Dartmouth Listed: Similies for the Dartmouth experience
By Alex Howe
Published on Friday, November 17, 2006
Dartmouth has fraternities, and they are much too important. Students drink, but are also smart. Sometimes people hook up.
Oops! Looks like I just wrote every Mirror article ever. Not to worry, Nova: I'm an English major. Let's think of new ways to write the same thing!
Your Wealthy Midget Uncle
Like your wealthy midget uncle, the Dartmouth experience is rich and too short. Despite the jokes you make about it, it is your ticket to success and you will return to it often.
Open-Bar Wedding
Dartmouth is like an open-bar wedding. Invitations to both are highly coveted, and the funniest and most debauched movies are based on them ("Wedding Crashers" and "Animal House"). While attendees may be intelligent, intelligent discussion is not rewarded: The premium is on gossip and well-established provincial cliché ("Can you believe her dress?" and "Ragey-boot sickblitz; awkward?"). Both feature entirely too much drinking by necessity and design. Both Darmouth and open-bar weddings claim and vastly overstate a culture of random hook-ups. Dressing terribly is condoned (bridesmaids, the DOC). In general, ritual and tradition are critical and the center of each is lasting relationships (awww).
The Animal Kingdom
In the jock culture that is Dartmouth, bigger and stronger means status. Fraternity meetings are animalistic. Also, like sharks, we can't play football to save our lives.
Approaching a Black Hole
Bear with me. Like approaching the event horizon on opposite day, time speeds up the closer we get to graduation. On a non-opposite day, what lies beyond (graduation, the black hole itself) is unimaginable.
No advanced physics classes or late-night heartfelt conversations can prepare us -- it is simply beyond our understanding. We can guess, though, that the arrival (to the real world, to Dimension X) will be extremely strange, and that normal laws (of physics, of blitz etiquette) will no longer apply, making us incredibly uncomfortable.
The Black Hole Metaphor You Just Read
Non-stop bullsh*t, like your English 5 essays and sorority rush.