Thursday, February 28, 2008
Search for the Truth, and Take a Few Drinks Along
I was out drinking the other day, having an after-party for the powderpuff football game. “Powderpuff,” in case you were wondering, is the term for girl football. Yes, I played. Yes, it was fun, and yes, I am now painfully aware of every movement I make. We played our asses off, but the upperclassmen won, because they started calling fouls on us every five seconds. I’m a little bitter about this, because the freshmen and sophomores totally deserved to win. We were so much better. Oh, well. So, anyway, we had an after-party involving hot dogs and, of course, lots of beer.At first, we were all at a certain park down the road, which happens to be closed at the moment for renovation or some such nonsense. It’s been closed most of the year, actually, but we’ve had a lot of parties down there, regardless. So we were hanging out there, until a security guard, or something like that, walked up to what was probably the calmest drinking group he’d ever seen, and told us, rather rudely, to leave. Our response was “Okay,” and we instantly packed everything up and left.
At this point, some of us decided to leave altogether, but the others wandered down the road to another dirt patch that we habitually frequent. I was the only freshman who remained, and pretty soon I entered into a discussion with a couple of the sophomores, musing on how truly strange people at my college are. There’s no place like it. And the people there are completely inexplicable to the people outside. Just looking at that last incident, our drinking party was sitting around a fire pit, engaged in semi-intellectual conversation, when a guard came over and was unnecessarily rude. We didn’t give him any backchat at all, we simply cleaned up after ourselves and disappeared in literally under a minute (we’re rather used to getting kicked out of places). We simply moved a few hundred feet and continued our chill party. Someone started playing tunes from his car, and the intellectual conversation was resumed, occasionally broken by bouts of singing or rapping along to the music, or, more frequently, lapsing into gossip, which is much more fun (as a graduate once put it, “There’s two things to talk about here: The books and the people. And after about the first two weeks, you get pretty tired of talking about the books.” The people, on the other hand, are always changing).
That’s my college. We’re intellectual, we’re nerdy, yet we’ll burst into rap when the spirit moves us, and switch just as easily into indie rock or an Irish drinking song, or something equally unexpected. We swing dance, we get into furious debates about matters ranging from whether an angle can be a magnitude to which of the old Star Wars was the best to why the Iliad ends with the burial of Hector. We watch movies in cars off-campus, we smoke like chimneys, and we drink in dirt patches, while remaining comparatively polite. Most of us are either semi-alcoholics, or getting there. And, somehow, we preserve chastity.
Yeah. Nothing like the place, nothing like the people. For the first time I found myself thinking of this place as a kind of home. A funky, messed-up, claustrophobic home. Sounds like it should suit me, in a badly-fitting way. And maybe badly-fitting’s not so bad. It's sort of a perpetual state for me, in fact. I think I'm finally getting comfortable with it. After all, it's probably the best I'll get.
Spudge at 7:20 PM