At Dartmouth, we all encounter the polite conversations in which we are perfectly content with treading permanently at the surface level. I'm sure there are times when someone has asked you how you're doing, and you wanted to spill our guts on what's really going on in your life, but instead you chose to say, "Fine," and continue on your way to class. Here are a few other imagined, impolitic responses by a hypothetical individual fed up with empty questions.
Question: "Hey man, what's up?"Answer: "I'm good, just finishing up some homework."Real Response: I've spent the past 12 hours in the 1902 Room building a tower of books shielding my laptop screen so I can surf Facebook and Gawker without feeling guilty.
Q: "Last night was really fun, we should definitely hang out again in the near future. Lunch tomorrow?"A: "Mhm, it was fun. How's next week? I'm swamped with work until then :("R: We were drunk and the music was good. I thought you looked cute in your black dress. But when we talked before, after and even during, if I'm totally honest, I just couldn't help but think how boring you are. Text me sometime and we'll hang out, maybe randomly study together in the library, or get drunk at a party and sloppily make out, but I'd really prefer if we agreed to never make this a thing.
Q: "How'd you do on that test? I was expecting the prof to grade fairly hard, but it wasn't too bad."A: "Yeah, I definitely did better than I deserved given that I didn't study for it at all." R: Anxiety led to procrastination for days, then for weeks. I'm up to snuff with the latest rumors of ghastly celebrity scandals, and I've viewed every iTunes movie trailer coming out for the next six months, but still my knowledge of the early Weimar Republic is very nearly as shallow as TMZ's journalistic integrity. A last-second Hail Mary from a dusty 2010 study guide designed by an intrepid do-gooder saved my sorry ass with B+ material. You can judge me, but I dressed up that B+ material with A- writing myself. I'm marking it down in the "wins" column.
Q: "Last night, completely absurd. Shots on shots on shots. How'd yours play out? Any good stories?"A: "Yo, very crazy man, I can't remember half of it but let's just say it was fairly insane."R: Three hours meandering down YouTube rabbit holes coupled with intermittent sheer boredom masturbation did little to build a game-time mentality as night approached. Pounding at my locked door and a casual lie to cover my onanistic indulgences "Dude what do you want? I'm trying to nap before raging" led to one, two, three games of pong. I shirked most cups through a combination of faux-sloppy spillage or brazen cup-tossing leavened with compensatory no-f*cks-given machismo trash talk. Still, the four-beer buzz made it hard to think by the end of game three. Drunk and feeling out of place, I reluctantly trudged to the night's biggest scene out of obligation to overwhelming social pressures that dictate who is in and who is out. But playing the wallflower appealed for about five minutes. On the way out, I bumped into a girl I'd seen in class, fell into a heavy conversation with all the intimacy and intensity of two drunk people who believe they're having a moment, and then we bumped lips passionately. Those five minutes became the main fabric from which I wove my night's overarching mytho-narrative. Bro, I mean, like nine games of pong and a make-out. Solid night, but I'm real hungover for sure.
Q: "What's your major? What house are you in?"A: "Economics, and Alpha Beta Gamma."R: What do you hope to gather from this information? A label by which you can sort me easily? If only the question were innocuously determining what mutual friends we may have, where we've seen each other before or whether we're likely to run into each other in the future. Now I fear that every word I speak and every action I take from this moment on may filter through this lens. F*ck your stereotypes, I refuse to let perceptions define me. Rip the veil from your eyes and rid your mind of this poison. Whatever you've heard about Alpha Beta Gamma is definitely not true we're a diverse group of guys, some good and some bad, just like most anywhere. And econ majors have a quirky liberal arts bent as much as any comparative lit major, I swear.
