The nines have been bumped from the stroller.
Any older sibling knows the feeling: when your parents bring home the new tiny bundle of joy, the lavish days of being wheeled from play-date to play-date are over. Younger brother is smaller, cuter, a lot more defenseless and your spot in the stroller is gone. Some of the washed-up, older toddlers handle their new walking duties well; others, like myself, are caught trying to sell their new baby brother on the street for a negotiable price. Regardless of how we handle it, though, we're never getting back in the baby carriage.
Returning to Dartmouth after my freshman summer was almost more exhilarating than coming to Hanover my freshman fall. I spent the summer at home in Washington, D.C., working downtown and pretending to be adult on my lunch breaks. Driving back into Hanover was like seeing a celebrity in person -- I had thought of the campus and the people so much over the summer that seeing it again was almost surreal. Instead of being greeted by a group of what looked like poorly dressed speed addicts and heading off into the wilderness, I was greeted by the group of friends that I couldn't wait to live with and had spent the entire summer missing. Now, after a year here, I have finally learned the schedule of the Novack line, on what day Collis serves chocolate chip scones and that Carson is technically part of the library. It seemed like everything was going to be as wonderful as last year, but with more confidence and more friends. Until I remembered that we're not the little ones anymore.
There are tens everywhere, looking just as ecstatic and exhausted as I had felt after Orientation week. They're in the basements and in Collis and they drag their boxes back from the Hop. They look happy and at home and annoyingly adorable. They're the freaking babies.
And they're living it up. Fresh meat, shmen, sh*theads, whatever you want to call them, they're the babies. Even I have indulged in a few "fresh meat" jokes with my friend, but what does that make us? Then I had the horrifying realization that I had basically been calling myself rotting beef for the past month. Does this mean that it's no longer endearing and cute to not know where buildings are? No more free T-shirts? Where are all of the organizations trying to convince me to join their blitz list?
I wallowed in my washed-up toddler status for a few days, wearing my '09 Night at the Hop shirt and sweetly staring at pictures of Noah Riner '06 and my Freshman Trip. I unpacked my room and ran into a lot of people that I hadn't even realized that I had missed until I saw them again.
It wasn't until I had spoken to at least four or five classmates that I had semi-forgotten about over the summer that I genuinely realized that I'm a sophomore. Now, the first question after "How was your summer?" is "What's your D-plan?" A tenth of our class is already scattered around the world, studying languages or government or theater somewhere, and it seems like half of us will be gone in the winter. I'll be in California next term, and by the time I come back even more of us will be gone or be returning, and then it's sophomore summer, the quintessential Dartmouth experience that I've been picturing since my first Dartmouth tour. We're in it. With D-plans and LSAs and off-campus housing and rush, we're totally in it, immersed in Dartmouth. We're definitely not the babies anymore, but who wants the stroller anyway? Right now, it seems like a lot more fun to be walking with the older kids.
