Sept. 7, 2024
Night one of trips: two co-leaders with nothing in common except a shared disillusionment with the Trangia, a Swedish military stove neither of them knows how to operate; the exchanging of Instagram handles and assignment of nicknames. “Loverboy” polling our shelter for girl advice as “Bauser” and “Spoon” harmonize snores into the September a.m. Learning together, the hard way, that a watched pot never boils.
This is so Dartmouth. Well, maybe not exactly this — legs cramped in the fetal position, free bleeding in a sleeping bag, shoveling lentils into my stomach with a tortilla as I ponder how to answer the question “So, why aren’t you affiliated?” My own freshman fall blurring into a year, and then three. Now I’m standing in front of six eager-eyed freshmen explaining how emailing your crush a flirty poem is not at all weird. At Dartmouth, it’s actually pretty normal.
Like many freshmen, I entered college with the cockiness of someone who scored high on their SAT. I thought getting into the Ivy League made me smart (it didn’t) and that the hardest part of my adolescence was over (it wasn’t, it still isn’t). When I arrived on campus, my biggest accomplishment — the common denominator between me and all of my approximately 1,200 classmates — became obsolete. Among a sea of academic grinders and Olympic athletes, I no longer felt smart or special or even particularly interesting.
In the subsequent three years, I have been forced to develop a personality outside of my alma mater. Of course, I’m still arrogant. I don’t call my parents enough. Sometimes, I eat so many shelled peanuts I feel ill. None of these things make me proud. That’s college — it’s messy and selfish and random. My trippees will soon internalize these lessons the hard way. I wish I could prepare them for the development of their frontal lobe but I can’t. So instead, I teach them the acronyms NARP and DFMO. I urge “Loverboy” to hand-write his first flitz and “Frizzler” to try out for Ski Patrol. I encourage all of them to forget about their SAT scores because they really don’t matter anymore.
Sept. 10, 2024
Someone plastered a (since redacted) Harris-Walz sign outside TDX. I’m doubting it was a brother. Foco no longer has an eclectic soda machine and “the Penthouse” doesn’t mean anything to this year’s batch of National Merit Scholars and billionaires’ daughters. The Green is barricaded in orange tape. The same Green I bawled my eyes out on freshman fall as a couple of juniors to my left peddled through one of the seven. The same Green that has fielded presidents and Nobel laureates, vigils and state troopers, freshmen girls crying over sophomore boys, sophomore boys playing spikeball, Roger Federer and a Samosa Man stand that only manifests when I’m not hungry.
Sept. 19, 2024
My landlord and I are currently beefing over email. Like, whatever the opposite of a flitz is, that’s what’s happening. I’m not typically confrontational, but my current housing situation mirrors a frat in spirit and substance. We’re trying to find the humor in it, my housemates and I, but the broken front door and general scent of mildew are wearing us down.
I forgot what fall in New England felt like, and I’m already, preemptively mourning it: rows and rows of dahlias, cascading paper leaves, the river — just warm enough to jump in without feeling like you were dared — my house, haunted with the ghosts of rugby rosters past. I’m not used to beauty being so on-the-nose.
Sorry this discussion post is late, have you looked at the leaves?
Sept. 29, 2024
Maple creemees upset my stomach. The Lumineers piss me off. I dropped my phone in the river this afternoon. No, these aren’t the names of lesser-known Jimmy Buffet songs — my life is in shambles. Thanks to the Ledyard Canoe service and Dartmouth Dining phone wallet, I have $635 dining dollars to my name — a name you can’t legally verify is mine because I no longer have any form of government-issued identification. That, too, is resting at the bottom of the Connecticut. I could hire Jay Whitehair of Norwich to scuba for it, but his going rate is $200. As earnest as he seemed over the phone, I’ve never been much of a gambler. I’m tired of turning non-sequiturs into narratives. Sometimes the bad thing just happens.
Sept. 1, 2024
Alex cues “All These Things That I’ve Done” as we glide past coastal California grassland. I learn it’s her mom’s favorite song. In a month, it’ll be stuck in my head as I stroll up West Wheelock Street — “I got soul but I’m not a solllllldier.” I do not know this yet. It’s an early harvest moon but the sun has yet to set. It is still September first. We are still chasing the sun.
