Deception, Double-Crossing, and Dirty (Or Clean) Socks

“There will be no deals or negotiations. Never drop your vigilance. Take no prisoners.”

I received this e-mail last week from Alpha-Assassin 001, and I knew it had begun. It, of course, being JE Assassins. JE Assassins is more than just a game – for one day to one week, depending on how soon you’re eliminated, it is a lifestyle. You will walk everywhere carrying a pair of socks in one pocket and your umbrella in the other. (Offense and defense, respectively. Socks are weapons, umbrellas can be shields.) You will run from your bedroom through the common room to the bathroom, aware that the common room is not a safe space and anyone could be lurking there. You may attempt to make deals with “friends.” Beware: for these few days, no one is your friend. Deals mean nothing and can and should be broken. Double-crossing = encouraged.

Some will tell you that it’s all good fun, to relax, to enjoy yourself. The others, the more committed assassins, will tell you the truth – there are no deals or negotiations, never drop your vigilance, and take no prisoners.

Walkway out of the JE common room/dining hall. A prime bottleneck for catching targets.

Safe zones include bathrooms, your bedroom, the dining hall, and intramural sports. But the common room outside the dining hall is absolutely not safe and is a prime bottleneck for catching the unsuspecting diner. Some people choose to eat where they can see their targets, then follow them out and tap them with a sock as soon as they cross the threshold into the common room. Others leave before their targets do and then wait in the common room, “reading a newspaper” or “playing piano,” bundle of socks carefully hidden out of sight . Still others, the ones who can’t win on their own and must recruit suitemates as spies (yes, I’m talking about YOU, my would-be assassin), ask friends to sit in the common room, “doing homework,” who will alert them via text when you leave the dining hall, so that they can catch you outside.

Assassins is a magnificent game. It’s also prone to induce extreme paranoia in its players. For the first round, you have no idea who is playing or who your assassin might be, and so everyone is a potential assassin. Best to creep from your room to the dhall and back and to spend time exclusively with friends from other colleges. Or, if you must spend time with friends from your own college, avoid people outside your immediate friend group. Loyalties are fickle and all but your closest friends are liable to be deceptive double agents.

My bedroom. A safe zone.

When only seven assassins remain, the second round begins: a free-for-all, which is even more intense. Now you have six people to stalk and six people to avoid, and crossed paths in the courtyard that lead to three-way standoffs are not uncommon. My only advice, if you make it this far, is: there are no deals or negotiations, never drop your vigilance, and take no prisoners.

However, as much as I might mock others for their “rookie mistakes” – not looking behind them when they leave the dining hall or lingering too long in the common room – I have to admit that immediately before Round 2, I was prey to one myself. The majority of my good friends had already been killed and I was beginning to feel just the tiniest bit creepy as the junior assassin whose sole mission was to eliminate multiple freshmen, many of whom lived in the same suite. The paranoid fear and competitive drive that had kept me alive began to wane.

A lovely piece of winter art, or a cover/hiding place for a potential assassin? You decide.

And so I slipped up. I believed that I knew who my assassin was, having thwarted a previous assassination attempt (see above: bungled common room killing), and so I went to study in the JE library. I had my socks at the ready and raised them at nearly every passerby, but let down my guard when they were not my suspected assassin. When one girl walked past and I recognized her as what I thought of as a friendly, sweet sophomore, I lowered my sock arm. I was rewarded with a sock tap on the shoulder and the words, “… Sorry!”

Oh, well. Now at least I can go back to studying in my library, eating in my dining hall, and walking through my courtyard without constantly glancing around in paranoia. Although to be perfectly honest, I kind of miss it already.

Are you ....

-exhausted from skiing all day?
-excited that you finally found a friend who responds appropriately to the quote "Feed me, Seymour!" ? (For the record, the answer is "Feed me all night long," from Little Shop of Horrors.)
-hoping your skiing exhaustion won't affect your performance in the long-awaited FIRST IM INNER TUBE WATER POLO MATCH OF THE SEASON?!
-still annoyed that you didn't immediately guess the "childhood pop star who has recently made a comeback" whose last name starts with "S" ? (Britney Spears -- such a lowball!)

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then I'm going to have to guess you are:
Me, after playing Botticelli for two hours on the bus ride home from Okemo Mountain, VT, where JE hosted its annual ski trip this year.

Okemo Mountain.

Botticelli is a fantastic game that I first learned on my FOOT (Freshman Outdoor Orientation Trip, www.yale.edu/foot) pre-orientation hike. The point of Botticelli is to guess a person whom one of your friends (let's say Sam) has selected. Sam gives you the first letter of the person's last name, and then the game begins. In order to ask "yes/no" questions about the mysterious person, which you need in order to figure out anything, you first have to break into the "inner circle." To get to this inner circle, you have to stump your friend by thinking of another person whose last name shares the same first letter as the mysterious person. If Sam can't guess who that person is, then you're into the inner circle.

For example, if the last name of Sam's person begins with an "S," I might ask, "Were you ever married to Carla Bruni?" Or "Did you duke it out with Mark McGwire to break the single-season record for number of home runs?" If Sam doesn't know that the person I'm thinking of is Nicolas Sarkozy or Sammy Sosa, well, I'm into the inner circle.




Charlotte Bronte, Nicolas Sarkozy, & Bill Belichick were just some of the names that came up in our game.

The three-hour bus ride home from VT flew by. It was hilarious to see who my friends chose and it was so indicative of the variety of interests my friends have -- we covered people from the Kennedys to Indian film actresses to British novelists to football coaches. But as much fun as Botticelli was, it was far from the highlight of my day. Because prior to Botticelli, I had spent 7 hours skiing on Okemo Mountain with 50 members of JE in a subsidized ski trip run by the college.

It was AMAZING! I've never gone before, and I can't believe that I missed out on this twice. For starters, we left JE at 4:30 am which made for a hilarious bus ride up there. 50 very sleepy JE Spiders crawled onto the bus, and either dealt with their exhaustion by being insanely awake and peppy or by falling asleep all over their neighbors. Once we got to the mountain, though, everyone woke up.

Gondola ride up the mountain!

People came who had never skiied before and they spent most of the days on the bunny slopes being coached by one of the JE sophomores. I also had a bunch of friends on the trip who have practically been skiing all over the country since age 4. I had mistakenly considered myself to be "intermediate" -- little did I know that after being convinced to come along with 4 of my friends who all fit into the second category (they make skiing look easier than walking), I would realize I still have a LOT to learn. The fact that my entire body is stiff today, including my arms (who knows how that happened?) is proof.

Ana and Ayaska on the mountain!

Beyond making it difficult for me to walk and challenging me to wrack my brain for political and pop culture trivia, the trip was fabulous because I got to spend a completely surreal day with some of my best friends in JE. I know I've said it before, but I absolutely love having the JE community as my home within my home at Yale and whether the people on my trip were my closest friends or my good acquaintances, we're all members of the JE family and I wouldn't trade my residential college for any other.

Speaking of which, the first JE IM inner tube water polo game of the season is tonight -- wish me luck in continuing JE's eternal climb toward the glory of the Tyng Cup!