Welcome back, Leave Termers!
So it seems your world has transformed itself while you were gone. Social circles have regrouped, romances have ended, new ones have begun -- everything seems a bit out of whack. It might throw you. Such is the inevitable result of the ongoing social experiment that is the D-Plan.
After my leave term in the fall it took me a little while to get back in the swing of things. I remember walking into Full Fare one murky morning to score a little fried breakfast meat before class, only to learn that Full Fare was now only serving a "continental breakfast"; basically you're paying for dry cereal and waffles you can make yourself. According to the official Full Fare representative with whom I spoke, this change in breakfast policy had been in effect since the fall. As I munched on my Frosted Flakes, I tried to place myself in some sort of comprehensible Dartmouth context and came up short -- I felt quite displaced.
Seeing my friends who had stayed at school while I'd been gone was equally confusing. All the different rituals, regular eating places, different catch-phrases, even. It was hard not to feel left out. They had created a perfectly enjoyable world for themselves without me, and now I felt like an intruder on their social space.
I suppose your confusion level depends on where and how you spent your leave term. If you spent your leave term at home, or anywhere near a television, you have my utmost sympathies. My leave term this past fall included far too many hours of television watching (in all fairness, I did have an internship at a television show).
TV is the consummate evil, as addictive as nicotine, as mind-numbing as, say, a marathon of C. Thomas Howell movies. I sat on my couch, perusing 17,000 cable channels, and I swear, it put the spin on my brain. I began to wonder, am I worried enough about gingivitis? Who's the perkier morning personality, Joan Lunden or Katie Couric? Should I take the High Endurance Challenge from Old Spice?
Returning to Dartmouth provided welcome relief from this media barrage. I actually started leaving my room and engaging in physical activity again. Well, sometimes. A few times. Once.
However, you may have spent your leave-term abroad, far beyond the nefarious influence of television. The spiritual wisdom you acquired epiphany-surfing with Buddhist monks or pondering Shakespeare in a musty London library will serve you well at Camp Dartmouth. Don't despair; the world to which you've returned may seem insane now, but you'll adjust. Remember how disoriented we all felt upon arriving in Hanover for those DOC trips -- this place seemed light years away from the familiar world of adolescence. Unless, of course, you went to one of those New England prep schools -- they're not a whole lot different from Dartmouth. And coming up to visit as a prospective can really take the edge off the confusion. And you could argue that it's not the change of scenery that's disorienting, it's the changes within yourself as you mature that engender those waves of befuddlement.
Whatever my point was, Dartmouth can certainly seem absurd when contrasted with your leave term environment. I think.
There are a plethora of ways in which your Dartmouth world may have changed; I've only touched on a few of the more trivial examples. And remember, certain elements of your college experience will be absolutely as you left them. Collis food, for instance. Most of it still resembles something you'd use to caulk bathroom tile. Such reliable standbys can be a comfort in the deluge of changes that assaults you upon your return.
The longer a period of time you spend outside of college, the more you realize how ephemeral the college experience really is, how it pales in significance compared to the larger issues of what some casually call "real life." Well, you might realize that. Nevertheless, college is an important time -- there's still so much to be learned.
For example, how many of you know what postmodernism is? Anybody? Do postmodernists know what postmodernism is? And if we're postmodern now, what can possibly follow?
But I digress. To all of you winter leave termers, it's good to have you back. You may feel bewildered at first, but you'll acclimate, I promise. I did. Sort of. Well, I'm working on it. But eventually I should be just fine.
I hope.
