The Trojan horse

Talk of the Quad: My extracurricular is nothing

At the first affiliate event we hosted at Burnett House, a few first years asked me, “What do you do here?” They did not ask, “What is your favorite meal? Who are your friends? What classes do you like? How do you survive the workload?” They also did not ask, “Are you happy? Have you found love? Have you found yourself?”
I was struck by this question because I was at a real loss for how to answer it. We were standing in a small circle, one of many small circles at the party, holding cups filled with cider and eating a lot of cheese. There’s something about a small circle of people that makes it easy to forget you don’t know anybody in it. After all, we have been practicing standing and sitting in circles since pre-school.
Two of my best friends were standing on either side of me. They answered orchestra and a women's discussion group, Student government and organic gardening, Peer Health and outdoor leadership.
“Feel free to contact me if you’re interested in any of these,” they said to the first years. Their lists probably could have gone on, but these were their main activities. These two friends of mine are bright eyed and beautiful and funny and smart. They are musical and mathematical and read entire books in one morning.
Upon hearing their lists, the first years looked energized instead of intimidated. So many options, so many ways to get involved. It was just what was promised in the college brochure.
I had no idea what to say. I could not answer with a list. I wanted to say, “Sometimes I watch cooking tutorials on YouTube. I fill up journals and can’t read my own writing. I struggle to finish all my essays and readings and take-home exams. Sometimes I call my mom and talk for forty-five minutes.”
What do I do at college? I spend hours lying on the Ikea rug in my room on the third floor of an old house listening to Patsy Cline.
What else? Well, I’m in love with someone 3,000 miles away, and loving someone takes more energy than any extracurricular I’ve ever done. Sometimes I unroll my yoga mat. When I feel sick with worry, I walk to the next town over. I get coffee and let people rant to me about the things that hurt. Often, I bake bread and it goes horribly, horribly wrong. I’m not the head of an organization, but I have conquered an eating disorder.
If there’s anything I’ve done here, it’s learn that it is so much harder to slow down than to speed up.
So here’s to doing nothing. To the quiet moments. To the days you sit within yourself and just watch. To soft music, handwritten words, silence. To listening to the way snow sounds underfoot. To watching dusk and dawn come and go.
We should be proud of the moments we do not try to fill. Not that activities and extracurriculars and essays aren’t tremendous and important. But sometimes I want to gather the busy students, the ones with crunched faces and big backpacks, and say, “Shh. It will all be okay. Let yourself settle. Enjoy the nothingness." There will be times in our lives when the car breaks down, when the children are crying—times that will be much noisier and certainly more difficult than college. And even then, we must commit to the moments of nothing, the moments of sheer, simple joy. Eating a perfectly fried egg. Opening an untouched notebook.
Doing nothing does not mean failure. Pausing does not mean stopping. We are stirring up the dust by learning so much, and we must create a space for that dust to settle.
We are all superheroes with an Achilles heel: We are afraid to stop moving, afraid that if we for one second return to our introverted Peter Parker/Clark Kent selves, the world will be too far gone to save. But the reality is, it won’t. After all, it does take some time to figure out what our powers are in the first place.
Raisa Tolchinsky is a member of the Class of 2017.

Talk of the Quad: Not quite apple pie

Foreignness is strange. Americanness is stranger. It’s subtler, like the feeling of self-consciousness when I order an Americano and feel my place in a heritage of the (however briefly) expatriated longing for a cup of brewed coffee. Perplexed and under caffeinated, I am learning what it is to be foreign and what it is to be American. The Americanness is what surprises me.
I recently boarded a plane and an Irish man engaged me in conversation. He was a Civil War buff who had been to the U.S. several times and had some strong and, truth be told, bizarre opinions. “The United States,” he said, “is not a nation. It is a confederation of states. Ireland is a nation.” I bristled.
While my travel aquaintance’s view of the U.S. seems out of left field even for a non-American, it did give me pause. In Ireland, I am sometimes reminded of my Americanness in tangible ways. My passport is blue and I have to get it stamped in the Non-EU line at the airport. My accent is wider and more nasally. When I’m picking out salad greens, I look for “arugula” instead of “rocket.” When I can’t find it, I get frustrated because the grocery stores here are inefficient and I think I could make them better.
What really catches me off-guard, however, is feeling my Americanness in the abstract and missing my imagined community very strongly. I belong more to Oregon (where I have never visited and may never go) than to Belgium, where I went last week. I feel a connection to Iowans and Hawaiians and Texans that far exceeds only a humanist bond. Alaska is farther away from my state, New Jersey, than New Jersey is from Europe. So why, when I think Alaska, do I still think home?
When I first arrived in Ireland and people asked where I was from, I said, “the U.S.,” or, if I wanted to spend the breath, “the United States.” “Oh, the States!” my interlocutor would say. “The States! I’ve been to Miami and Las Vegas and New York City and LA.” Always (for some reason) these cities. But more notably, always “the States.” As if the plurality was the only essential bit and the “United” superfluous. I now say the “the States,” in conversation, but it always feels awkward in my mouth. Why do I feel that the “United” is essential? Isn’t it?How do I explain that Americanness doesn’t sound like English? That it doesn’t look like a Walmart or J.Crew aisle or smell like an apple pie?
We talk a lot about nationalism—if it is good, if it is bad, if it is real, if it is necessary. Whatever it is, it is on my mind all the time. I feel it nagging at my heels when I cross streets where the cars drive on the opposite side of the road.
Waiting for a walk signal, my Americano in hand, I make my list.
Americanness is uncanny, the foreign always familiar. It isn’t having or not having guns, it’s worrying about them.
Americanness is race with a big question mark and religion with a big ellipsis and work ethic all in quotations.
Americanness is knowing that there are 300 million people and a few islands and an enormous land mass in the Western hemisphere that you are supposed to be allowed to belong to and that are supposed to belong to each other. It is as big as homesickness and as soft as my favorite blanket and as loud as a call with one as the country code.
How is it so big and so little at the same time? When does it fit and when does it feel too large or small? What is it about “we” that is so irresolvable but so strong that it spans oceans and thousands of miles, the magnetic field of us-ness reaching me all the way in Ireland, huddled around my coffee cup, with my me-ness compass’s arrow pointed home?
Katherine Churchill is a member of the Class of 2016.

Talk of the Quad

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Stevie Lane

Contributor

February 27, 2015

In kindergarten, Ms. Poger had a big bowl of buttons. They were “counting buttons”—meant to help us with math. If I have eight buttons, and I give you three, how many do I have left? Now, a little bit you need to know about me…

Growing up, I had what my parents termed a “special drawer.” It was below my sock drawer, above my shirts, and it was where I kept all of the small objects I compulsively squirreled: diminutive unfilled notebooks, miniature rubber dog models, tiny binder clips.

I had a glass cup of coins—not even special coins or foreign coins—just shiny nickels, mostly. So, being a small, strange child obsessed with collecting useless and unexceptional things, I was naturally drawn to the buttons.

And they were beautiful. One was tin-colored and conical, with complex cutouts and curlicues. One was brass, square shaped and deceptively heavy, with two-thread loops on the back. All together, they were enchanting, tumbling over one another and tinkling conspiratorially.

Sharing may be caring, but thievery is far more gratifying, and the buttons were like insects to my flypaper fingers. I started to steal them, every few days, after our math sessions. If Ms. Poger has one hundred buttons, and Stevie takes three each week for seven weeks, how many buttons does Ms. Poger have left?

When Ms. Poger discovered that the button bowl was losing weight—that students were pilfering—she took the bowl away in draconian fashion.

The idea was this: that if we were abusing her generosity in sharing the buttons, we lost the privilege of having them at all. In front of the class, Ms. Poger made a big deal out of locking the bowl away in the bottom drawer of her desk. No more buttons.

Thursday at 2:40 p.m. and I’m wondering if the same sort of logic is operating in Coles Tower, except that now, being 22, I’ve graduated from buttons…

Let me explain: There are five Tower RAs, all of whom are wonderful people. I have no unkind words to voice against them. They put nametags on our doors, they have cellphone numbers posted to theirs, and they host pizza parties on the 16th floor catered by Flipside. I have no real complaints.

But it’s Thursday at 2:40 p.m. and I’m looking for condoms. Ok, ok—not for use at 2:40 p.m. admittedly. But it’s important to be prepared—for anything and everything. That’s a rule I also learned back in kindergarten, when, after being confronted with the impossible and explosive nature of the milk cartons, I started always opening my chocolate milk with the spout pointing away from me, at my friends.

So I go down a few floors, to the nearest RA’s door. I’m looking for that Halloween-style, serve-yourself vessel full of the small, light blue packages. No luck.

I know RAs aren’t proctors, and maybe they aren’t told to provide seniors in the Tower with condoms, but why not? I guess I’d just assumed that all Residential Life staffers had access to an off-putting number of condoms with which to arm us residents.

Disappointed on this floor, I head down a few more and stop by the next RA’s apartment. Same thing. And none at the next RA’s floor, either.

There are, surprisingly, no condoms in the Tower.

And here’s the Ms. Poger connection—are you still with me? I wonder if, like the bowl brimming with “counting buttons,” there used to be an awe-inspiring bowl of Trojans made available for students, a privilege which Tower residents abused for too long—stealing condoms, hoarding them, hiding them in their “special drawers.” Then I think about the bowl being locked away forever in someone’s desk. No more condoms.

Not that I’m blaming anyone— I’m certainly not one to judge. But no matter, I still have no condoms, and now it’s 2:50 p.m. And so I do what any rational senior would do when the weather is below zero with windchill, and head for the nearest first year dorm.

So I’m headed to West. Hey—when you got to go, you got to go. (I think I’d rather not tell you all about the day in kindergarten when Ms. Poger’s class learned about that.) On the first floor, I beeline for the proctor’s door, made evident by the whiteboard and—at last!—the condom bowl.

I sort of wish I’d been discovered—a senior hunched greedily over the condoms and, for the first time in my life, choosing something over chocolate, which the kind proctor had also left in the bowl—because it was probably hilarious. Or incredibly frightening.

I’m trying to imagine some analogous scene—to throw some metaphor in here—and I keep thinking about Santa feeding from his plate of cookies, but everything about that comparison is disturbing. Anyway, I stuff the condoms into my bag, and kindergarten math comes rushing back. If the West first years have nine condoms, and Stevie takes them all, how many condoms do they have left? Sorry, West.

Am I embarrassed? A little. Did I abuse the system in taking all of the condoms from West? Undoubtedly. Am I judging myself just as much, if not more so, than you? Likely. But I hope that this, besides being a mildly entertaining story you read this morning while eating breakfast alone and feeling a little socially awkward about it, can be a lesson.

For all those of you who call the Tower your home on campus, don’t waste your time looking for the free condoms. There are none. In the interest of efficiency, head straight to the closest first year dorm—maybe you pass Coleman on your way to the library?—and stock up. And for all of you still in the dawn of your Bowdoin days, living in the first-year bricks—if your condom bowl is empty, it was probably us.

Stevie Lane is a member of the Class of 2015.

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