Beta Gamma Eta

It’s 3 pm on Friday afternoon. Modest Mouse blares from speakers out into the street and four guys are well into their first game of beer pong. It sounds like the typical routine of one of Penn’s many fraternities, but it’s actually how my housemates and I start off most weekends.

I didn’t expect to be a part of frat culture. Not at UCSB where I spent freshman year or at Penn when I transferred. So, even after moving into a house with seven of my best friends I didn’t foresee any changes in my general dismissal view of frat life.

Seven months later, after seeing an invitation to “The men of BGH” (an abbreviation for the Bright Green House where my friends and I live) atop an Alpha Phi Crush Party ad in the DP, it looks like I might have ended up a frat boy after all. More than a few observers have made the comparison to my house and a frat and now that we’re simply known by three letters they might be right.

After all we end up drinking more nights out of the week than not. Our common room is usually sporting some mysterious odor or another. We spend most of our time exclusively hanging out with each other.

Then again we all entered into this ‘fraternity’ willingly. There were no paddles or brands when we pledged. And really we’re probably no different than most groups of friends on campus from Hillel, to the Daily Pennsylvanian or Penn Masalla.

I guess what does surprise me is that I’ve learned to live with the frat label. When the accusations of being “fratty” were first leveled at me I balked. “No way,” I said, “I could never be.” But I concede finally that there’s more to being fratty than shotgunning beers, popping your collar and blasting Fall Out Boy at all hours. It’s about having your friend’s back if he needs a wingman at Smokes or being there to congratulate him when he gets into law school. And if that’s the case than I think we’d all like to be fratty when it’s most important.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.