Three falls ago, upon leaving Dartmouth for our first winter break, Amanda blitzed Seanie with the subject line “Spotted.”
“Kid in Harvard sweatshirt at the Boston airport,” it read. “Me in my Dartmouth sweatshirt feeling competitive and sad...the Dartmouth bubble has officially been left behind.”
This is a term so cliche that we will now hit ourselves for writing about it. And yet we will write about it anyway, because we cannot stay away. We love talking about the Dartmouth bubble almost as much as we love talking about terms.
Maybe it’s because we’ve never known anything in this life to be so comforting and yet so sinister. It’s like a two-faced jerk that makes you feel like you live on a weird cloud when really you are surrounded by lava. We do not know if this image makes sense, but we stand by it.
The first evidence of the bubble’s awful nature came soon after the “Spotted” blitz, in another blitz from Amanda that read: “Fell out of bed, because I got used to jumping down since my bed is so nice and high at school. Miss you!” This anecdote seems innocent, but it is not. It was our first documentation of our bubble-induced ways causing us harm outside. It was a foreshadowing of the horrors to come.
This week, we both traveled off campus for different reasons, neither of which involved getting a job interview, and the two-faced jerk struck again.
Amanda: I had been away from Dartmouth for three hours — the time it takes to ride the bus from Hanover to terminal B1 at Boston Logan — when I realized that I had once again forgotten how to be away from Dartmouth.
I think I was still asleep when I dragged my feet over to the Starbucks in the airport. I already knew what I would order, the exact same thing I get every morning. I had my Dartmouth ID in hand to prepare for another perfectly normal, completely unremarkable KAF-like transaction. Perhaps I should have given it a little bit more thought because it was not a KAF-like transaction. I asked for my coffee with skim. The barista raised her eyebrows and pointed to the milk on the counter behind me to show that milk was a DIY thing at Starbucks.
Fine. She listed off the price, and I gave her my ID. There was a moment of the two of us swapping blank faces before I realized that Starbucks does not accept DBA nor do they have any idea what DBA is. Also, a small drink (inexplicably called “tall” at Starbucks) is basically the same price as a Dartmouth meal swipe. I knew this. I know this. And I was reminded of this yet again. I assumed mistakes like these would stop happening three years after my first departure from the bubble. But they are only getting worse and more frequent.
Seanie: This week, I borrowed Amanda’s car to make the three and a half hour drive to visit my little brother at college. I was about an hour into the drive when I hit the toll booth. I saw it looming in the distance, and I knew my doom. By the time I got to the window, I had slowed to a negligible speed in order to scavenge Amanda’s car for stray coins. I found many interesting things, including Nutella, but literally zero stray coins. I cursed Amanda for not predicting this and pulled up to the window. I only really have experience on Los Angeles freeways, which are called freeways because they are free, so I honestly had no idea how this situation would be handled.
“What do you do if you do not have any money?” I asked the man at the window.
“You don’t have 75 cents?” He took pity and asked for license and registration, only raising his eyebrows slightly upon seeing that my license is extremely expired. I got one of those slips that says you have to pay the toll within five days and continued on.
Soon I hit another toll. I searched the car again, knowing nothing would be different. There was more traffic here, and several people in cars behind me let their annoyance be known by dangerously reversing out of my lane to switch to another one. I made no eye contact and collected another slip.
At the next toll, I had managed to find a nickel, the coin that is useful for nothing, and held it up as a sort of offering. I received another slip. I briefly thought that it might be a cool thing to get one of these from every state, but only briefly. By the time I arrived at my brother’s college, I was $5.75 in debt and my nerves were fried. Not carrying cash with you, a fine thing to do at Dartmouth, is actually a stupid and dangerous habit that will not get you far.
We love Hanover. But if you pull a place around you this tightly, it’s disorienting when you have to let go. Again, we have no answers. But we will now be the bigger people and congratulate the Dartmouth bubble for its 482nd mention in the newspaper. That is more mentions than both “Phil Hanlon” and the word “problematic.”
Yours in the lava,
Lucy & Ethel
