So I give myself great kudos that I helped teach him that you could apply heat to food to make it yourself, by making him some spaghetti sauce. (I think

mhorai played a larger role in the overall process of teaching him to cook, though. Especially as regards cous cous. [I still make cous cous a la

osirusbrisbane from time to time.]) Anyway, in the end he was persuaded that yes, you could cook food without a degree in haute cuisine, and launched on his, er, varied career of doing so.

These days,

osirusbrisbane has joined the ranks of Those Who Will Not Leave the Williamstown area, and is living in the house he bought to put a piano in. He still lives rather like a monk, if one can imagine an atheist monk who devotes his life to humor instead. Thus a picnic with him a few years ago involved simply grabbing a large loaf of bread and a large hunk of cheese.***** Grace found this slightly appalling; I found it rather inspiring. Since then (I really need to visit...), he has been living with

the_star_fish; all of his friends were initially surprised not that he had a girlfriend (there's something about him, and humor...) but that he wasn't complaining about the fact, like he had on all previous occasions.
Mowichleu married

mhorai, after a complicated courtship. They beat us to producing the first WARP Spawn of our generation, and are also on our list of People We Should Visit More Than We Do. (Especially now that he's at Wesleyan and O'Rourke's has reopened.) But this post is already too long to explain all of that.

* What is it about American private schools that encourages this sort of behavior?
** Conversations involving him and Mowichleu can be pretty epic. Not only do we have Osirus’s sense of humor, but despite being pretty straight-laced in some regards, Mowichleu has the ability to tell the most outrageous, elaborate lies with a straight face. And I’m just slow enough on the uptake to make a perfect fall guy for either of them.
*** For those interested, I played an exaggerated version of a friend of mine: young, noble, usually drunk. Should really have had to re-roll him after he jumped out a window holding a rope that was attached to a stone golem—which then went out the window too—but the DM had mercy.****
****Yes, all my friends are huge geeks. Deal. ‘Rest of you, hands up any non-relative who hasn’t played MTG! right.
***** We also persuaded him to let us bring a bag o' cherries, but it was a bit of a struggle.