I completely lack coherence. So I present “Thirteen Stories About One Thing”
ONE
Random, hysterical laughter and then “Did you watch Dawson’s Creek in high school” (Because if even I watched Dawson’s Creek, than clearly every female on the planet watched Dawson’s Creek.)
“I watched Dawson’s Creek in college!”
“Ok, well remember that Dawson’s dad got killed, because he…
“…went out to get milk, and then got in a car accident…”
“…because he was eating an ice cream cone, and he dropped it, AND THEN HE TRIED TO PICK IT UP…”
“Yeah, so if you drop you’re ice cream, don’t try and pick it up.”
“What a stupid way to kill off a character.”
-Me & Xina, after a shopping jaunt
TWO
Me: Ooo, Pretty Woman is on.
Brent: What?!? You awful person!
Me: Shut up, I love this movie
Brent: You’re the last person in the world I would expect to love that movie.
Me: Shut up, I know, it’s shameful. I think every female has this chip in her head that makes her like this movie.
Brent: But you hate Julia Roberts!
Me: I know!
Brent: I’m going to use this against you. And Richard Gere is awful
Me: I know! But he buys her lots of clothes. And she saves him!
Brent: Richard Gere is awful
Me: I know! That’s why Primal Fear is so cool, because Edward Norton totally got him.
-Spring Break, last year.
Edward Norton was crazy, smart, manipulative and so-o cute in that movie. Hm. Typical.
THREE
It doesn’t make sense that someone as rational, cynical and paranoid as I, is at times incredibly idealistic and a ridiculous romantic. (I adore alliteration!). I also wonder if I should be saying: It doesn’t make any sense that someone as idealistic and romantic as me could be so cynical, rational and paranoid.
-Now the two sides will engage in a fight.
FOUR
The rational answer is the easiest to come up with but the hardest to actually put into action, which upsets everyone greatly since they prefer coming up with grand theories, acting like schmucks and then mourning over the fact that they’re not acting as they should
-Wednesday, the younger, wiser sibling (though I am still way cooler!)
FIVE
It is part of a follow-the-leader game of second best we have all been playing — Rose with Simon, Simon with me, me with Stephen, and Stephen, I suppose, with Lea. It isn’t a very good game, the people you play it with are apt to get hurt. You can only ask ‘Why’, even though you won’t be satisfied with the answer. It isn’t a bit of use my pretending I’m not crying, because I am. Pause to sober up. Better now
-I Capture the Castle, 342
SIX
It’s very easy to be critical and angry and vengeful. Vengence is easy, virtue is more difficult. But what’s virtuous isn’t always right.
You can be an enormous, painfully critical bitch when you’re not being stupid
-Thursday, sibling, again
SEVEN
NascentIgnorance: later stupid
Just Rachel 129: fuck you stupid
NascentIgnorance: shut up stupid
Just Rachel 129: you started it stupid
Just Rachel 129: I’m glad we have such a loving relationship
NascentIgnorance: you wouldn’t want it any other way
-”If I’m crazy then it’s true, that it’s all because of you, and you wouldn’t want me, any other way” Because, you saved me in 6th grade from being a typical girl, even if I do like Dawson’s Creek & Pretty Woman
EIGHT
I know prospero wins and there is some subtext about government
-Brent, on the Tempest
NINE
Laugh at the things that formally bound you
-Shakespeare Class on Thursday
TEN
I want to go scoff at Camp Hamp for failing in it’s attempt to turn me into a communist, filthy feminazi. In fact, that really, really screwed up because I’m a capitalist, and
ELEVEN
“I’m independent and I can take care of myself, but what I really want is a hot, emotionally detached workaholic man to fall in love with me because I’m so wonderful”
-Circa August, drunken whinings that the hippies would certainly say was an example of how the patriarchy has gotten to me.
TWELVE
Anyone want to go on a day trip to Amherst soon-ish? I would definitely buy you dinner and protect you from the dirty hippies You’ll get the chance to see the Hampshire bubble up close, a hellish representation of why utopia shouldn’t exist
THIRTEEN
Joy is not a state of being. It’s an activity. It doesn’t exist independently of our actions. Joy is supposed to be fleeting and transitory because it was never meant to be permanant.
Mono-no-aware, “The sadness of all things.” The sadness that informs everything, evne joy itself. Without that, joy cannot exist. Joy is what we do, joy is pagan, and absurd and tinged with lust and sadness. Bliss is not. Bliss is death.
-”Happiness” – pg247
I am not the notoriously cynical, pessimistic, voted most sarcastic girl I was in high school here. In high school I was good about being the very vocal minority, who (sometimes condescendingly) dismissed the views of my classmates. I bitched about the ridiculousness of a system that reward stupid kids who spit back rhetoric with a high class rank. I tried to avoid getting into NHS. I was a star academic decathalete (and loved it!!!) with Cs in Chemistry, Spanish, and Math. I wasn’t a contradiction, but some might of saw me that way.
I am the token libertarian member of SYRA. If my parents knew I had joined a club with Republican in the title I think they’d cry. I speak up in class and I’m not shy about expressing my opinions if you ask, but I don’t go out of my way to make it known that I’m probably one of the more conservative people on this campus. I don’t write articles for the SkidNews, that’s bashed my club every week. Even though I can write coherent articles it just seems pointless to publish something that people will dismiss because its ‘conservative.’ I don’t know.
Maybe I’m not putting enough faith in the Skidmore community, but in the past year and a half, I’ve found that the ‘collegiate liberals’ here are barely better than Hampshire. Sure they shower more often, and don’t think money is evil, since most of them have quite a lot, but they hold similar narrow-minded views that they refuse to see past. And I don’t understand. College is, ideally, supposed to challenge you, and challenge you’re perceptions of the world. Skidmore doesn’t do that. Most students enter Skidmore as relatively liberal, and take Liberal Studies which is supposed to teach you to think about things the way you never did before, but really just confirms all the comfortable ideas most people already have. It’s approach is normative and no conclusions are drawn. The class would have been controversial in my upper middle class white high school, filled with kids whose parents “Vote for Reagan” signs on their lawns had scared my hippie mother when we first moved to the area. At Skidmore, it just seems to enforce what almost everyone already believes. It doesn’t challenge any assumptions.
Again, maybe I’m just being cynical, but its been a long time since I felt this disillusioned. At Hampshire I found crazy hippies somewhere to the left of communist who spouted endless ridiculous rhetoric and discounted my view because I’m white and straight. At Skidmore I’ve found classes full of people who don’t do their reading, liberals who think the views they acquired freshman year will guide them through the rest of their lives, and a community that is rather intolerant of views that do not fit into its touchy-feely liberal scheme. You’ll certainly never find “The Closing of the American Mind” in LS1 or read a Phyllis Schafly article in Women Studies 101. If the general population doesn’t agree with it, it isn’t discussed. So many viewpoints, so many ideas are discounted, and even ignored. In high school, the focus was narrow and I was under the impression that that changed in college. I was wrong.
I’ve changed since graduating high school, I’m still dramatic, but more quiet – a product of barely uttering a word my entire tenure at Hampshire. I’m less cynical, less bitter, and less angry, because I am more content with my surroundings (sometimes) and my life. I’m not as notorious. I’m somewhat alienated from a good part of campus life, and getting here a year late didn’t help that. I’m not unhappy with that. I like “my” version of college life, even though its often atypical. I love the government department and talking to my professors and getting obsessed with my reading.
But I don’t like being attacked in the paper in a baseless article. I don’t like being in class and having everyone in the room gang up on me, and rudely tell me I’m wrong without even letting me finish my sentence. I don’t expect people to agree with me, in fact, I’m perfectly willing to engage anyone who disagrees with me. I’m not afraid to defend what I believe. I am, however, insulted by the fact that liberals here are so threatened by conservative views that they have to result to anti-SYRA propaganda. I find it appauling that if I try to express myself before Senate I’m accused of breaking the honor code because my opinion is apparently aligned with ‘not upholding the integrity of Skidmore College.’ I find it depressing when people raise completely irrational ideas in class that have no basis in reality and are applauded for their compassionate liberal thinking. And sometimes, I’m lonely, because all I want to do is have a beer and argue about books and politics and ideas, and that’s when I really miss my o-town friends.
Skidmore is not what I expected it to be. I knew it was liberal (and that fits with a lot of my views, actually). I knew it was a mix of hippies and rich kids. I didn’t know they’d lie to me like this. I was promised a challenge and what I’ve gotten is a place where I can whip out a 10 page paper 2 days before and get an A, when Ms Roeser would have just shook her head and used the “STOP” stamp. I’m not unhappy here. College, overall, has just not been what I’ve expected. I’ve created my own form of the college experience, and I’m fine with that, most of the time. It just makes me cynical sometimes. I am, after all, “the cynical one” of the LTTC.
I want beer and good conversation and I want college liberals to stop being so afraid of the views that they try to so hard to counter.
But I’ll take 2 out of 3 (but don’t be sad cause 2 out of 3 ain’t bad)
The end of a school year is always so weird. It is such a nostalgic time for remembering past end of school years and such, and expressing disbelief that the year is over.
Sociology today was so sad. It’s without a doubt the best class I’ve taken in my college career. Everyone else in the class is intelligent, well spoken, and fun — we have had amazing discussions, and a great dynamic. It’s very rare to find a ‘perfect college class’ but this was about as close as you could come. Mike, who did my Weber critique and is probably one of the nicest people I’ve ever met is a senior and graduating, and even though I really don’t know him personally, just from class, it made me kind of sad that I’ll never have the opportunity to talk to him again.
College is kind of depressing like that. You make connections with people in class on an intellectual level and many times you don’t have the chance to ever talk to that person again besides a nodd when you see them walking across the Green…I’m ranting, and its not making any sense.
I can’t really be articulate about what I’m thinking about all this. Whats that literary term when one part symbolizes a whole? Because I think that is what I’m getting at, or something.
One more class today, N/W Lit, my least favorite class. I don’t want to go, but I do want to give the professor a scathing evaluation. Then I have a lecture tonight that my sadistic professor is requiring us to go to on the LAST DAY OF CLASSES. But I’m exhausted from not sleeping last night and after this weekend, I’m not eager to drink any time soon, so its not like its too big a deal. More a hassle than anything else. So yeah. These entries are getting more and more boring, but I swear they are all very political and sociological and libertarian. Yeah.
I can’t believe this year is over.
