They say first impressions are lasting. But rather than using this introduction to impress upon you our senior year thoughtfulness and wisdom, we'll cut to the chase. We are heavily flawed. Hopefully that's made clear by the title. What Have We Done seemed to fit because if we've learned anything in the past three years, it's that we are pros, champs and all-around bosses...at messing up. We are the elusive defective Dartmouth student. The question "What (ON EARTH) have I done?" has become the unfortunate mantra of our college careers. We've hummed it to ourselves watching professors sign withdrawal cards, sung it loud as our planes touched down in study-abroad countries about which we knew nothing and beat ourselves over the head with it after our worst failures of romantic tact.
Cataloging our blunders began during the winter of our freshman year. At the height of the doldrums, we started a blog meant for our eyes only as a way to write and vent and keep in touch during terms spent away. We had been best friends for three months, but in those days a lot of things, including our status as college students, felt like they would last forever. So, rather than writing a research paper and a lab report, we sat on a tie-dye beanbag chair in Fahey-McLane eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch and marshmallow fluff sandwiches and wrote our first blog post to imaginary readers about SAD-induced depression and the perils of the Freshman 15(00). We titled it "For When Shit Gets Heavy (And You Do Too)." It was wildly popular amongst its two-person readership.
By the end of the term, we would secretly chronicle a bout with pink eye, back-to-back all-nighters, sobriety and lack thereof, general irresponsibility resulting in the repeated loss of important personal identification items, paper title-writing, a condescending cop on the night shift, turtlenecks, shower singers and stalkers, to name a few. The blog was our way to tackle the misadventures on which we embarked while stumbling through the arctic tundra that is February in Hanover. It helped us swallow the massive pill that is Dartmouth College and keep laughing when the going got rough.
But freshman year came and went. (Beware of this, '17s. Don't let it happen to you.) We got busy with all of the things that college sophomores get busy with, and the blog dwindled to a post every eight months or so.
This summer, together in New York City, we reread it. It feels as sentimental as it is stupid, familiar as it is naive. Yes, we have learned. And we've even grown up a bit too, despite our earlier belief in our own timelessness. We have collectively trotted the globe, dyed our hair, cut it off (with nail clippers...do not do this), lied about our identity, had EBAs delivered to a tree stump, spent off-terms together and apart, seen death and felt unequivocally, wholly alive. And now here we are three bumpy years later, still standing. Still stumbling. Still screwing up a lot more than we care to admit.
We've found that, crouching at the starting line of the final lap of college, most of our peers fill their bucket lists with stuff they wish to do and see before they graduate. And some senior columnists of Mirrors past have given the greater Dartmouth community their final words of wisdom, divulging the many honest, smart things they have learned in college. We've admired them for three years, waiting for the heavens to part and shine this same wisdom down upon our bowed heads. Hanover's raining more than ever, and we're still waiting.
So for you, we will now abandon the wait and accept the inevitability of fiascos abound in the next nine months. We'll give you the uncut and unedited (just kidding we love our editors) retelling of the roller-coaster ride that is our final chapter in Hanover. We cannot guarantee wisdom any more so than we can sobriety. We also can't always guarantee we'll hit our deadlines. As of now, all we know for sure are the basics. We're Dartmouth students (though that clock keeps ticking). '14s (forever). SWUGs? We'll see. Mostly, we're just two college seniors dealing with the fact that the end is egregiously near and we have no idea what that means. We like to write, we like to laugh (once so hard that it resulted in the Pants-Wetting Debacle of 12S), we like each other and we like you.
We signed off on all of our old blog posts as one of our favorite hilarious historic BFF-duos who turned messing up into an art form. So we will continue to do so now. Stay tuned, friends. There's always more to come.
Yours,
Lucy and Ethel
