Raise a glass in honor of St. Syllabus, Remus Rubric

Ah, the Festival of St. Syllabus. It’s a time when faculty and students come together with a… Ah, the Festival of St. Syllabus. It’s a time when faculty and students come together with a united message: “We wish summer were a week longer. Also, we like beer.”

If you’ve never experienced St. Syllabus’ week before, it’s the first week of each semester, when your professor will hand out the syllabus, then go over it. In detail. Slowly. It’s a time when normally mind-numbing classes let out after seven minutes, when recitations are truncated, squeezed down to their fiery essence, and when most teaching assistants will do anything short of leaving out spaces between their words to get you out of class sooner.

It’s a time to raise a mug — of root beer, Mom, root beer — and toast semesters past that you can’t quite remember, and the arrival of a new semester that, someday, will also be forgotten. It’s a time of peace, joy, understanding, brotherhood and drink specials.

St. Syllabus’ week, like other saints’ holidays, honors a man who gave his life for others’ betterment. Simon Syllabus was a Roman scribe, who attended the Great University at Rome, so many moons ago. Along with his compatriots Remus Rubric and Octavio Overhead, he fought for students’ rights: the right to know when tests were, what the grading scale was, and if attendance counted.

Sadly, he was injured in a freak accident involving a stylus — a pointy-ass pen made of iron the Romans used for scratching messages on wax tablets. Most of his body was never recovered, save his writing calluses and a single tear, which was preserved in a glass bottle and is now kept at the University of Rome.

He was canonized — a very painful process, from what I hear — and became a saint as soon as the Romans stopped killing Christians and starting being Christians, the date of which, I’m sure, is on your Western Civ syllabus.

Nowadays, we honor St. Syllabus by sleeping late, stumbling into classes hung-over and asking inane questions like, “Will we be graded on the test?”

This week is a time when students from Pitt, Carnegie Mellon, Carlow, Chatham and all the other universities can communicate with one another, on equal footing, about what, exactly, it is that they didn’t do that day. Yes, it takes St. Syllabus to end that seething Pitt-Chatham rivalry that’s led to so much tragedy and ill will.

St. Syllabus’ week, like most nontraditional holidays, has been incorporated into the mainstream. It is accompanied by yet another festival, one more approved of by the Pitt administration: the Add/Drop period. Don’t be swayed by its accepted status though. Add/Drop, while a great holiday, has nothing on St. Syllabus’ week.

While Add/Drop is celebrated via its traditional Thackeray rat races, with the desperate masses all paging through course-description booklets, St. Syllabus’ week is the true holiday, which, like Saturnalia, has been overshadowed by a more universally approved one.

So, whether you’re going to plug-and-chug physics or advanced rocket science for geniuses, toast your student ancestors who worked so hard to get you where you are today.

Tonight, the concluding festival will convene at the shrines of Our Lady of Long Island situated all around Oakland. As you enjoy these festivities, always keep this in mind: A man died a freakish death so that we might party; let’s give him the wake he deserves.

Sydney Bergman wants her fellow students to honor St. Syllabus anyway they can — except streaking. E-mail her at sbergman@pittnews.com.