"My name is Matthew and I'm a Gmail convert."
"Hi Matthew."
"It's been three months since I last used Blitz." (Gentle applause.)
So in other, more pressing news, today I was thinking how relieved I am that no one asks anyone to "get lunch" anymore. You remember "lunch," right? When those not-drunk-enough conversations would tragically morph into totally sober, daylight meals wherein you would stare at each other and say things like "How's your term going?" while thinking to yourself, "Reading the adjectives on Collis baked goods = soooo much better than eating them."
Why would I want to watch you put grotesque things in your mouth while you're telling me how lame all the other kids were on your FSP last term? When did we become certain that we are not the lame ones? So anyway, getting lunch is dead, and good riddance.
And then it hit me: Perhaps all across campus, people are still asking each other to lunch. It's just that no one is asking me. You clever rascals have wised up to me, haven't you!
I long for the days when I used to entertain at Collis post-11s as if I were Martha Stewart and you all needed stock tips. Well, as a washed-up junior being driven insane by my environment, I can't blame all my peripheral "let's get lunch" people for avoiding me like the plague.
So, of course you're all still eating lunch! Wait, are you? People are all having Late Night Collis-dates instead of lunch-dates now, you say?
Oh! I shall read food at night now, too! And Sunja is the next Jim Wright? You don't say! I've been away so long!
So following the advice of the young and with it, I venture forth to Late Night. I'm peering into the abyss of the chicken nuggets and wondering if they are edible, since they have no prefacing adjectives like the magic raspberry-pumpkin chipper scones, and are merely nuggets of chicken. But suddenly they appear to be chanting "Gimme gimme more, gimme more!" and I think to myself, "AHH! The hallucinations are starting!" But then I turn around to find it's just the ringtone on some little dtf-stitute's cell phone.
I'm staring at her like Munch's "The Scream" and she's smirking at me like "Oh, he so thinks I'm hot" while my actual thoughts are more along the lines of, "I wish I'd thought of that ringtone but since no one ever calls me it would be a waste of my father's $2.99. Alas. Well, at least the nuggs were not singing. And that girl is kind of cute. I hate her."
With four classes, my various psychoses and the extenuating intercession of Gmail, I often feel so disconnected from this place that I think I'm taking a fifth class in the anthropology of Dartmouth College, or that I'm the narrator reading some ridiculous script for the "Planet Earth: Dartmouth" episode. The wide-angle high-def camera pans the basement as I intone, "No one will ever know why the animals have constructed this mating dance called 'pong.'"
No? Am I the only one who has a hard time listening to people because I'm pretending they're on mute and I have to re-write the subtitles myself? Is that not your favorite game to play with the people in your head?
For example, when I'm looking in one of my many mirrors and talking to myself, which is what I now spend most of my time doing, I might re-write my own subtitles: "Poor self, you have a terrible pimple! You must not leave your boudoir until you've either finished this bottle of scotch and feel ready to deal with the world, or Mt. Vesuvius has ceased Pompeiiing your face. There, there. It will all be over soon."
So anyway, back to the story I was supposedly telling: My disconnection from reality in general, and specifically the reality of Dartmouth, is either the chicken or the egg of the motivating factors behind my abandonment of our sacred BlitzMail -- I'm still not entirely sure. Gmail is better and more practical for a thousand reasons, which you will discover when you graduate and have to use it. I won't try to convince you to embrace the inevitable any earlier than necessary, but here's what I like about it lately:
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There's a strange cachet-effect where people think I must have some other, more important life. This notion is laughable, but beggars can't be choosers when it comes to cachet.
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It gives me an excuse not to return blitzes quickly. ("Oh God, this must have gotten lost in transit to my Gmail, I'm so sorry that I missed our lunch date!").
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I spend a lot less time indulging my blitz-addiction, which gives me time to focus on my other addictions.
The thing about the world is that it's best seen from fresh eyes. When I wake up in the morning, I fix my perception by putting lenses over my eyeballs, and later in the morning when I no longer like what I see, I put on my drunk-goggles. At the risk of sounding like a stimmed-out lit-theory paper, Gmail is simply a more practical, though perhaps less rose-tinted, lens through which to view the text of our life here.
