Breaking news: we are bringing home the bacon. Literally. By bacon, we mean both money and tiny swine. Thanks to our first donor (Seanie’s mom), the piglet fund has taken a turn toward the literal and has moved far, far (this is an exaggeration) away from the hypothetical. Amanda’s mom contributed a care package containing a pink plastic margarita glass and a felt Hello Kitty Easter basket full of gummies and candy. We’ll take it. Thanks, moms.
Our small successes inspired us to seize the Tuesday and hold a fundraiser bake sale. All was going relatively well up until the point when the vanilla cupcakes were pulled out of the oven. That’s when we realized we had no frosting, which our taste-testers informed us is “the most important part of the cupcake.” We stared piteously at the naked vanilla lumps and then at each other.
This shouldn’t have been a big deal — there was an easy fix on hand: all we had to do was walk across the street to Topside and purchase a can of Duncan Hines. Instead we decided to rebrand our cupcakes as “sweet bread” and abandon the absurd idea that anyone would want to purchase or eat them. We were so full of batter at this point that even the mere act of trying the so-called sweet bread stemmed from feelings of obligation, not desire. Afterward, we both went to Seanie’s room and Amanda watched Seanie win her umpteenth game of 2048.
Amanda: While Seanie continued to conquer 2048, I decided to do some serious soul searching. Senior spring has raised a variety of questions, most of which I have yet to answer. Normally I like to leave things up to chance by flipping a coin or shaking a Magic 8 Ball (I think I get this tendency from my grandma, who visits a psychic regularly), but with the post-grad world only half a term away, I decided it was time to buckle down and get some answers.
Naturally, I consulted BuzzFeed. Lucky for me, BuzzFeed quizzes pose questions that relate to my situation at the time, like: Which city should I live in? What career should I have? Am I hipster? Am I cool?
Some of the quizzes were applicable to the past, reaffirming where I stand here and now: Which Ivy League school should I attend? Dartmouth forever. Claro. Others were more abstract, but informative nonetheless: Who is my pop star best friend? Which Quentin Tarantino film am I? Am I a brunch superstar?
The following is a summary of who I am and what I should do with my life according to BuzzFeed: I should move to Paris. I should be a designer. If I were an arbitrary object, I would be a box of hangers. I should marry a pizza but eat a sandwich for lunch. I am mozzarella cheese. I am somewhere in between cool and uncool (lukewarm?), somewhere in the middle of hipster and not hipster. I am a winky face kiss emoji.
The good thing is, there are some noticeable patterns that make some sort of sense to me, and I have also learned some interesting things about myself that I did not previously know. Overall, BuzzFeed did me the immense favor of answering every one of the tough questions that have been plaguing me all term in less than 45 minutes.
Seanie: Perhaps it is just me, but the BuzzFeed quizzes are getting longer and longer. I have the attention span of a goldfish — except when I am playing 2048, during which I am able to stare at the screen hypnotized for hours at a time, unblinking and peaceful. But when it comes to clicking answers in an online quiz with questionable metrics and results that range from confusing to honestly mean (Princeton? Really?), I can’t do it for more than 30 seconds. Also, on the “are you cool?” test, I got “you are not cool.” I have known that since the first grade, when I literally broke my skull trying to climb onto the couch that my friend’s older sister designated “the cool kids’ couch”.
Circumstances made my lack of coolness all the more apparent last weekend. I went to visit my little brother at college in Maine, where he is finishing his freshman year. I can say this because not even he reads this: Brendan has always been cooler than me. In high school, he was one of those kids with the tight group of friends who called each other by their last names, and he started a still-thriving Facebook message thread after being ripped out of each other’s arms to go to college. I was kicked out of my friend group in the ninth-tenth grade (it was a lengthy and brutal process) and never quite recovered. I’ve been lucky enough in college to find the kind of friends who are going to stick around forever if I have anything to say about it, so I sometimes forget my roots.
Entering a new social situation brought me right back. I made the three-hour drive to Brendan’s college to surprise him for his birthday and met his girlfriend outside of his dorm. (He is also one of those people who got a girlfriend during orientation and yet people still think he is cool. He is literally that cool.)
Few things make me happier than being around my brothers, so it was a great day until it was night. I briefly considered bowing out of the whole “going out” thing and telling Brendan that I was tired and feeling sick and had to be up early, et cetera. But it was his birthday, and I figured that four years of college must have prepared me to be the cool older sister by now.
But alas. We arrived at one of their social houses to find many freshmen, jumping around on the dark dance floor and lunging at each other in greeting. There were cups of beer with cereal and chips floating around in them on a table near the front door. Also, a large bin of pink sorbet hollowed out in the middle from attendees plunging their hands in like animals. The party was objectively fun, and I did not know how to deal. I froze immediately and remained frozen for the entire hour that we stayed at the party. A creepy smile was plastered upon my face, showing that I felt completely natural and in my element.
My brother was kind enough to lug me around with him the whole night and even kinder to text me the next day apologizing that the night was “whack,” as if it was the party and not my utter lack of chill at fault.
And so we will leave Dartmouth, just as uncool, and acutely more self-aware about it.
Yours (20)4(8)ever,
Lucy & Ethel
