I was sitting in my room last night, a half-smoked Camel Filter casually dangling from my lips, wrapping up the evening's reading of "Richard III" for the next morning's Shakespeare class, listening to some Smashing Pumpkins album "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Pretentiousness," I think feeling rather Edgar Allan Poe-esque, when I heard a knock on the door.
"Come in," I bellowed, but it was a happy bellow, a come-on-in-and-suck-on-my-aura bellow.
Two pointy figures poked in their young heads, one male, one female. "Hi!" the female head chirped, beaming incessantly. The two visitors proceeded to introduce themselves as "double-zeroes" who live on my hall. "We just wanted to introduce ourselves, because you're the only person on the floor we haven't met. You're sort of an enigma to everybody."
So I'm the Boo Radley of New Hamp, I thought. I'm the potential serial killer (which, for those of you who have inspected the photo of me accompanying this column, should come as no great shock).
As it turned out, about a dozen of these bubbly double-zeroes had crowded around the doorway of my room by now, all anxiously peering in to get a good look at the local John Wayne Gacy and his smoke-filled den of horrors. I tried to play it cool.
"Yeah, well, I'm not here a lot."
"I told them you were probably working on a thesis," offered the Undergraduate Advisor, who had appeared on the scene in that quasi-authoritarian yet goofily-just-one-of-the-crowd UGA way.
Probably working on a thesis, I thought. Of course. Only the sheer magnitude of a thesis could explain the sicko behavior of a senior who -- can you fathom it? -- doesn't go out of his way to effectuate super-chumminess with the local freshman wags. Must be a thesis, because who wouldn't love hanging out with these people?
And isn't it ironic? Don't you think?
The conversation kind of dissipated after that -- one of the double-zeroes observed that she didn't like the smell of smoke, and so they all went on their merry little way. Still, the incident made me think: why does Dartmouth seem so very anxious to get me to socialize with my neighbors? Every day it's another blitz about Pancake Night or All-You-Can-Eat Headcheese Breakfast or whatever else. Sure, I remember the appeal of these exciting events from my own freshman year -- back then hearts were aflutter at the prospect of the John Cusack Movie Marathon in Brace Commons ("They're showing 'The Sure Thing' AND 'One Crazy Summer?' Color me divinely blessed!").
These days, however, it all seems highly unnecessary. I've been here three years already, I have plenty of friends, I don't particularly feel that I need any more. As for my becoming some kind of mentor to these, well, teenagers, forget it. Every time I find myself trying to explain Dartmouth or advise about Dartmouth I am overwhelmed by hostile torrents of cynicism.
"Dartmouth? It's just one fee after another. Can't pay for registration? Late fee, which makes sense, because if you can't afford to register you certainly can afford to register plus fifty bucks. Wait, I shouldn't have said that, there's probably a fee for it -- an administration-bashing fee. Plus the P.E. fees, dorm damage fees, music locker fees, bike fees, parking fees, speaking fees, breathing fees, existential fees.
"And declaring a major -- forget it. Either you can't find the professor whose signature you need because he's off on sabbatical in Bali trekking with the ancient blue-tongued yak-hunters of the Squash Mountains, or the one course you absolutely have to take to complete your area of study isn't being offered in the years 1996-2015 (but is still, of course, listed in the Organzation, Regulations and Courses book). Don't be late with that major card, though, because they'll charge a fee for it.
"And if the major doesn't get you the food will -- eight bucks for a chickenburger, twelve bucks for a salad, or something like that. Anyway, they charge a fee for it.
"Not to mention the $200 Biology textbook and the $170 Women's Studies reader ... and, uh, I'm sure there's a fee somewhere in there, too."
You get my point. Is this the kind of skewed perspective to which you want to expose your touchingly naive double-zero minds? Let's face it, they'd probably be better off with a serial killer.
