It’s Saturday, and it’s the day of the first football game at campus. It’s the Gators against UT Martin. What to do on this day? First I will need to buy an orange shirt that will combine well with the blue bandana that my mentor gave me for the game. I already have an orange shirt, with UF ’23 however, which essentially screams ‘Freshman’, so that’s not an option. So I went to the thrift shop, and bought this beautiful shirt with “I-L-L I-N-I” on it, it was either this or the blood donor shirt so the decision was easy. After thrift-shopping, I joined my friends at the tailgating of the surf club. Which was a bit too fun, because I found myself hurrying towards Weaver to meet with a friend to get to the game in time. Something which apparently was not meant to be, since I had to login, already being in the application, to get the QR code. The correct password was not in my key-library and none of my own passwords worked, so I did a hail mary with resetting the password and hoping for a quick e-mail. This resulted in us being 6 minutes late for the game, which was not a big problem at all looking back. The game was fun, even though only 1 hour of the 3.15 hours was filled with the actual game. A lot of nice chants I could sing along (although they said gator bait at some point, which I really understood as Gatorade, confusing me a bit).
September the 8th, a special day for me, finally turning 21 in the USA. This day I had a pita gyros from the local Greek, which made me very happy. And don’t tell this to my parents, but I bought rum and vodka to celebrate with shots/mixed drinks with friends that evening. Gina gave me special color changing bike lights (for the spokes) as a present, a very cool gift!
On Wednesday, Gina decided to join Dennis, Kristen (my fake mentor) and me to the Grogs. A club that has free drinks and you only have to pay 5/3 dollars depending on you being 21+ or not. A very special night because Gina turns 20 at midnight!
A story about my fake mentor…
Before I actually was assigned to a mentor with the Navigators, it had been a couple of days since I applied and a lot of friends already were coupled with mentors. So at the Young Life BBQ event (a Christian organization that does extra non-religious activities), Dennis and I met Kristen. Kristen is a Young Life member who also really wanted to be in the Navigators, but thought she was too late to apply. Since we hadn’t heard anything from the Navigators we just created our own “fake” navigators mentor/mentees group. Later on, Dennis got paired with Sydney, and I with Gina. We asked our mentors if we could merge our two groups into one and apparently they already were best friends, what a coincidence! After this, we asked them to add Kristen as well, and with her and Gina talking in the: “The More the Merrier” group, they found out they were talking to someone they already knew, while walking out a meeting together of a club they are both in. That’s how, strangely, we all were connected somehow!