Mirror
An Ode to the Awkward
When I imagined winter term on campus, I didn't picture myself yelling through plexiglass to order food at Foco.
Emma ('23) is a Mirror writer from Chicago, Illinois. She hopes to major in some combination of English and geography, studies opera and is a member of the Dartmouth Rude Mechanicals. Emma also enjoys hoarding house plants, has strong opinions about musicals and hopes you had a good time reading this bio.
When I imagined winter term on campus, I didn't picture myself yelling through plexiglass to order food at Foco.
For some Dartmouth students, Greek life is as quintessential to campus culture as freezing New Hampshire winters and rigorous academics. Though Greek life offers positive connections and genuine support networks for some, for others, a house is not always a home.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began almost a full year ago, I’ve thought a lot about the future of art. If art is a mode of self-expression, what happens when your sense of self, removed from the places and people that shape it, is rocked? If art is a vessel for our joy, what happens when the sources of joy change? I was afraid that life in lockdown would make us too tired to create things, or that stress and lack of materials would immobilize us even when we wanted to create things. I hoped that making things was such an inherently human act that it would pull us through the wildest of circumstances.
The prospect of living in a dorm is, for many new students, one of the most foundational parts of college life. Somewhere between the buzzing excitement of move-in day and the bittersweet last glance through the door before leaving on break, many develop soft spots for their little rooms. When walking back to the dorms after a long night of studying in the library, some students even find themselves unthinkingly saying that they’re “heading home.”
Now seems like an odd time for a dance club to be having a renaissance. However, the Dartmouth Classical Ballet Theater, a student group dedicated to offering free, inclusive dance classes, has emerged from this unusual year leaping higher than ever. Having extended its reach across the student body (with beautiful port de bras), DCBT is starting this year en pointe.
Is your quarantine routine starting to feel drab? Are you looking for fresh ways to bond with your new floormates? These 10 activities, which you can do no matter where in the world you’re quarantined, are both socially distanced and sure to jazz up your day.
Dear ’24s, Chances are, you didn’t imagine spending your freshman year online and in quarantine.
Nearly every essay I wrote during my first two terms at Dartmouth was composed at 10 a.m. on a Saturday, sitting in the lobby of Baker-Berry with a King Arthur Flour scone and an over-cinnamoned cappuccino in front of me. I’d never had any reason to believe my writing ritual was problematic, but when faced with my first essay of the remote term, composed at home and far from Blobby, I came to a grave realization: I was incapable of writing without KAF. Playing both Pavlov and his dogs, I had unwittingly conditioned myself to rely on the ritual.
There is a small portrait of William Shakespeare stuck to my computer, mustachioed and smiling under the sunglasses drawn onto his face. “Today is the day,” I tell Shakespeare every morning when I sit down at my desk. “Today is the day I make you proud!”
