What's that you say? You're a freshman?
Oh that's great! Good for you. But what about me?? What about my rights? I'm a grand old senior dammit! What does that get me? Nine months, that's what.
Yes, indeed, the old mother has conceived another litter of 1000 strapping young go-getters and in nine months she'll eject us out of her proverbial womb, and we'll emerge, sobbing and probably throwing up, and we'll probably sleep a lot afterwards.
But of course that's not what's important now. No sir. What is summarily relevant to me is the pregnancy. The next nine months of stuff is what I care about.
This past Friday I found myself walking alone from one end of campus to the other at 5 a.m. Imagine my surprise to see that the campus was entirely deserted. There was literally no one awake. And all I could think of was how can anyone be asleep? There's no class. There's nothing to do. It's orientation week. The only person I saw was a woman outside Topliff. No, this was not some floozie hanging out down by the gym looking for a good time. She was instead a woman walking her three black terriers around the neighborhood at 5 a.m. on Saturday morning.
I see no reason to sleep! There are a million things left for me to do. I'm not done with Dartmouth yet. While mathematically one might say that I am in fact in the last quarter of my college career, I think we all know that math and science are a load of poppycock. I mean, after all, if you believe what math and science say, then our lifespan is exactly one million billion zillionth of a nanosecond in the course of the universe. It's true, you can look it up. One million billion zillionth of a nanosecond. Whoa now! Doesn't that make feeling too tired to go out and live at 5 a.m. seem a little bit insignificant? Apparently the woman with the terriers seems to think so. And I'm with her. The terrier lady's living this life properly. Long live the terrier lady! May her one million billion zillionth of a nanosecond be filled with all the 5 a.m. terrier walking that she can handle and then some.
After all, what other time of day is there than 3-5 a.m. when you can look around and say "Hmmm I don't have much to do right now, my schedule's pretty clear for the next couple hours, Rosie isn't on till 10 I think I'll go walk the terriers." And especially during interim! Orientation is not the time to attend seminars and make sure that you get your 8 hours in the rack so you can take on the world bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning. That's called life.
Life is the part where you have to think about 5 a.m. and wish that you could still be up then, but you can't. Then retirement is when you actually do give up that thought and resign yourself to doing what everybody else is doing. You throw in the towel. But we're not even born into real life yet and we're retiring to our beds early in preparation. This isn't the orientation for College. It's the orientation for the orientation for life. We should be orienting ourselves with 5 a.m. and the freedom of such an ungodly hour. How else will we know what we miss twenty years from now (unless we are terrier-lady-like in our persistence).
So prepare to be oriented! Orient yourself with things that are not part of the official orientation. Once the official orientation ends, the next one begins, and so on and so on.
For, you see, the 00's only have nine months of orientation left. I just found out how to get telephone service turned on, for example. It was exhilarating. I still get goosebumps. There's a bazillion gagillion things with which you need to orient yourself, and I'm playing catch up right now, as are a lot of my friends and acquaintances. And I'm certainly not trying to catch up with the departmental teas etc. that I went to while some senior was out running around at 5 a.m. muttering to himself about what beautiful terriers those were.
