Of the three big weekends, Winter Carnival is my least favorite. Its particular flavor of debauchery is so different from the renewal of tradition characterizing Homecoming, or the smooth, mellow elixir of Green Key. Winter Carnival always struck me as a mad scramble to soak up the last remaining bits of winter pleasure the student body, half-stricken with Seasonal Affective Disorder, feverishly laps up the last traces of mindless sex and intoxicants from the frosty and barren earth.
After the holidays, winter is the season of shoe gazing. Aside from cherishing a fresh coat of snow, you keep your head down, ignoring the sad gurgle of gutters and the all-obscuring humps of snowdrifts. In my experience, winter is a time of introversion. I spend a lot of time inside myself, and I assume this is true for other people, to varying degrees. This introversion conditions the way we launch into Winter Carnival the rubber band of activity, drawn inward by school and whatever important work we have to do, is suddenly snapped outward. Only after a big weekend can this re-shifting of energy be brought back into balance.
The marathon of parties begins on Wednesday, and it seems that by the time Saturday comes around, no one really wants to go out anymore. And yet we force ourselves to do it anyway. This is a common symptom of the way fun happens at Dartmouth, and it becomes feverishly obvious during Winter Carnival. This symptom is a certain kind of strenuous and un-enjoyable fun fun that's not actually fun.
Frequently, we try to force fun to come out of experiences to play as much pong as intensely as possible, to hook up with as many attractive people as possible. But this is exhausting. To be honest, I'm not sure if I can really stand four days of "fun," which strikes me as a sort of a weak and passionless word. (To throw a wet blanket on top of fun, the Great Goethe once said, "Everything that liberates the self without an increasing growth in self-mastery is pernicious." Stodgy old classicist that Goethe was, he's worth pondering, if only to make you feel a little uneasy about everything you formerly found likeable, e.g. Winter Carnival.)
At any rate, there is a thin red line between lighthearted banter supplemented with a few games of pong and some sort of bacchanal or competitive vomiting contest. Not that I've ever seen Winter Carnival edging into a competitive vomiting contest. (Well, not more than once, and you have to stick around pretty late to catch sight of this particular train to Lost Souls-ville as it ratchets by.)
But the point I'm trying, somewhat wordily and exhaustingly to make, is that I can't abide the kind of freewheeling plummet into exuberant, fratty joy that so characterizes Winter Carnival (and all the other big weekends, if we're being honest although while Green Key has the Block Party and Homecoming has the bonfire, Winter Carnival is just an amp-ed up version of what people do every weekend). I mean, whatever happened to rules and regulations? I want to jitterbug to a big, energetic string band, or just really jive-it-up to some Chuck Berry. Give me none of this electronica-rave music and free love. I want charming old-time music and a logical progression from first to second to third base not a haphazard sexual flea market.
So consider this a bit of an anti-column, the rambling expression of feelings that probably won't affect much. In the words of the old Arabic proverb, "The dog barks, the caravan passes." But like Goethe says, let's not neglect the classical virtues.
