Being and Dartmouthness
Some time ago, a female friend of mine told me she was amazed that I was both in a fraternity and a "good person." I wasn't sure how to respond.
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Some time ago, a female friend of mine told me she was amazed that I was both in a fraternity and a "good person." I wasn't sure how to respond.
A drunk alum tells me to enjoy this while I can. The real world, he says, is a lot less fun.
When I came to Dartmouth, some of my closest friends were women. But by the end of my freshman year, I barely spoke to women at all outside of passing hellos or frenzied, convoluted exchanges in the basement. The lack of female friendship in my life became a recurring frustration. What I sensed then and what I recognized once I left Dartmouth my junior year for an off-term was that it wasn't for lack of friendly women. There was something inside me getting in the way.
My parents are polar opposites in many ways. Their friends from college often express amazement that my dad, a football and baseball-playing SAE, ended up with my mom, who was a hippie flower child with hair down to her waist. On their first date, over dinner before one of my uncle's high school hockey games, my dad explained the rules and strategies of hockey to my mom. My mom reciprocated the lesson by explaining the concept of negative space in visual art.
As the end of my student life at Dartmouth nears, I'm finding myself looking for the people, events, significant characters and lessons that have defined the story of my class' four years here.
Through the low branches of the trees that line the road at the entrance to my high school lacrosse field, I see Aaron waiting for me on a patch of thick grass. He stands in front of the goal, an aluminum frame and frayed, hole-ridden netting, and lets one fly. I park the car and reluctantly step out into the August heat. Only a few years ago, this place was as ordinary to me as my bedroom. Now, my eye picks up every peculiar feature the sloping crown at midfield, the swampy drainage ditch next to the parking lot, the cluster of droopy pine trees by the main road.
When my close friend and lacrosse teammate decided to try out for a play this past fall, I responded with earnest, if cautious, encouragement. I was happy to see him branching out and trying new things, but deep down I doubted he could pull it off. I assumed, probably like most people, that lacrosse and theater had nothing in common.
We come to Dartmouth in a million different ways by car, by bus, by plane. Some come to Dartmouth because they hear it's a good school, only setting foot on campus for the first time at Orientation. Some scout Dartmouth for years and come to pursue a specific interest, from sports to music to business.
, At the end of Winter term at Dartmouth, the campus empties out. Relieved to be done with exams and the cold, students head exuberantly to the tropics, gleefully to the mountains or quietly to the familiarity of home. Hanover is left with a smattering of townspeople and professors. The only Dartmouth students left are the spring athletes, whose work has only just begun.
"Coulda, woulda, shoulda." That's what my dad always says when I start a sentence with "I should have..." It's infuriating. Sometimes I just need to decry the injustices that have befallen me. Let me wallow.
When I was six years old, my uncle gave me a lacrosse stick for my birthday. Every day after school, I would grab it from the bench in our kitchen and run outside to play catch against this thing called a Rebounder, a bouncy net that sends the ball straight back to you. The challenge was to see how many throws I could make without dropping the ball. Some days I could barely get to five, and on the best days I got close to 50.
There's a new feature on Facebook called Timeline that helps you assemble your life story on the Internet. I haven't switched to Timeline yet, but the tutorial page is full of slick graphics and videos with inspiring music that I have no doubt would make my own life story a lot more compelling. Displaying the story of our lives online shows that we have come a long way since the days of AOL Instant Messenger and its clunky "buddy info" and "away messages." Each month, 30 million people still log onto Instant Messenger, according to AOL. I'm not sure how they measure this exactly it's probably inflated, but even so, that number wouldn't shock me. Remember middle school? AIM was the go-to for talking to other kids, typically of the opposite sex, without being unbelievably awkward.
I'm getting pretty tired of writing about my life and my "experience" here at Dartmouth. As a writer you'd like to think that all it takes to write a good piece is a little soul searching, a few wistful anecdotes and a subtle turn in your conclusion paragraph.
Dirt: a timely issue for The Mirror, given our recent hazing scandal. We don't like dealing with dirty things here at Dartmouth. We prefer to keep our dirt in our basements.
When you visit a foreign country, you're often subjected to odd and sometimes prying questions or assumptions about your homeland. When I went to Ireland in fourth grade, kids always asked me if, being from America, I knew any movie stars. In France, the summer after my senior year, my host mother was convinced that people in America only ate fast food.
I think there's a lot to be said for breaking rules. Especially when they don't make sense.
Of all the benign questions I'm asked at holiday parties, the one I dread the most goes something like, "So tell me, how do you like Dartmouth?"
We all like to complain about Dartmouth winters with wild over-exaggerations hibernating in basements, braving the tundra and so on. But I don't think we actually hate it that much. From a distance, though, it does seem miserable. When that fateful day comes when I actually have to put pants on and get off the couch to pack, I would much rather stay put with my blanket and cookies. Bond-a-thons, pajamas and lazy afternoons with family and old friends are hard to walk away from.
I've always had a complicated relationship with satire because I'm pretty horrible at taking flak. I tend to think way too hard when I'm someone else's punch line, and I end up feeling stung by the most harmless of pokes from my friends.
One time during my sophomore year, as I was sitting in the Hop with my friends, an older guy in my fraternity came up and congratulated me for hooking up with a girl the night before. I felt my stomach clench as chuckles went around the table, and I don't think it was just my hangover or the undercooked Billy Bob on my plate. I pushed out a smirk and kept eating.