by emily
Grade: C
(adjusted for grade inflation)
Time tends to act as a natural memory cleanser. This is why ladies are able to give birth more than once: after a little bit of time has passed, it becomes nearly impossible to remember pain accurately. The downside of this adaptive trait is that sometimes we find ourselves feeling nostalgic about something that wasn’t very good in the first place. VH1’s tireless effort to eulogize every T’pau-level pop-cultural moment from the last 30 years is a great example of this phenomenon. But there’s another example I’m getting at here.
Spring is the only time I ever allow myself to feel this kind of deluded nostalgia about Kenyon. Kenyon, for those of you fortunate enough not to know, is a small, second-tier college in the blank, empty heartland of America. It does an admirable job of living up to every available stereotype about such places: ivy-covered stone, light slanting though centuries-old stained glass in the more impressive classrooms, et cetera. One glance down treelined Middle Path is enough to convince the Parents’ Weekenders that they’re totally getting their 40 grand’s worth. A fellow Kenyon quasialum once described it as “the Ivy League of the Midwest,” which I would amend to, “the school for Ivy League double-legacies who still couldn’t get into Yale and were forced to go to school in the Midwest.”
I spent two miserable years in a truly awful place, but I still miss it sometimes. Isn’t that weird? I have a hard time explaining it. I mean, maybe it’s because I led a very decadent lifestyle there – that’s the nice thing about being around a bunch of rich people in the middle of nowhere. There were lots of crazy parties and a steady stream of anesthetizing substances, lots of lying in a cornfield with a Nalgene bottle full of vodka on a warm spring day. But before I get too warm and fuzzy about College, I have to remind myself of what really went down.
I had been going to Kenyon for exactly one week when it happened for the first time. There was a knock at the door of my dorm room. My resident advisor, a Texan named Jana Joseph who bore an unfortunate resemblance to Weinerdog-era Heather Matarazzo barged in.
“So how is everything going for you?” she said, smiling robotically in the way that people with matching first and last initials sometimes do. I said something about liking my classes.
She moved closer to me and lowered the tone of her obnoxious voice.
“Um. I just thought you should know. What people are saying about you.”
Uh-oh. “I just thought you should know” is right up there with “No offense, but” in the stupid bitch handbook.
“I mean,” she said, affecting a look of concern appropriate to her Residential Advisorness, “is it true that you slept with seven guys your first week here?”
I was dumbfounded. Um, for one thing, the white-hatted, beer-gutted boys of Kenyon would never in a million years have merited that level of overachieving sluttiness. And for another thing, um, NO? I was much too busy that first week trying to figure out where my classes were and negotiating the least embarrassing way to eat alone in the dining hall. Now, I have had my slatternly phases, and I don’t want to make it sound like I have anything against behaving like a little hooker. But at seventeen, the fact that an almost- total stranger could walk into my bedroom and spout such nasty lies– while somehow pretending to be looking out for me – was shocking and actually a little bit scary.
And that was how it was going to be for me at Kenyon.
This is what I soon found out: except for the mellow rich hippies, Kenyonites are basically two types of people: frat boys and girls who would be sorority girls if Kenyon had sororities, which it doesn’t, so they have to compensate by competing for the attentions of the fratboys and becoming their girlfriends, whereupon they form informal sororities that are probably worse than the real thing.
The school has a long, proud, rich, rich, rich history of Greek life. The kings of its Big Fat Greek System are the Delta Kappa Epsilons, or ‘Deeks.’ These guys have a reputation for being the richest and cokeheadiest of all the frats, with the most bizarre, morbid/homoerotic hazing rituals. Pop quiz: guess which current US president was a Deek? I know, it’s a hard one. Most of them probably wouldn’t get it. Most of them are probably investment bankers now. They’re probably having a nice dinner with a bulimic nineteen year old a few blocks away from here. Let’s not dwell on it.
The second most important frat is the Psi Upsilons, or ‘Psi Us’. Their girlfriends are referred to, especially by them, as the ‘Psi Uteruses.’
I don’t know why I didn’t repack my suitcases and move back in with my parents after that first week, but in some ways, I’m glad I didn’t. I suppose going to Kenyon for two years made me a stronger person or whatever. I know, two years is a long time, right? But I did like my classes. Also, it was pretty there – cornfields, cows, bonfires, The Amish, etc. Besides, I just thought that that was what college was like. I transferred to school in New York, so for all I know, that is what college is like.
This spring I ran into a guy I’d sort of known at Kenyon at a book party for America’s First Supermodel, Janice Dickerson. He was on his way to a Kenyon party downtown, and I was in a good mood and a good outfit so I went with him. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess maybe I thought I could show them up, or just show them, look, you didn’t hurt me, this is me and I’m still alive and I have a job and really nice tattoos, I’m so cool, aren’t you sorry you were mean to me? Because the bad thing about being around small-minded bitches is, after a while you start to think like them, as a matter of self-defense. And then sometimes, year later, you still can’t stop.
Being at the party was kind of surreal. It was exactly like a thousand other parties I’d been to at Kenyon, except this one was in Chinatown and everyone looked old and tired, probably from being investment bankers. I compensated for the awkward fact that no one was speaking to me by getting deeply involved in my drinking.
After I left the party I should have just gotten into a cab and gone straight home, but I couldn’t. The streets of Chinatown were appealingly deserted, so I wandered past the noodle shop and the pagoda-style McDonald’s, past the perfume-drenched line waiting to get into a club and the new luxury condo. I didn’t know where I was walking. I didn’t feel drunk, just numb and kind of hysterically happy. The glistening streets and the tenements and the neon were all suddenly heartwrenchingly beautiful. Clearly, I was shitfaced.
Eventually I realized that I was on 3rd Street, standing in front of apartment building I’d lived in when I first moved to New York. The whole façade of the building was new. It was now white and sleek and trendily modern. The metaphor was so appallingly obvious that I started laughing. Here it is, in case you didn’t figure it out yourself:
Everything changes so quickly here: neighborhoods, buildings, people. Everything can reinvent itself as often as it wants to – this is the whole point of New York. But the past isn’t going anywhere. It’s lurking under the floorboards and behind the plaster, holding up the structure, maybe even determining the future. All we can do is keep trying to remember the bad things as well as the good. All we can do is look forward to more changes, better ones. We can look forward to the day when we’ll have something that proves once and for all that we’re different from all the people who have ever made us unhappy. Or maybe we can just look forward to the day when we’ll finally stop caring.
By B
By emily
By emily
By emily
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