Everybody wants to know me
Two days of orientation of the University of Limerick and this is what I remember:
It’s the first day of the orientation at the University of Limerick and the student unions president tells me that he wants to know me. Not just that. He wants to know about me. It doesn’t really matter that the room is full of people and that he stands on stairs, kind of like Zarathustra, sermonizing to the crowd. He says, “We want to know about you” I know he means me. For some reason he isn’t alone in having a curious interest in me.
Jump to day two of the orientation. I am sitting with about 200 or so Erasmus students in a church sized lecture-hall. In the front there are two of the members of the university’s chaplaincy who informs us that God loves us and that their doors are always open. This makes me feel a bit awkward.
I am, like some of you know, an atheist. I try not to shovel that opinion up in stranger’s faces as long as they don’t ask. To me, that would just be rude. But if someone has the bad taste to do that, I get kind of pist of. So while father-what’s-his-name tells us about God or whatever, I am making cartoons of priests with baseball bats and vampire teeth.
Jump to when one of the speakers asks us how many Germans there is present and forty or so persons extends their right arm, Nurnberg style. I don’t know who the speaker is but he wants to know about me and the other Erasmus students. So do the guys from the different societies, clubs and departments that are up next.
My initial response to this sudden interest in my persona is that of paranoia. I mean why would they want to know about me? What do they know already?
But at the end I succumb and exclaim “I want to know about the you to, random people!”
PS: As I am writing this, I can’t recall any piece of information I got during the orientation.
