I knew this would happen. Story of my life. Man, I used to hate it here. Or at least act like I did. And now, just as I'm realizing I actually do like it here, when this place starts to feel a little bit like home, it's time for me to go. Not exactly -- I mean, I still have another term and a half, so it's a little early in the game for nostalgic laments, but whatever -- you know what I mean. And if you don't, you will -- eventually.
Senioritis. It's a term that's often bandied about, but what does it really mean? In high school, senioritis meant blowing off your classes to play PlayStation or smoke a joint in the parking lot of 7-11 (adolescence in suburban New Jersey being what it is and nothing more). But in college, senioritis is a whole different affliction. The sense of escapism isn't there in part because you can play PlayStation or smoke almost anytime you want in college. Honestly, I think one of the main reasons college is so obscenely expensive is because the price tag alone can motivate kids to go to class. I'm no math major, but if you work out the numbers, each class you skip winds up costing something like $5 billion in tuition. But the escapism of high school senioritis, the sense of needing to just get away for a while, is replaced with a completely different, and not any better, feeling: the pressing urgency to remember these last few days, weeks, months as the "time of your life." The need to take a sort of faded, sepia-tinged mental photograph of everything about Dear Old Dartmouth.
Because there's a lot that you're going to want to remember forever, in the classroom and outside of it. I've read a ton of really great stuff that's changed the way I look at the world. And I've also had a ton of great conversations, staying up 'til the wee hours of the morning talking about religion, Art with a capital "A," philosophy, sports, whether or not it's possible to boot translucently if you drink enough water. Stuff like that. One of the greatest feelings, provided the hangover's not too strong, is to wake up on a Sunday morning and try to piece together drunken memories from the night before. To try to make sense of all the unexplained drinking injuries you picked up in various basements; to try to remember all the drunken blitzes you never should have sent and then pretend like nothing happened and go hit the books. There's something divine in the dichotomy.
This is what makes college special. In the Bible, it says, "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." While we may not be full-fledged adults trying to hack it out in the real world (I shudder to think), we're certainly no longer children. For most of us, we don't have a war to go off and fight, an event that defines a generation and teaches us, almost overnight, how to be men and women. So college becomes our war and the battle is internalized. We deal in philosophies and abstracts. We fight to define ourselves by what we do everyday. And eventually we all have to start putting away our childish things. But that doesn't mean we can't have fun while doing it.
There's a gloom that lurks in the uncertainty of our future. At some point, everyone has to worry about job interviews, career paths, grad school (although grad school might not be an option for me since I've somehow managed to go through close to four years of college without ever speaking in class, so there are very few professors who even know my name, let alone would be willing to write a letter of recommendation for me). But that gloom shouldn't bring you down.
Over time, this column has become increasingly self-referential (a trend that apparently shows no signs of fading just yet). But I don't think of myself as a columnist. I don't walk into parties and go, "What's up, ladies, it's me, the columnist from The D." (At least I hope I don't ... but it wouldn't be the most pathetic line I've dropped at parties, unfortunately.) This is just something I do. I try not to get all preachy in this column (although I did lob a Bible quote at you) and I'm not going to get up on a soap box and start shouting out all that carpe diem crap (you're smarter than that). But this column does have a distinct purpose in mind: I want you to like it here. I want you to realize how fortunate you are to be here, in the bubble of college in general and at Dartmouth in particular.
Even if you claim to hate this school, even if you rail against it in dozens of columns (endlessly repeating yourself like a broken record -- and overusing parenthetical interjections ad nauseam), even if you don't think this is a place you could ever love, forget all that. You'll have the rest of your life to be bitter and cynical. Make your time here count. I'm sure you've heard that from countless other people, but that's my two cents. Take it for what it's worth.
