The schedule of college groups volunteering over spring break was made months in advance, so I had plenty of time to plot how I would prove myself a better human being than the Harvard-bots: arm wrestling, perhaps, or a contest of SAT-style analogies.
Go! Dartmouth is to Harvard as Snoop Dogg is to Jay-Z; they may be marginally more succesful, but we're (making an ostentatious show of) enjoying ourselves! They're the president of the (record) company; we build our image around making it look easy. They're the teachers pet; we're the cool kid pulling A-minuses and (lying about) not studying.
More Ivy League rap analogies! Yale, Harvard's archrival, is Nas - good, but far too serious. Brown is Lil' Jon: of questionable talent, drug-quirky and entirely without rigor: "What?" passes for lyrics, optional grades pass for a degree. Cornell is the Notorious B.I.G.: big, ugly, dead. Penn is Vanilla Ice, the punchline: from day one, they didn't belong in the business. (I just hit the creativity wall, so Columbia and Princeton will have to be the Ying-Yang Twins: dumb and stupid.)
Over time, the tricks of memory set upon the small envelope I received from Harvard. Now I remember it as a torn-off scrap of postcard with a message in drunken scrawl: "Your In!... jk! rofl, no srsly, y did u apply?"
Needless to say, I was paying attention when the Harvard kids arrived.
Every evening after dinner, they had what appeared to be a scheduled intellectual roundtable. I overheard only a snippet: "...soviergn territorial states." Indeed.
Hoping to find an electronic parallel to their daily pedantry, I visited Harvard's equivalent of Bored at Baker, Bored at Lamont.
As it turns out, the kids in Cambridge put their pants on just like we do: one unbearably horny leg at a time. The much-lamented brutal gossip and strident racism of Bored at Baker (Go Big Green!) are distinctly absent from Bored at Lamont (a popular post calling for the assassination of Barack Obama appeared to be archly sarcastic). But the thrust of the Harvard messages matches ours: It seems that, when it comes to anonymous online environments, the Bloodhound Gang was right: We ain't nothin' but mammals.
When I logged on, Bored at Lamont was so dominated by gay men soliciting anonymous hook-ups. This post appeared at 6:14 a.m.: "don't gays ever sleep?"
Later that morning: "Harvard has people who are experts in every field. Who is an expert on free online porn?"
I never worked with the Harvard kids in Biloxi, but my friend Aaron did. Imagine my delight when he reported, unprompted and unaware of my residual rejection anxiety, that they struck him as "nervous dorks."
Zing! Bap! Booya! Bangarang!
How about those apples? No, Harvard, I am serious, how do those apples strike you? In the face, I hope.
Aaron is an AmeriCorps volunteer. I thought he was pretty cool when we first met: he dropped out of college, briefly lived in a seedy hotel behind a strip club in Vegas with his girlfriend, and joined the Red Cross in New Orleans after Katrina, where he became - blissfully Bachelor's-less - a regional supply-distribution coordinator.
Then I saw his MySpace picture. It captures Aaron, who is Jewish, tapdancing on Hiter's grave. He silkscreened the image onto a t-shirt and a zip-up hoodie, which he wears frequently.
Then, somehow, he became yet cooler. The long-distance no-contact high-five is now common: You simply perform the motion toward a friend across the room, who simultaneously reciproctates. Aaron's innovation is to slap the bottom of your forearm at the height of the motion: the air high-five with audio!
Music tournaments are a fixture of Hands On Gulf Coast. Invented by Janos Marton '04 and implemented by Guillermo Olivos '05, the format is a March Madness-style bracket of one-on-one match-ups, one song versus another. Every night, two songs are played during dinner. Everyone votes for their favorite and the winner advances.
Music tournaments are cheap, addictive thrills, the best idea UGAs never had. The most recent contest aimed to determine the best song of the '90s. The final, I am sad to say, was 2Pac and Dr. Dre's "California Love" versus Coolio's "Gangsta'a Paradise."
What a farce: a song with a vocoder chorus versus a track recorded for a forgotten movie by a rapper who made more appearances on Nickelodeon than BET, with no less at stake than the decade of our youth. It was a championship analogous to an Expos-Blue Jays World Series (now impossible, thankfully) - a betrayal of the spirit of the contest.
I bring this up because one of the Harvard kids was hopelessly confounded by the voting mechanism of the tournament, which consists of the names of the two songs printed on a little sheet of paper. You tear it in half and hand your choice to a volunteer walking around with a collection bucket (yearningly labeled the Bucket of Truth).
Thankfully, I witnessed his confusion. I triumphantly announced it at the end of dinner, explaining how happy it made me as a (semi-) student of a J.V. Ivy (credit for that phrase going to Neel Shah '05, I believe).
Harvard aside: Their new president is named Dr. Faust. The ascendent leader of the world's flagship intellectual institution is named... Faust. Is this happening? Wouldn't that be like a woman named Auntie Christ becoming Secretary General of the U.N.?
I enjoyed meeting real Harvard students. As a rule, kids from my high school don't go to Harvard, and I love them all the more for it. I'll close with an illustrative anecdote from my friend John.
"It all goes back to when Scott used to drive Jeff home from cross country practice. Back in those glory days that bastard would drive on the wrong side of the road until Jeff said 'vagina.' If he did not find it within himself to utter said female body part out loud before another car was about to hit them head on, Scott would drop him off on the side of the road wherever they were and make him walk home from there. Cruel? Maybe. Justified? I think so."
E-mail Alex at howeas@gmail.com
