A word on hovering

Doublethink: Recognizing Bowdoin as part of "the real world"

After a break of globetrotting or deep existential musings or endless hours of catching up on “Scandal” with mom and the cat, we’re all back in the arctic tundra of a January Bowdoin. With a week under our belts, a soft 90 percent of all our conversations have included either inquiries about how our breaks were or lamentations on how annoying inquiries about our breaks are. We’re also finding ourselves describing our transitions from “The Real World” back to Bowdoin. And no, we’re not talking about the two-decade running cultural phenomenon that was MTV’s “Real World.”
The phrase “The Real World” gets tossed around a lot at Bowdoin. Recently, we’ve heard it used as an excuse for unsavory behavior on our campus and other college campuses. But more broadly at Bowdoin, the phrase is used to differentiate the place where we spend the majority of our time from reality. Anytime we leave Bowdoin, we enter this real world. Anytime we pause to consider the utility of which classes we take and which major we choose, we’re factoring in “The Real World.” Anytime we think about life after Bowdoin, we name it “The Real World.” We talk about our time here as if it’s a magical fairyland summer camp where time just doesn’t seem to hold the same weight as it does elsewhere.
Of course, life at Bowdoin feels different from life anywhere else. It’s highly concentrated. We’re enveloped by a frenzy of campus wides and heated discussions on the top floor of Adams and Moulton brunch playlists and lab reports and blizzards and sunrise smoothies and the most stimulating, thoughtful, fun people we’ve ever encountered. Each day feels like three days. What about this is not “real”?
Sure, we’re privileged here. We’re nurtured. Sheltered, even. But that doesn’t mean we should discount our time at Bowdoin as something separate from real life. When we split ourselves this way, we’re always internally at odds. Reconciling distance, and who we are in different places, is part of growing up. But calling anywhere besides here “The Real World” makes this task harder. Because how can we possibly become cohesive, functional people out of the disjointed sections of our lives while not giving Bowdoin the gravity of “The Real World?”“The Real World” has many iterations. The two of us link it with the stability and structure in our lives before Bowdoin. But it can also mean the “harsh reality” that lies outside the bubble. It can mean personal space. It can mean the world that expects us to work hard and make money and be “successful.” Even though we think of “The Real World” in different ways, it is always in opposition to Bowdoin.
In doing this, we’re framing Bowdoin and our daily lives here as unreal. It’s not a big jump to go from here to “what I’m learning won’t matter outside of this context,” “this time is just a placeholder” and “my feelings aren’t that important.” So we slump. As sophomores, slump is in the air. The more that’s put on our plates—major declaration, study abroad applications, housing choices, increasingly intricate social scenes—the harder we slump. It’s tempting to slip into some combination of dealing with these things and complaining about dealing with these things or just blowing it all off and hiding under the blankets. We are forced to grapple with decisions from “The Real World” while living in a space that we deem not real. So we lose motivation. We stop being present. We forget to relish this place.
Bowdoin is reality. It’s real because we experience it every day. That’s the point, in and of itself. By existing here, we make it “The Real World.” And that’s scary as shit, right? We’re staring big decisions in the face all the time, and we want to write our uncertainty off as unreal, as just passing through. But maybe we ought to sink into that instability. Being in-between is terrifying, but it’s exciting, and it is “The Real World.”

Doublethink: Letting go of FOMO; facing Bowdoin’s pressure to always ‘be on’

Put yourself in the Union at 10 on a Tuesday morning. How many people do you make meaningful eye contact with as you walk up the stairs? As you’re waiting in line for your coffee, are you smiling? Waving? Bantering? Staring at your phone avoiding these social interactions? Are you running through your to-do list for the day? Are you taking stock of your body? Is any of this conscious?
All of the labor that goes into moving about the world at Bowdoin amounts to a pressure to always “be on” here. Being on means everything but down time, everything but being alone, everything but being off. There is always another person to talk to and party to go to and new friend to make. We’re tempted by the fantasy of never needing to sleep, of reclaiming the six to eight lost hours imbued with possibility. Being on is about living in a community where we are constantly presenting ourselves to each other. That presentation is an active process. Our social worlds here are relentless.
So we had an idea: what would happen if we tried to quantify our social interactions? Coming off of five weeks of hanging out at home, going long stretches of only talking to our moms, the constant barrage of Bowdoin Hellos was a shock to our systems. Amidst our February woes, the contrast between home life and Bowdoin life felt particularly pronounced. Our goal in keeping track of the Bowdoin social web was to figure out the scale we deal with. We decided to log our social interactions with the highly scientific method of scribbling tallies on folded papers. Cut to: Tessa newly craving a pocket protector for her denim button-down. We used four categories: hellos to strangers, acquaintances and friends, with longer conversations in a bracket of their own. Cut to: us disrupting normal human contact with the slick interjection, “Shit, I need to record this.”
We anticipated the hubs of first floor H-L and the Moulton Light Room. But we discovered that our social realms expanded to almost everywhere. Carly went on a run through town and racked up four hellos to Bowdoin acquaintances and two to friends. Tessa found the Union bathroom to be a real hotspot for conversation. Even in places where we expected to be alone, there were people. We felt compelled to talk to these people—even the ones we didn’t know. Our arbitrary distinctions between stranger, acquaintance and friend made us consider how in no other setting are these boundaries so blurred. What constitutes a friend? Someone whose phone number we have? That we pause to talk to? A Facebook friend? These questions came to light as we struggled to categorize the people in our lives. It felt weird. It felt weird to explain our tallies to people. It feels weird to acknowledge it now.
We planned to do this for a week. We failed miserably. Two days of data that would never pass an Institutional Review Board left us wiped out. We felt exhausted for a couple reasons: the mental task of remembering to do something that’s entirely unnatural proved taxing. And while looking at our tallies at the ends of these days, we were astounded by the volume of interactions we had. Overall, Bowdoin Hellos won, but longer conversations had more than any discrete category. It was striking to see the emotional labor of a single day at Bowdoin laid out tangibly in front of us.
Reality check: our assertion is not that we’re Regina George, basking in our own popularity. Though we realize it’s not universal, we believe that ceaseless social interaction is a shared feature of Bowdoin life for many students here. That’s why we talk about FOMO all the time—it wouldn’t be so prominent in our discourse if we didn’t have the precedent of constant connection. Sometimes we feel that we can take on our social worlds here, and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes they’re really daunting. Yet when we extract ourselves from the web, we often feel compelled to justify our decision. “I didn’t go to x party because a) I had some shit to get done, b) I’m sick, or the intentionally vague, c) I needed to self-care.” Very rarely: “I was doing nothing.” Almost never: “I didn’t want to.”
So we fear being off, missing out, not looking like we’ve got it all together. But Bowdoin is a more forgiving place than we give it credit for being. Don’t we spend so much time talking to people that we don’t really know? Doesn’t this speak to a level of warmth and openness in our community? Quantifying our interactions also made us aware of their quality. And although the amount of our interactions startled us, the overall substance of them reminded us that we’re surrounded by special people here. We think that no one is really, truly going to judge us harshly for opting out of the web. We’re allowed to extract ourselves, to take breaks. We can trust that the interactions we do have are valuable without constantly focusing on the ones we’re not having.
Put yourself in the Union, or in the library, or at Cold War, or wherever you are right now. Is it where you want to be?

Doublethink

This piece represents the opinion of the authors:

February 12, 2016

We learn campus culture quickly at Bowdoin. In our initial weeks as first years, we learn to go trayless in the dining halls; that the sporty folks go to Baxter and the crunchy folks to Reed; that it’s socially acceptable to cry at an a cappella concert. In the intimate community of the College, we are given a lot of agency in shaping what life feels like here. This doesn’t always seem like the case, though. There are times when the power of the administration explicitly manifests itself. Sometimes, we agree with the steps taken. We think it’s good that ResLife knows when and where parties are happening because it keeps us safe. We’re glad that the College provides spaces that allow us to come together and explore identity, like the Women’s Resource Center and Russwurm House and 30 College. And yet there are times when it feels like the administration gets it wrong—when it hovers too close. These are opportunities for us, as students, to play a part in dictating our campus’ dynamics.

Two Sundays ago, all sophomores were expected to attend a one-hour meeting intended to “help [us] make the most of [our] experience[s] at Bowdoin, and beyond.” Gathered in Pickard, administrators talked at us from the stage about the “invisible internship network” and “keys to success” and “how to best use extra time.” Amidst calls to “stand up if your parent is a doctor or a lawyer” and “raise your hand if you play a sport,” we found ourselves most frustrated with the sense that each decision we make now ought to lead to some nebulous, lucrative future. We are already inundated with emails about major declaration and study abroad deadlines. This meeting rested on the assumption that we are oblivious to these once looming, now pressing decisions before us. The reality is, we have five semesters left at Bowdoin. We wanted to hear: “enjoy this time;” “be present;” “foster meaningful relationships;” “pursue what you’re passionate about.” Instead we heard: “networking is not a dirty word;” “make connections for the future;” “win the opportunity.” The take away is that our time here is simply a stepping stone for achieving a high powered career with high donating potential. Not that our time here is valuable in and of itself, or that we should do what we love and lead fulfilling lives. We want to acknowledge that this meeting very well could’ve been helpful for some members of our class, but we have yet to talk to someone that feels this way.

The All Sophomore Meeting was indicative of the type of person that Bowdoin—at least a part of it—aims to produce. To us, this felt like undue pressure from the College, and attitude management. It depends on a conventional notion of what it means to do well, to be successful. And we’re seeing that these notions don’t just stop at the institutional level. They also bleed into the deeply personal.

This week, we’ve witnessed an uproar from students surrounding Bowdoin’s policy on pornography. Yik Yak was flooded with lamentations of the death of porn at Bowdoin. In an email to the campus community about a new network security system, we were told that “Websites known to be infected or distributing malware and those categorized as high-risk—including pornography and gambling sites—are flagged” and that IT security officers will review our web activity (i.e. our use of these flagged sites) to “secure the campus network and technology.” OK, fine. We all want a secure network. Tessa is frankly still hurting from last year’s phishing fiasco. We dug deeper, though, and discovered that Bowdoin does in fact prohibit the use of pornography on grounds divorced from campus safety. The IT website states: “Use of the College’s computers, network or electronic communication facilities [...] to send, view or download fraudulent, harassing, obscene (i.e. pornographic), threatening, or other messages or material that are a violation of applicable law or College policy, such as under circumstances that might contribute to the creation of a hostile academic or work environment, is prohibited.”

Sandwiching “pornographic” between “harassing” and “threatening” is loaded. Bowdoin’s wording isn’t really clear here—maybe they just don’t want us watching porn on the first floor of H-L. Watching porn is legal. We’re all over 18. We should be able to watch it in the privacy of the Stacks (...or our homes). It’s valid to have complicated feeling about porn—we both have our qualms with it. But it’s not Bowdoin’s job to regulate those feelings under the guise of protecting against a “hostile academic or work environment” or network security. The ambiguity here leaves room for Bowdoin to take a moralized stance on our sexualities.
Bowdoin is going to shape us no matter what. It’s a residential college: we spend four super-intense growing years of our lives here. We have a right to make Bowdoin the place we want it to be. We have an obligation to be critical of this place, and to speak our minds about what we want to see change. The All Sophomore Meeting and Bowdoin’s policy on porn are not necessarily representative of Bowdoin at large, but they highlight these moments when Bowdoin tiptoes into the territory of a helicopter parent. Bowdoin is not Big Brother, because we won’t allow it to be. Power runs in all directions.

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