'10 Guy: "Recently, I've started believing in God."'08 AD: "Oh, really? Why's that?"'10 Guy: "Oh, because ... like ... only good things happen to me." Overheard from Oct. 27, 2006; and later reprinted as a best Overheard of the year.
- This spring, after years of wrangling with immigration, my favorite uncle finally married the woman he loves, who until now has lived in Costa Rica. Michelle and her 11-year-old daughter, America, have since moved into his bungalow in suburban South Portland, Maine. Their life is not glamorous. Their spanglish ain't pretty. But the stars in little America's eyes, at an end-of-the-summer barbecue, watching the lobsters crawl around the lawn, before their hissing destiny
I wish I could make this shit up. I stood there, as America giggled, and recognized echoes of my own delighted once-upon-a-time, when the world was brave and new and mine for the taking. When I arrived in a land of endless opportunity, where the laws were just, and everyone was kind, and good, and eager to sleep with me. When I arrived at Dartmouth College.
- Is drunk. Big drunk. What. Big drunk forever and ever, amen.
Is a game. Where's Waldo: My Brain edition. Get it?
"The reason I think I am important is that I know everything."
Har har. Nope.
"La la, my teeth is perfect, blue birds sing wherever I go, doors unlock, boys buy me drinks, my legs is longgg and my SATs is better than yourrrs."
Heh. Blessed are the freshman girls, for theirs is the kingdom.
"Recently, I've started believing in God..."
Nein danke. Not my brain. Well, not anymore. Okay fine, four years ago, yes. That was me: So brutally naive, philosophizing on the porch at Collis, as if the whole world was my cloister. Oyster. Whatever.
- "Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream..." What I first thought was a dreamland became an environment where I feel like a second-class citizen. As a gay man uninvolved in Greek life, I'm objectively a social failure at Dartmouth.
But maybe only here, at a school whose culture is such an all-encompassing closed-circuit, could I have become so estranged from myself and my subjective worth. I became an alien in my own mind. I began to think of myself as inherently flawed. I began to think of myself as worth less than a heterosexual version of myself would be, and f*ck it. No one wants to hear this shit. I don't even want to hear this shit.
- Am feeling sobered. Am getting older.
Take two. Aloha, bitches! How's college treating you?
Fail. Can't think cohesive, besides intricate plans to [redacted] all the a cappella groups on campus. But alas. Can't talk about that shit in the paper. Can't think it, either. Ding that thought like a whack bitch in a tube top.
Lucidity lurks too close. Need drink. Am plagued by perceptions "A city built on a hill cannot be hidden" the gospel according to Matthew.
Loves me, loves me not: Is the College on the Hill.
- America with the stars in her eyes, or those lobsters clawing the sides of the pot: These days I identify with both. On the one hand, being back for senior year feels like a fresh start, but hopefully with enough perspective to stay detached from the social fray. On the other hand, I just bent over backwards and turned this column into a po-mo mess in order to incorporate all these random-ass Gertrude Stein quotes, as a mission from a secret society which reminds me just how insecure and anxious for social approval I really am.
At least, I think it's a secret society, and not just someone with a fake e-mail account fcking with my head. Don't they tap bitches in the spring? Someone is fcking with my head.
But that's the thing "I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself." I have plenty of reasons to be skeptical, to doubt everything here the very morality of this college and its social hierarchy but somehow, when someone says jump, I still jump.
All it takes is a fresh face to kiss, or a thesis to write, or an insane party to go to, and believe it or not like it or not I'm back in the dream.
