Sherman Ave Freshman Guide: Icebreakers

One thing you will learn about Northwestern upon arriving your first week is that everyone here loves a good icebreaker. Your Peer Advisers will make this quite clear to you upon arrival but if you have any interest in making new friends here, icebreakers are a great way to start. Try coming up with a few very obscure questions you could ask potential new friends that will challenge them – Northwestern students love to be challenged. Upperclassmen already know the drill so be sure to grill them with all of your icebreaker questions, too.

Icebreakers will also come in handy at parties. Freshmen boys: Icebreakers are a great way to talk to Freshmen girls (and upperclassmen if you’re feeling brave). Here are a few proven questions that have worked in the past:

An open letter to the Northwestern Kid who Just Didn’t Get Involved Enough

Happiness Club does NOT count

Dear Northwestern Kid Who Just Didn’t Get Involved Enough,

Let’s face it.  Every single person at this university is way busier than you, and everyone knows it. Uninvolved Kid, your lack of extracurricular involvement within Northwestern is like a giant dildo on the floor of a nursing home. We all know it’s there, but we really, really don’t want to bring it up.

Remember how you sobbed after realizing how fucking fat and lazy you’ve gotten since high school? How you dripped tears and snot onto your iPhone and Siri was like “whoa, this kid needs his mom” and called her for you? And how your faithful mom, who has been glued to her phone ever since that one time you rang her up about barfing in the BK lounge AGAIN, answered your moaning self-denigration with a “Honey! Of course that’s not true. You’re my little rainbow! Why, I bet everyone at your smart college thinks about themselves the same way.”

The Evolution of the Group Project

Group projects before college > group projects at college. Here’s why:

You used to be somebody.

Elementary School:

Your 4^th grade teacher just assigned you to make a poster about the rainforest. In a group. Could life get any better than this?! THIS IS GONNA BE THE BEST PROJECT EVER WE HAVE TO GO BUY RUBBER CEMENT AND GLITTER RIGHT NOW!!!!!! You obviously all gathered at the swankiest group member’s house (AKA the one who had the World Wide Web) with the coolest mom who provided the best snacks. Bagel Bites and Dunkaroos were on the menu and Destiny’s Child blasted on the stereo. You laughed, ran with scissors, threw glitter at each other, and spilled Capri Sun on the carpet. Then you got down to business and used the house’s top-of-the-line laser printer to decorate your kickass poster with colorful birds, lush green forests, and crazy looking anteaters. You came away from the day with a ton of new inside jokes like “Team Brainforest!” and “be the Amazon!” that you would shout at each other in the hallways for the next six months…or six years. AND THE YOU MADE A PACT TO BE BEST FRIENDS FOREVER AND IT WAS THE GREATEST AND YOU GOT A THOUSAND GOLD STARS!!!

World’s Worst: Animal Species

Do NOT, under any circumstances, give this animal “Bill Clinton sex.”

If there is a God, why didn’t He command Noah to throw these assholes overboard?

Dolphins
It is a well-known fact that dolphins are smart motherfuckers. This is what makes them so awful. Evolutionary theorists claim that all mammals, including dolphins, evolved as land-dwelling creatures, but dolphins were evicted back to the sea after they organized and attempted to “eliminate the Koala Problem.”  Dolphins are also responsible for 10% of drownings of children under twelve. They have been known to put on Bill Clinton masks and pose as mermaids to small girls, who immediately either choke on whatever saltwater they’re swimming in or instinctively stop treading water to tightly cross their legs.

An ode to Northwestern memes

In the great Northwestern University student tradition of never doing anything original ever, we have succeeded in completely ripping off funny Madison students and made our very own Facebook group for Northwestern-themed memes. And even before Madison made their group, Sherman Ave’s very own Evander Jones and Ross Packingham engaged in a daylong meme duel on Facebook, laying waste to the timelines around them with their brutal label-based humor bludgeons. If you were Facebook friends with them and missed out on these two wunderkinds making memes of each other and generally raping newsfeeds everywhere, I feel bad for you. It would be akin to taking Professor Bailey’s Human Sexuality class and skipping the optional after-class discussions.

But even though it’s not original, Northwestern Memes is awesome. I mean, nobody cares if you’re copying someone else as long as you do it better, and we are definitely doing it better. My complete and utter lack of interest in Madison has prevented me from even perusing their meme group, but I can’t imagine it being anywhere as good as Northwestern Memes.

I love memes. Who doesn’t? They’re hilarious. In our modern ADD society, they offer quick, digestible little nuggets of insight and satire about our modern culture. They are the Internet at its greatest, smartest, and funniest. Sometimes they even reference such awesome things as Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, which if you haven’t seen or read Lord of the Rings then you probably aren’t a Nerdwestern Northwestern student.

As a result, I love Northwestern Memes. I’m going to break down why I love Northwestern Memes into a list for you. Here’s why:

1. My last three articles have been thousand-word slogfests about coffee and/or Newt Gingrich, and I’m sure you’re all tired of it.
2. Sherman Ave is even better at doing lists than we are at making YouTube videos that get 10,000 hits in two days, so this is pretty much guaranteed to be awesome.
3. I want to write an easily digestible reflection on the easily digestible nature of memes.

See? Wasn’t that an awesome little list? Wasn’t it easily readable? Yes it was. Everybody loves lists, just like everybody loves memes. So without further ado, here’s a list of why I love Northwestern Memes:

Some of Them are Funny
Since Northwestern is full of people who are smart and aware of trends, some students have significant experience with memes, and it shows. Some of these memes would be genuinely funny even by the standards of the greater Internet, just as there are some students here who would be considered hot at any college. Just not many. Which leads me to my second reason for loving Northwestern Memes…

Some of Them are Spectacularly Unfunny
Yes! Hoo ha! Most people posting pics to this group are clearly making memes for the first time. Thus, we find ourselves faced with people who don’t understand memes, people who don’t understand specific memes, people who are just not funny, and people who are kind of funny but are fitting long-winded jokes onto a small meme template. It’s always fun to watch people fail. This is why everyone loves this year’s GOP presidential race.* What’s that? I sound like a condescending hipster? Well, I’m not the only one…

Meme Haughtiness
Some people hate hipsters. I love them. I find them hilarious, especially when the thing they’re being hipster about is silly and meaningless. Like say, the ability to make memes. Some of the very first posts in Northwestern Memes were warnings about how we were in for a flood of bad memes. And we kind of were…but it was still hilarious that people decided to lord their knowledge of the Internet as if it made them intellectually superior.**

It’s All a Giant Conspiracy
Turns out that all these “___ Memes” groups were started by one guy as an advertisement for an all-encompassing “Campus Memes” website he’s making. It’s a conspiracy! As if you didn’t already have enough reasons to love Northwestern Memes, here’s another: it has something in common with the assassination of JFK!

Ah, yes. But as much as I love Northwestern Memes, I do have one suggestion for improvement. Two words: more fucksaws. The memes are coming a mile a minute now, so maybe one slipped by me, but I have yet to see a single meme mention a single fucksaw. What’s the deal, Northwestern? Jokes about Asians are funny enough, but “I’m tired of talking about fucksaws” was probably the last line cut from the “Shit Nobody Says” video. I know the Keg is gone and Lodge is closed and stuff, but c’mon guys. Fucksaws, I tell you.

Other than that, keep on tracking.

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*Sorry, I just couldn’t stop myself from referencing it. I’m done now though. I promise.
**Morson alert!