Striving To Be Better
Much of the press that has surrounded Dartmouth since I arrived here four years ago alludes to or points out that there are bad people on Dartmouth’s campus. Either that or good people who do bad things.
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Much of the press that has surrounded Dartmouth since I arrived here four years ago alludes to or points out that there are bad people on Dartmouth’s campus. Either that or good people who do bad things.
During freshman orientation, there are a few questions that, to be normal, you must ask people when you meet them. What’s your name? Where are you from? What’s your schedule? Where are you living on campus? The River? Ouch.
Did you know that you can purple something? Why don’t we use purple as a verb more often? Purple, like the way we feel about graduating: not quite blue, because at this point it’s kind of more funny than sad how little we know about where we’ll be in five months. Purple, like Amanda’s hair. Because Amanda purpled her hair. An interesting tactic for job interviews, but we’ll go with it.
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.
We will commence with an update on the status of our piglet fund and pending piglet. Neither a piglet nor a piglet source has been secured. The fund remains at $0.00. As of late, however, we have a lot of faith in anonymous donors and believe that something truly magical will happen.
Last week we said that senior spring is hilariously weird. This week, we were told that we are hilariously weird. We find that hilarious and weird. And so it goes.
Senior spring is hilariously weird. We’ve tried to understand it and the way it makes us feel, which means that we have spent much of the past week sitting on our bed (Amanda) and futon (Seanie), thinking. Which also means that for once, we have no stupid occurrences or behaviors to write about, not because we didn’t do stupid things, but because we truly didn’t do anything.
Chapter: The last. Question: How on earth did we get here?
There’s something about dealing with big things that makes us catastrophize the little ones. Looking into the mysterious labyrinth of our futures, we manage to stay calm by directing our sweat at the small stuff instead. Many self-help books would call this tactic counterintuitive and deeply flawed, but, as Fernando Pessoa once said: “In order to understand, I destroyed myself.”
Like many of our peers, we keep a mental list of all of the big things we need to accomplish at Dartmouth and beyond. Due to this ambitious mental life list, we often think of ourselves as being destined for greatness. College graduation used to seem like a respectable deadline, so one of the strangest things about senior winter has been coming to terms with how far we are from our lofty goals.
Though we constantly get emails from the registrar about applying for our degrees, letters from Class Council with Commencement information and blitzes from Career Services describing application deadlines and resume drops, there’s something about winter that makes us feel like freshmen all over again. We have reassembled our freshman year intramural hockey team and are taking the Green League by storm.
In our previous column, we were so overjoyed about finally making it back to campus after our nationwide flightmare that we forgot to mention how we got here.
Winterim was once only three weeks long, and those three weeks were completely torturous after freshman fall. Jan. 3, 2011, the day of our 11W reunion, seemed better than Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year all wrapped into one. We were hyper-aware of all the deficiencies of our home existence — no friends, no four-day-a-week sleepovers, no weird semi-intellectual conversations with strangers. We withered away without them, waiting for 11W like it was the only thing keeping us alive. Seanie often watched Dartmouth webcam’s live feed of the Green with a guarded secrecy that made her feel like she was doing something illegal rather than just pathetic. Amanda alternated between hibernating and eating ice cream.
Hello. Merry finals season. Happy Thanksgiving. Merry Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa. Happy New Year. Good winterim. The next time you hear from us, all of this will be over, grades will be in, turkeys eaten in celebration of things that should not be celebrated, presents unwrapped, resolutions made and resolutions shattered.
Though the origins of the What Have We Done blog date back to freshman year, the truth is, the What Have We Dones began the second we started forming personalities. We recently uncovered one home video of Seanie dramatically performing a song she composed called “I like myself” and another of Amanda’s failed attempt to walk on water.
Three falls ago, upon leaving Dartmouth for our first winter break, Amanda blitzed Seanie with the subject line “Spotted.”
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.
During our sophomore year, a friend made an observation about us that rang disturbingly true: we love to talk about terms.
Week four of the final lap has been fairly routine and nondescript, as the middle weeks of a Dartmouth quarter so often are. As always, we have a lengthy list of "What Have We Dones" to confess, and for the sake of tradition, we will name some of them here. We collectively got an exorbitantly expensive parking ticket, received the comment "no" from a professor beneath an answer on a quiz and prioritized standing in the KAF line over attending a mandatory meeting. Seanie realized that one of her '17 trippees is unequivocally cooler and more pulled together than she is. Amanda realized that she was probably the only person on campus who missed rush, had a truly "good time" just like Owl City and Carly Rae Jepsen do and started making up new lyrics for songs for 14W rush. To top it all off, we committed our most egregious failure to meet our column deadline yet. We do, however, retain a good feeling about next week.
Week three (through week seven) of a Dartmouth quarter means that midterms are upon us, and it's time to come up with a new crop of excuses for why we simply cannot study. The two of us met to review the "progress" we have made so far.