Culture

It’s that time of year again - it’s ten degrees colder than when you first began to complain about the winter chill, your fingers continue to grow stiff on your laptop keyboard, it’s difficult to get out of bed in the morning, and the motivation you thought would return after the semester break just hasn’t come. You’ve now been dumped with a new semester worth of assignments and, to top if all off, it’s flat-hunting season. Crusty third-, fourth-, and fifth-years (what are you still doing here if above) are a little more used to this by now. Second-years are braving your first tense “do we turn the heat pump on” season, but at least you don’t have to battle it out for flats on Castle and Leith this year. As for freshers, we thought you could use a hand coming up with some stress remedies. There used to be a pack of dogs (for cuddles) that were brought around the halls, but I don’t think they do that anymore. Maybe they do. I don’t know, we didn’t research this piece at all.

 

 

Without doing any Googling at all I’m gonna guess that renting a bunch of real dogs to come cuddle for an hour is gonna cost somewhere around $250. I have no idea if that’s accurate but it feels right. Heck, it might be free. But for $250, you could buy ten 300mm x 30m rolls of bubble wrap, enough to completely carpet the floors of most res hall lounges. Or you could roll yourself up like a stressed little burrito. Either way it’ll be good for something. Alternatively, the colleges could start just saving all the bubble wrap that comes with new purchases and not have to pay a cent. Reduce, reuse, recycle. 

 

 

Same concept as having actual dogs visit the halls, but with an added thrill. Someone from Auckland Uni tweeted that this happened there during their undergrad; posters were put up advertising a “puppy petting session” but it was really just drama students wearing dog collars. So this one isn’t even remotely outside the realm of possibility. While this might be more stress-inducing than stress-relieving for all parties involved, it would certainly serve as a distraction and maybe even an awakening for budding young furries (I’m not judging). 

 

 

Hiring a bouncy castle in Dunedin costs between $185 and $520. If we’re going with the $250 ball park figure for what colleges are willing to spend on their overwhelmed cohorts of freshers, then a modest “Paw Patrol” bouncy castle of $200 is a bargain. Knox once hired what appears to be a mid-range bouncy castle at around $350 that doubled as an obstacle course and I can vouch for its stress-relieving qualities. One of the best days in my time there, but that’s not saying much I guess. And exercise is apparently good for you, so there’s that too.

 

Hire a stripper

 

I mean, you could. I don’t think very many students would actively enjoy this (at least not the ones you want to make happy) but it would undoubtedly make people forget about their stress for a while, even if that was just because they were too preoccupied with wondering how this idea ever got green-lit in the first place. Maybe the stripper could teach pole classes or something, I dunno, that’s an active way to move your body. No matter what happens, it would definitely be a distraction.

 

 

Instead of bringing in puppies that you have to pet and treat nicely, bring in inanimate stuff that you can break and treat meanly. Or, even better, take someone’s totaled car and park it out front, then give students five free swings with a bat to see what they can do. Safety glasses are a must, of course. You could even start charging for extra swings to make a profit on this method, and use the profit to fund another method on this list, making it the most economically-viable option of the lot. 

 

 

Listen, healthy coping methods are great if they work for you. I’m all for a hot girl walk and meditation session. But sometimes you just need to be able to drink an ungodly concoction of hard liquor to the point of forgetting the conversation you had with your friend ten minutes ago, let alone the stress of being an adult. The frankly oppressive rules of residential halls don’t seem to recognise this. Freshers are new to being adults - it’s hard. Lifting the alcohol rules for a week at halls is the least they can do in terms of pastoral care of residents, and it’s also very cost-effective (free). Healthy? No. Stress-relieving? Temporarily.