There is a certain period of time in college during which it remains kosher to be incapable of performing basic life operations in the absence of parental guidance. After said period of time, this thing called "personal initiative" enters the picture. Suddenly, magically, you feel self-motivation to do stuff like wash your sheets, file taxes, vacuum things and not eat Lucky Charms for breakfast, afternoon snack and post-dinner dessert every day of your life.
Or at least that's how we imagine it going, for other people. We cannot actually speak to this sudden, magical shift. Perhaps it's like learning how to ride a bike, when once you get it, it feels like you've always known. You say things like,"Of course I track my spending so as to avoid the humiliation of a rejected credit card in a crowded establishment!" That kind of thing seems like something we should instinctively do by this point.
Historically, we've justified our negligence with our busy academic schedules. We're here to do homework, not laundry, right? But for the past week, we've harbored this newfound, unsettling insecurity. Is it that we have the "personal initiative" for these tasks, but simply don't employ it? Or are we actually just inept? The questions all began with a visit from Amanda's mother.
Amanda: My mom and I are close. Recap of last week: on occasion she acts as my back-up alarm clock. This week, she came to campus for a visit. Now, my mom is the type of lady who likes to dive into things and get involved. I got used to this in high school, but I had not yet experienced the extent of her eagerness in college. This is how it manifested.
She came to class with me, not an uncommon thing for a visiting parent to do. But I know my mother, and I knew what a Dartmouth class would do to her. So I set some ground rules for her class participation:
- Don't talk
- Don't try to force me to talk
- Actually don't do anything except sit there
We sat in the back corner by the door, and I repeated the ground rules to her, though I should've known. This was my mother. The whole personal initiative business is kind of her thing. So when my professor prompted the class with questions about a Wordsworth poem, my mom pointed to a line in my textbook and asked me under her breath if she was allowed to say anything. I shook my head. A few minutes later, there was some commotion out in the hallway and she whispered to me again, this time asking if she could close the door. I shook my head. There was really nothing wrong with her closing the door except for the fact that it broke ground rule number three, and breaking ground rule number three is a slippery slope. After class ended, my mother was ecstatic anyway. She was beaming, talking about how enriching and inspiring and wonderful the hour had been. How she wished she could take the class with me and read all of the material listed on my syllabus.
And so I realized it: My mother is a better student than me. I don't know when this happened or what I can do to fix it.
Seanie: This week was laundry week. There is nothing that makes me feel so incompetent as laundry week.
It was last Sunday afternoon, and, standing amongst the mountainous pile, I lacked direction. For comfort, I asked myself the usual questions. Is it really that big of a problem if I refrain from doing my laundry for such a lengthy period of time? The clothing strewn across my floor has actually served as a sort of daybed for the other writer of this column. Does anyone else really notice or care if I wait until the situation becomes hazardous? My roommate has grown to accept my ways. The means of egress in my hall remain unblocked to my floormates. There is no downside.
And there lies my biggest problem. I tend to justify my most unacceptable actions by selectively locating the things that might possibly be construed as positive about them and blowing those things up until I can't see what's blatantly wrong with what I'm doing. In reality, not doing my laundry catapults my room into a state of disarray so severe that the prospect of having to set foot inside it or even anywhere near it triggers a feeling of impending doom. It becomes not a safe haven for mid-afternoon naps and other leisurely activities but rather a literal pigsty, fiery abyss of hell.
So on Sunday, there was nothing to do but resign myself to the task. I have spent the past days since sorting things into whites and darks, searching for quarters in the depths of my backpack, borrowing laundry detergent from the blessed people who leave theirs in communal spaces, loading, unloading, forgetting to start the machine, shrinking things to hobbit-size, not dry cleaning dry-clean only items, folding, shouting "DOWN WITH FOLDING," throwing everything into drawers and listening to Evanescence to numb it all.
We feel that there's nothing to do about these problems but wait. We wait for the light to come. We wait for the day that we do important things out of a natural sense of personal integrity. We wait.
Until then, with love,Lucy & Ethel
