Tessa Westfall
Number of articles: 13First article: April 3, 2015
Latest article: April 28, 2016
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The 'Artists' Are present In defense of slacking: coping with end-of-semester stress
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The “Artists” are Present Eating alone
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Performing Abramovic in Smith Union
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Doublethink When our bodies force us to stop
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The 'Artists' Are present The status of statuses: Coping and solidarity found in Facebook community
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Doublethink: Your Ivies horoscope
In this, our last column of the year, we tinkered with the idea of writing something sentimental: something about the ephemerality of transitions, and how this temporal space affords us pause to feel our feelings. But then, Tessa got snubbed by Polaris, Carly got the stomach flu and it snowed. So we decided to go in a different direction.
Looking forward to the weekend that is sure to be our Bowdoin social peak (fingers crossed), we couldn’t take any chances. We turned to the hard sciences for guidance. Respected for millennia by ancient Mesopotamians, Shakespeare and Neil DeGrasse Tyson alike, our choice was clear.
Astrology. We raked through the Bowdoin archives and found pages of zodiac forecasts dating back to 1865, the year our fine Ivies tradition commenced. Just as the Ancient Mayans predicted the world’s end in 2012, so too does this Star Chart provide promising insights into Ivies 2016.
Read your own, read them all. We humbly report: Ivies Horoscopes.
Aries (March 21-April 19)In the event that a travelling performer who abstains from milk of cow appears on campus, heed his call to “Go Hard in the MotherF***ing Paint.” As the sun in the sky sets, the sun beneath your feet will appear to enliven your dancing spirit.
Taurus (April 20-May 20)The gravitational pull of powerful Pluto will find you unexpected romance. Ivies Bae could be for now or could be forever, but beware the Winds of Finality blowing from the East: they could strain this cosmic pairing.
Gemini (May 21-June 20)While passion might tickle the pink cheeks of Taurus, beware, Gemini! Venus is setting for you this week. Instead of falling in love, you are likely to fall into the beckoning arms of Somnus, keeper of sleep. Be sure not to nap in an unseasonable snow bank.
Cancer (June 21-July 22)Searching of sustenance in the form of cylindrical meat products, venture to the land beyond the graves. Neptune will kindly cast an umbra to guide your path.
Leo (July 23-August 22)Jupiter’s moons stumble out of alignment for you, Leo. You have spent weeks agonizing over the perfect Brunswick Quad ensemble, yet alas! Best laid plans run amok. Embrace your zodiac lion heart and rally.
Virgo (August 23-September 22)Congratulations, Virgo! Juno, queen of the gods, will spot you losing steam from her perch on a passing asteroid and leave you a gift. One bottle of Andre will hold her Elixir of Stamina for you and you alone--your only challenge is to find it.
Libra (September 23-October 22)Allow the balance inherent to your star sign guide you over the course of this emotionally fraught weekend. Step on glass and make a friend. Shed a tear and have a laugh. Everything that goes in, must come out again. This you know.
Scorpio (October 23-November 21)Lillith, the most powerful energy vortex in the Sun-Earth-Moon system, will cause illusions to your vision. Scorpio, you may believe that a tiny Danish hipster sings before you, but have the strength to resist this trickiness.
Sagittarius (November 22-December 21)In a shocking twist of fate brought on by mischievous Mercury, your elders decide to pop in for a surprise visit this weekend. Be sure to remind them that you are not only studious, but fun.
Capricorn (December 22-January 19)Lucky Capricorn will discover an inestimable boon! The convergence of shooting stars in your sign will drop a fanny pack filled with snacks on your doorstep. Be grateful, be decisive.
Aquarius (January 20-February 18)Aquarius, while under the spell of solstice, your hubris gets the better of you. You commit a bit too hard to dancing during the guttural Earthsound musical festivities. By moonlight, take care of yourself.
Pisces (February 19-March 20)The ever-present swirling of the planets becomes too much for the muddled Pisces. In attempt to keep up with concentric rotations of the Earth and of the party, you will accidentally perform a séance. Fortunately, the ghosts of Donald B. MacMillan and Thomas B. Reed are in high spirits. Offer them a drink and enjoy the weekend.
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Doublethink: When our bodies force us to stop
Sometimes it feels like everyone at Bowdoin is slightly under the weather. Maybe it’s something about the vaguely sticky chairs in the Union or snagging bites of vegan sin city off our sneezing friend’s plates. We tend to collectively hover at a level of not-quite-healthy-but-still-functional. Both of our Jewish mothers would be appalled at the volume of sniffles and coughs in the classroom.
We have both fallen below the functional threshold in the past year. Last week, Carly went on brain rest for a concussion she got playing frisbee. Last semester, Tessa was bedridden for two weeks with a nasty case of mono. Both of us were rendered useless for solid chunks of time.At first, being really sick at Bowdoin can feel like playing school-sponsored hooky. Our professors tell us to rest! To not worry about upcoming assignments! We got to experience Bowdoin with the veil of responsibilities magically lifted off of us. In those first moments of uninhibited lounging, it was all Otter Pops and David Sedaris audiobooks. The world transformed into a cozy, if a bit foggy, luxury.
But the fog settled in real quick. What started as a fun break from reality soon became long hours in our dimly lit rooms, feeling awkward about asking our friends to bring us nourishment and missing our aforementioned mommies. We got lonely. We got frustrated. We were mad at our bodies for not letting us participate.
Having a concussion, having mono, having anything that keeps us away from day-to-day life for a sustained time, takes a mental toll. We could deal with being lonely—an en masse text announcing “open office hours” and bricking our doors would remedy our woes. We could deal with being frustrated—we’re both lucky enough to have emotional outlets to help calm us down. To an extent, we could deal with being mad at our bodies because deep down we trust modern medicine enough to intellectually justify rest. The barb that snagged us was not being able to think. Not remembering, not making connections, not tracking conversation as we normally could was entirely destabilizing. Losing our cognitive ability made us feel inhuman. Our normal process for understanding the world was slowed down, put on hold.
It’s easy as college students to believe that our bodies are infallible. We’re constantly able to push our physical limits—we stay up late, party hard, wake up the next day to write a paper. And so on. Being sick, like we were, is a rude awakening. It reminds us that our bodies can betray us, and that’s terrifying.
In our darkest hours, the two of us were convinced that we would never heal. Against all odds, sleep, vitamins, fuzzy blankets and time returned us to our normal selves. Being incapacitated also provided space for our friends to show how they care for us. We each felt the Bowdoin community stepping in, coming to us when we were not able to engage. And we got better.
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Doublethink: Bringing Bowdoin to our homes
Three thousand miles west of here, the Bowdoin College Meddiebempsters spilled out of minivans in the driveway of Tessa Westfall’s Los Angeles home. Burnt to a crisp from their day at Santa Monica Beach, they threw off their vacation wear with reckless abandon and jumped into the pool. Tessa’s mom wasted no time describing how the pool is neither chlorine nor saline, but rather EcoSmart, while simultaneously dishing out piles of organic snacks. The Meddies ogled as she fed the subpar veggies to the pet desert tortoises, Kippy and Lightning.Approaching one thousand miles south of here, Carly Berlin hurtled toward Myrtle Beach, S.C. (affectionately known as “Savannah”) with Bowdoin’s ultimate frisbee teams. While the destination wasn’t Carly’s home, she did feel like a token Southerner. She couldn’t help cringing at the abundance of overbearing “Jesus Is Your Savior” and cartoonishly racist “South of the Border Restaurant” billboards. Her car stopped at a Waffle House off the highway somewhere in North Carolina, a place nondescript to her, but to them a novelty where they could order their hash browns “Scattered, Smothered and Covered.”
It’s surreal having people from Bowdoin in our home spaces. Maybe it feels weird for everyone to have the two worlds intertwined. We suspect, though, that coming from far corners of the country makes this experience more pronounced. The presence of Bowdoin guests in our regions provokes us to be critical of where we come from. It heightens our awareness of the background noise of our locales, of the freckles on our own faces.
The two of us hail from places that don’t exactly have flawless reputations on the national stage. Let’s explore this through a fun word association game. Carly, what comes to mind when you think of LA?
Superficiality, road rage, intricate Starbucks orders, Valley Girl upspeak, hippies who shave everything, putting on a full face of makeup to go to your afternoon SoulCycle, class cancellation due to light drizzle, people trying to find themselves, having Jared Leto stare at your butt while on a hike under the Hollywood Sign, etc.
Tessa, what comes to mind when you think of the South?
Sweet tea, “family values,” debutante balls, “Bless your sweet little heart,” Honey Boo Boo, “The War of Northern Aggression,” fried everything, “The bigger the hair the closer to God,” conservatism, chauvinism, racism, etc.
These characteristics are far from representative, but we admit, a lot of them are true. They’ve certainly shaped the landscapes that we grew up in. The truth to them crystallized when we were presented with a whole new landscape: New England.
We were shocked! Tessa was visually stunned by the throngs of 18-year-olds wearing khakis and pastel Polos. Carly had never before met someone from a “town.” Tessa had previously believed that boarding schools only existed in 19th-century Britain or contemporary Utah, where rich LA kids were “sent away.” The whiteness of Maine struck both of us. Physical toughness in the face of the elements (and accompanying lumberjack aesthetic) as a cultural value was totally foreign. In our second year here, much has become familiar. It’s an ongoing process, though—Carly still hasn’t sprung for an E-ZPass in her car.
We’ve experienced people responding with surprise or throwing shade when they hear where we’re from. Having to own and defend our home places has given us more clarity in looking at them. It’s a process towards making sense of and accepting the places that have shaped us, in spite of and because of their deep flaws.
For the whole first part of our lives, a large piece of how we understand the people around us is through their personal context—what the buildings in their neighborhood feel like, the smell of their house, the food their family eats for dinner. In college, everyone’s immediate context is the same. We’re given a whole new kind of agency in defining ourselves, based on our behavior, our interests, our ideas. That being said, there’s something really gratifying about showing people from Bowdoin our backstories.
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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?
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Doublethink: A word on hovering
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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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.”
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The 'Artists' Are present: In defense of slacking: coping with end-of-semester stress
Well, readers. It’s exceptionally gloomy outside, and finals are fast approaching. Stress is in the air: we’re trying to tie up our academic and social loose ends and the days are short and passing quickly. This is our second try writing this week’s column, because no amount of snacks could get us through the first time. Here goes.
Writing about stress while we’re stressed is hard, but this is the most important time to talk about it. One of the reasons we’ve found it difficult is that everyone has different triggers for stress, and everyone deals with them differently. In our brainstorming session, we realized how greatly our approaches to coping with stress diverge. We’re both productive people who generally enjoy schoolwork, but that’s where the similarities end. Carly is a compulsive list maker; when her daily schedule does not go according to plan, there’s hell to pay. Tessa spends copious amounts of time in the Union, letting the spirit move her from assignment to assignment. Carly copes with stress by building time into her day to exercise. Tessa has leisurely mornings lying in her bed listening to the classic 2004 album “Confessions” by Usher. In fact, the thought of switching routines for a day provokes an onslaught of anxiety from each of us.
In the weeks between Thanksgiving and Winter Break, it can seem difficult to make time for ourselves. Everyone has a giant mountain in front of them, and it’s easy to slip into believing that yours is the tallest. We alternate between hunkering down and complaining about hunkering down. We forgo sleep; we work through meals; we try to convince ourselves that we’re something other than human.
It’s hard to avoid realizing how crazy this sounds as we write it down. So, why do we do these things? We think it has something to do with craving external validation. Grades signify something: that we did a good job, that we worked hard, that we’re smart. Even if we feel like we wrote a good paper or slayed an exam, it’s still affirming to know that our professor thought so too.
This attitude feels problematic. We would like to be able to validate ourselves without any outside input. But this is difficult: we haven’t just chosen to attend an academic institution, we’ve chosen to delve deeply into it and care about it. We’re having a hard time articulating our critique of the academic system, because we’re so entrenched in it.
We do know one thing for sure. It’s crucial to take care of ourselves, especially at this time of year. We need to sleep, we need to eat, we need to treat ourselves like human beings. And we think there’s something radical to self-care, too. Saying to yourself: I’m going to put down Moby-Dick for 45 minutes to go on a run. I’m going to take a break from writing this paper to read about the most recent mass shooting. Studying can wait for me to watch an episode of “The Great British Bake Off.” There is power in stepping away from our obligations and doing something that makes us feel good, alone, with no witnesses.
We think this is a way of sticking it to the man. We’re going to live with ourselves forever, so we should treat ourselves with respect. It’s wonderful to care about learning, to feel invested in doing well, but we’ve chosen to come to Bowdoin for a holistic experience. We owe it to ourselves to take that on. We should embrace slacking as an important part of the picture. It’s OK to take a pause from our schoolwork, even (especially) during finals.
Remember the words of the indefatigable Audre Lorde: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.”Best of luck to all. We’ve got this.
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The 'Artists' Are present: The status of statuses: Coping and solidarity found in Facebook community
Maybe we can all agree about one thing: this past week—this past month—has been distressing. The two of us are hovering on opposite ends of the distraught spectrum. Tessa, with a menacing case of mono, has been relegated to her bed with a carton of strawberry ice cream, devoid of the energy to watch one episode of “The Office” without falling asleep. Carly, on the other hand, has been walking around campus accompanied by a newly escalated internal monologue—let’s just say, caps lock has been turned on. Tessa is debilitated by the state of her body. Carly is debilitated by the state of her environment. It’s a hard time.
While our physical spaces haven’t overlapped recently, our digital ones have. Facebook is the location where everything converges. It’s our news source; it’s our soap box; it’s our place to seek support and find it. When shit hits the fan, it’s the thing we can control. And there’s something deeply comforting, but also deeply daunting about this: How will our peers judge us for what we post? What are the implications of a Facebook status? Is caring about this silly?
Disclaimer: Three very difficult and very different events happened this past week. We took to Facebook to process each of them. We are not trying to draw comparisons here, but rather walk through the way in which the space of Facebook informed our thoughts.
When student protests against campus racism began at the University of Missouri last week, variations on one particular status went viral. The two of us posted the same one:
“To the students of color at Mizzou, we, student allies at Bowdoin College, stand with you in solidarity. To those who would threaten their sense of safety, we are watching.#ConcernedStudent1950#InSolidarityWithMizzou”
Each of us felt a reservation before posting this status. We wondered: What good does a Facebook status do? Am I being selfish about posting this? In taking a stance on an issue that doesn’t directly affect me, am I implicitly mining that issue for social capital? We want to acknowledge that we exercise an enormous amount of privilege in carrying on with this mental dialogue. We both ended up posting the status, after coming to the realization that it’s an obvious decision. It’s the easiest way to show solidarity, support and, most simply, care. There is power to a Facebook status. If I can tap my thumb six times on my phone screen to make someone else feel safe, it’s worth it.
And in true Facebook form, when the next thing hits, the older one gets pushed to the background. Immediately following the flurry around Mizzou came the news of terrorist attacks in Paris. Facebook served as a reassuring tool in telling us that our friends abroad were safe. It also gave us the opportunity to add a filter of the French flag to our profile pictures. This sparked debate. Is this focus on the tragedy in Paris negating other recent tragedies that happened in the largely non-white world, such as the violence in Beirut, Kenya and elsewhere? Yes, our media is Westernized—this is a structural problem. But it’s coarse to police the way that people grieve after a tragedy. If incorporating the French flag into your profile picture helps you to process this egregious act in any way, go for it. We both cried to our parents on the phone, and chose not to change our profile pictures.
In light of the recent sexual assault on our campus, Facebook has been utilized as a support space. This week, a student created the group Bowdoin Safe Walk, and after just one day, the group had more than 1,500 members. It’s inspiring to see students organizing and finding ways to help each other. These phone numbers don’t feel like they’re just there in case we need to walk somewhere—people in our community are explicitly voicing their desire to act as emotional resources for each other. As women, the two of us find this personally touching, but we also hate that we need this right now. Bowdoin has, for the past year and a half, provided us with a space where we feel valued and safe. These horrendous events force us to confront the stark reality of going through life as a woman.
Posting the Mizzou status is a form of activism. It helps to bolster a movement by broadcasting it to different corners of the world; it is power in numbers. Solidarity for Paris is not about activism. It is a reaction to tragedy. By no means does this discount its gravity, and we all ought to give each other space to grieve however we need to. The Bowdoin Safe Walk Facebook group is reactionary, but it’s about preventative action. It’s our community saying: we’re not going to let this happen again.
We can’t let all of this stay locked behind our computer screens. Facebook is powerful, but it’s only an approximation of real life. Racism, terrorism and assault are things that pull us apart. The way to break that pattern is by supporting each other, in real life. Talk to your peers, your parents, your professors; go to rallies; walk a friend home. Whether or not you’re someone who engages with Facebook, we all ought to remember: in tough times like these, we must show up for each other.
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The 'Artists' Are present: Invasion of the NARPs: exercising our privilege to use the gym
There’s a lot of talk about the gym at Bowdoin. About making ourselves go, how much we lifted, how bros don’t let bros skip leg day. How we can eat this slice of Tollhouse pie because we worked out for half an hour this morning. There’s a lot of worry about the gym. Will the guy next to me on the stationary bike judge me for going more slowly than he is? Will people stare at my butt if I wear these leggings? Am I allowed to go to the bottom level or is it reserved for big dudes with Gatorade water bottles?
We ritualize the gym—or more precisely, how we interact with the space. To whatever extent we are aware of them, our decisions about the gym are calculated. We choose when we go, who—if anyone—we go with, what we wear and what we do there. We feel on display in the gym. We compare ourselves to our peers in the gym. Sometimes the gym can serve as a magnifying glass to point out those physical attributes we most dislike about ourselves. It takes our fears about appearing unglamorous and incompetent and thrusts them into public view, in a tight space. It’s a stressful kind of intimacy.
We went to the gym at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday. Neither of us had been all year. Which is not to say that we are fully stationary beings: Carly plays on the women’s ultimate frisbee team and Tessa enjoys long strolls (NARP). We at least hoped to avoid the gym before the ground froze over, but alas, duty calls.
This idea has been a long time in the making. Carly suggested the gym plan day one of this semester, and Tessa was physically repulsed. In the minutes leading up to our gym excursion, she frantically texted Carly:
“Literally what do I wear?”
“I’m gonna wear tennis shoes and leggings and a t-shirt.”
“Relax dude.”
“Solidarity.”
“Yay.”
“See you shortly.”
In retrospect, it’s striking that Tessa felt the need to ask for advice. Shouldn’t everyone feel like they can go to the gym on their own terms, without anxiety about feeling out of place?We started off easy, on the main level. Carly showed Tessa how to use a foam roller. Needless to say, her quads loved it. Amidst our stretch-n-gossip session, we ran into the issue of interacting with people we know in the gym setting. Everyone is in his or her zone, or is trying to be—there are a lot of earbuds and intentional perspiration. Navigating social boundaries feels different.
We ventured downstairs. What we expected to be a roiling, subterranean grunt-fest was in fact a gleaming facility filled with dazzling amenities. The kettle bells had names like “Elegance” and “Pride.” There was a helpful infographic detailing where we could appropriately spit, or not spit (spoiler alert: the recycling bin is not a proper spit receptacle). Rather than the expected, intimidating pump-up music, we were met by some welcoming 80’s female rock tunes.
We should acknowledge here that the lower level was pretty empty. We felt free to putz around, making multiple laps of the space. We picked up some things, we poked at others. We did not have an exercise agenda, and we did not push our physical limits. What was important to us was entering this space that felt foreign and stigmatized.
On the whole, we enjoyed our little jaunt in the gym. Tessa confirmed that she could do at least one single pushup. Carly tested the waters of a career in personal training. Honestly, though, it was anticlimactic. Coming in with our peers’ stories of weird gym experiences, we expected a cringeworthy afternoon. A lot of factors contributed to our having a good time: the gym was quiet, we were there together and we had no specific goals in mind. If any of these factors had been different, we probably would not have had as much fun.
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The 'Artists' Are present: Leaving the Bowdoin bubble: Fall Break, baths and different space
The beginning of the year is always saturated. Like us, you may have become illiterate over the summer, and reading is hard. Maybe your friendships are in transition, or maybe this is your first time living away from home. Fall Break is a time set aside for some undefined purpose (shoutout to Tim Foster—we’re not complaining), but however you spend it, this break is a marker in time.
In our column, we typically focus on inhabiting and challenging spaces at Bowdoin. For a special Fall Break edition, we neither inhabited Bowdoin spaces nor challenged much of anything. Instead, we took advantage of time away to reflect on how we’ve grown since last Fall Break and how Bowdoin has influenced that growth.
In retrospect, the first five weeks of our Bowdoin experiences were spent largely in tears. Our friendship began on a Friday night spent drinking tea and watching “30 Rock” on the first floor of Winthrop, hesitantly confessing to each other how weird college felt. Fall Break was the first milestone we were running towards. We were floating in the Bowdoin bubble, rather than grounded in it; we felt entirely blinded to the world outside by a space where we didn’t feel settled yet.
When Fall Break hit, emergency getaways were effective immediately. Tessa, reeling from bicoastal culture shock, needed to see a family member before she spontaneously combusted. The trek home to Los Angeles was just not doable. Luckily, a family friend swooped in with a ticket to Toronto, where Tessa spent the break with her brother. It was reassuring to see someone with whom Tessa had more than a month of context and who also understood how foreign Sperrys look.
Carly had given her plans more forethought. She and her high school boyfriend had set aside this time as their first reunion after leaving for college. Full disclosure: there is something supremely romantic about riding a bus through New England fall. A short stop in Boston was jarring. Carly was surprised at how unaccustomed she felt to city noises and strangers. She was elated to see her boyfriend, but the two soon realized the new challenge at hand. A relationship that had always been rooted at home had now become mobile, and Carly and her boyfriend had to reconcile their disparate spaces.
We’d like to think Fall Break last year was clarifying, but we can’t remember if it was. We needed that time away, but it probably felt too short; it was probably hard to come back to Bowdoin. Regardless, Fall Break became a timestamp that broke up our developing routines. We’re lucky to say that things went up from there. A big leap outside the bubble reminded us that we don’t stop existing off campus.
We don’t find ourselves needing that reminder anymore, at least not in the same way. Going away used to help us confirm who we were. Now, being outside of Bowdoin makes us grateful for the directions in which we’ve grown here. A year has stretched us, has pushed us, has shown us we can feel empty at some times and overflowing at others. And that’s OK. This year for fall break, we indulged in our Bowdoin relationships. In the spirit of our favorite Onion article, we, with a group of our female friends, spent a raucous night validating the living shit out of each other. A log cabin in northern Maine saw many heart-to-hearts, collective dinner-making and multiple stress-relieving baths.
What struck us about this time was our lack of urgency to get away from not just Bowdoin, but Bowdoin people. Our outside lives and our Bowdoin lives have swirled together, and now being away from campus doesn’t feel groundbreaking. We have taken root at Bowdoin, but we’ve realized that the layers of our lives can be fixed to multiple places at once. Some might say we are “at home in all lands.”
At Bowdoin, we’re empowering ourselves to have complex identities. You can be the squirrel with the messed-up tail and you can be Connie. Part of growing is letting seemingly contradictory aspects of ourselves exist at the same time. We’ve found that Bowdoin—and the relationships that we have here—give us that space.
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The “Artists” are Present: Eating alone
It’s the question we’ve all wanted that well-spoken upperclassman with a bold taste in sweaters to ask us as we depart our Sociology 1101 class: “Want to get a meal sometime?”
It’s not a precisely romantic thing, but perhaps more indicative of the elusive “friend crush” turned real friend. Maybe it’s our nationally acclaimed dining service (live the legend), or that we require an hour to decompress from our overcommitted schedules. Meal time is sacred. It’s a time to get to know someone new or to catch up with an old friend. It’s a social time.
But what if it isn’t?
Many of us feel anxious when five o’clock is nearing and we have yet to solidify a dinner plan. Some of us will even skip a meal if it means avoiding walking into Thorne by ourselves.
So we had to do it.
The plan was simple. Breakfast and lunch were too easy. We would enter the Sunday evening dinner rush with nothing but a OneCard. We didn’t allow ourselves any armor: no laptop, no notebook, no phone. Carly ventured into the Moulton dark room, while Tessa, having drawn the short straw, went to Thorne.
Carly’s experience was more pleasant than she anticipated. She found a seat easily, and was only minorly interrupted from her solitude when her friends gave her confused looks as to why she had chosen an empty table over their company. While she wasn’t necessarily stressed, Carly wasn’t luxuriating, either. She kept her head down and ate quickly, save for the lavish sundae she made herself to celebrate the end of her solo night on the town.
Tessa thought she would be fine, though upon confrontation with a line out the door of Thorne, she panicked. She nervously paced the “catwalk,” searching for an inconspicuous end seat, which she found only after passing the same friend what felt like an uncomfortable amount of times. Her potentially reassuring sense of anonymity had dissolved under ceilings that felt a little bit higher than usual.
What she initially thought was a secluded corner was immediately overrun by a throng of burly men with Gatorade water bottles. As Carly sat quietly and contemplated her recent reading of Michel Foucault, Tessa tried her hand at talkin’ sports.
“How’s the season going?” Sports.
“Our first game is on Saturday, everyone should come.” You heard that, Arts & Entertainment readers. Everyone.
Tessa’s pal came over with a concerned expression and asked if everything was okay. Tessa responded that she had just wanted to be alone, but was enjoying the time spent with her new friends. Things seemed swell.
As more teammates came back with their trays, the conversation halted. Through their discussion of Maine winter, it quickly became clear that the brave soul who had spoken to Tessa was a first year. The older ones seemed to be making a conscious effort to avoid eye contact. It was a very distilled moment of that phenomenon we’re all familiar with: after freshman fall, talking freely to people outside of one’s social circle becomes less comfortable and accepted. Tessa felt a selfish pang of disappointment that the strangers at the table would remain unknown to her.
We wonder what factors made our experiences so different. Carly left her dinner satisfied with the new knowledge that she could, in fact, sit alone among people and feel safe. Tessa could not exit the situation fast enough. Is it that Moulton love runs deep in Tessa’s veins that makes solo Thorne so terrifying to her? Is there a difference between sitting at an empty table by yourself and a full table surrounded by people who won’t talk to you? Or is it that Carly is a self-proclaimed introvert, while Tessa scored 100% extroverted on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator?
At a college like Bowdoin, with its sense of community, there is little division between school and home. All aspects of life blend together in a way that is wonderful, and, at times, draining. Arranging our weekly dinners can become yet another extracurricular. Scheduling the social, though, is more fraught than balancing labs and readings. That being said, mealtime is special at Bowdoin. Growing into that mutual understanding of “let’s get a meal” is an important part of feeling like you belong here.
It’s also important to feel like you can be alone here. It comes down to the fear of being too visible, or too invisible. Eating alone feels like a statement. We did it as part of our performance art column. But shouldn’t we be comfortable unabashedly taking up space, sitting on our own? On the other hand, is it really so bad to go unseen for half an hour, eating among our peers? It’s cool to be excited about people at Bowdoin and want to spend your time with them, but it’s also healthy to want to spend time with yourself. Our communal spaces don’t have to be shared all the time. As hard as it might be to admit it to ourselves, no one really gives a shit about whether we’re eating with friends or alone. It’s all in our heads.
So we challenge you to practice eating dinner alone. Build yourself into your schedule. Extra points for eating at Thorne.
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The Yik Yak Live experiment: anonymity in Smith Union
If you were moseying by Bowdoin Express, known to students as the C-store, on Monday evening, you may have seen two delirious short-haired gals wearing blindfolds and soliciting your participation in our latest project: “Yik Yak Live.” But we did not see you.
With our first undertaking a few weeks ago, we recreated Marina Abromović’s performance art piece, “The Artist is Present,” and held sustained eye contact with willing participants in the Union. We sought to explore vulnerability within the student body at Bowdoin. This time, without realizing it, we were drawn back to the idea of sensory alteration as a means to explore larger ideas. Now, we are considering accountability and anonymity.
We all know this about Bowdoin: an unfamiliar face is hard to come by (unless you’re Tessa at a hockey party). Anonymity is nearly unattainable here. So, we seek to hide. On apps like Friendsy and Yik Yak, ambiguity is the game. We get to spew our hormonal woes, our feelings of inadequacy and the political opinions we don’t feel comfortable expressing in public. It’s like yelling into a tunnel—anyone, or no one, could be on the other end. We were curious to see what happens when the invisibility becomes one-sided.
Our high production value sign read: “YIK YAK LIVE: What will you write when you can see us but we can’t see you?” We encouraged passersby to write down yaks in real time on slips of paper and place them in a container under the table. The sign also boasted some anxiously scribbled prompts: “Thoughts? Confessions? Ideas? Mean Commentary?”
“I want to see how mean people will be,” Tessa said, while Carly broke a nervous sweat. Again, we feared no one would participate. But—who knew!—people with blindfolds do attract some attention. One Yak we received read, “Why is SJP blindfolded now?”
Our responses largely reflected the general makeup of Bowdoin’s actual Yik Yak. We had some lighthearted admissions:
“I have a dead opossum in my trash (this is true).”
“I haven’t taken a normal poop in 4 days”
And of course, “I am Kote.”
There were musings about life at Bowdoin:
“I wonder if people steal from the C-store.”
In tiny handwriting, in the corner of a slip: “I did all kinds of drugs @ Ivies.”
“I’ve made out with 3 percent of Bowdoin College.”
Some Yaks treaded into weightier territory:
“Is the gay/lesb community really small, or can I just not pull?”
“People really overestimate how accepting Bowdoin is.”
“Confession: I’m male, I have pretty terrible body image issues, and I don’t feel comfortable addressing them w/ anyone. I don’t think it’s something people feel comfortable talking about/helping with.”
Lest we forget, Carly and Tessa sat blindfolded in the Union for a full hour on a Monday, not doing anything ostensibly productive. There has been little research on the results of placing college students, completely unoccupied and unable to fully engage with their peers, in a space for an extended period of time. We entered a fugue state. By obscuring our vision, we also seemed to obscure our understanding of all behavioral norms. Volume control? Disappeared.Conceptions of time? Gone. Ability to form sentences? Dissolved.
“Do you guys feel vulnerable?” asked an unidentifiable voice.
We did. It can be exasperating when mysterious forces drag baby carrots across your face or attempt to disguise themselves by impersonating others. But maybe there was some power in our voluntary impairment. In partially detaching ourselves from our environment, we accidentally lost our fear of consequences. Despite being surrounded by people in the Union, we felt like we were sitting alone in our rooms in our underwear, irrationally confident in our perceived solitude. We wonder now if we felt more anonymous than the writers of our yaks. Bowdoin students harbor fears about sounding pretentious, or dumb; too involved, or not involved enough; politically incorrect, or soft. Above all, we fear revealing ourselves and having someone say thanks, but no thanks. Yik Yak is a space where we feel comfortable broadcasting our anxieties and idiosyncrasies. But does it matter? If we don’t own our weird shit, then what’s the point?
Last time, we asked what would happen if people made more eye contact. Now we wonder about the opposite: what if we all just sat in a room together, blindfolded? What would we say? Would this new sense of anonymity allow us to shimmy out of our inhibited selves, or would we just find this another way to hide?
It turns out that we got far more positive than mean Yaks. We’ll end with our personal favorite:“I wish more people unabashedly shared how much they appreciate one another. That’s what love is.”
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Performing Abramovic in Smith Union
For 736.5 hours in 2010, Marina Abramović made eye contact with three-quarters of a million people in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. For two hours in 2015, Carly Berlin ’18 and Tessa Westfall ’18 made eye contact with twenty people in the David Saul Smith Union at Bowdoin College.
Abramović is known as a pioneer of performance art, particularly in her use of the body as a medium. For forty-two years, she has dedicated herself to fostering temporary spaces designed for vulnerability and psychic connection with her audience. In 1974, Abramović performed “Rhythm 0,” in which she placed seventy-two items on a table—including a feather, a scalpel and a loaded gun—and sat passively while her audience wielded these objects on her body as they chose.
We tinkered with the idea of schlepping a table into the Union with a Bowdoin Log, a Canada Goose, and a loaded gun. But we couldn’t afford the jacket.
We decided to go with “The Artist is Present.” If Marina could make eye contact for three months straight with minimal bodily harm, heck, we could too.
Participants in our rendition were permitted to make eye contact with either of us for however long they wanted. They were allowed to speak or move freely, as long as their eyes remained locked with ours. We did not allow ourselves to respond; we wanted to recreate Abramović’s stoicism to allow participants their own experiences as projected through us, rather than as a shared experience with us. While one of us made eye contact, the other would record observations and keep time.
First, Tessa sat down with her future roommate, who she had pried away from his calculus problem set.
“You’re just making eye contact with people,” he said dismissively.
After an excessive amount of whining about how no one was going to show up, he decided to comply. Four and a half minutes of sustained eye contact later, he stood up, hugged Tessa. “I feel much closer to you. I’m glad we did that,” he said.
Throughout the evening, we saw a slew of responses.
For some, holding eye contact was excruciating. One girl made two attempts: first clocking in at fifteen seconds, and then removing her jacket, only to make it for twelve.
“I’m finding out horrifying information about myself,” she said.
Most participants began by smiling and giggling uncomfortably. Some were able to breach that stage, their faces settling into a focused, though often tense, expression.
In Abramović’s performance, nobody was allowed to speak and many participants sat silently across from the artist and cried. The addition of speaking in our piece created a different dimension for exploration. Nobody cried, but we did hear a few confessions. Something about eye contact as a pause from all other activities seemed to make strangers eager to share intimate details of their lives.
“I’m secretly applying to the same internship as my best friend. I’m not telling her because I know I’ll get it and she won’t,” one participant said, while eating his seaweed snacks and blinking excessively. “Look, I’m confessing things to you.”
A complete stranger sat down and began describing a New York Times article she had read for a class. She shared her unease that a past hookup had been featured in it.
“Things like that have been happening a lot in my life recently,” she said. “This is the stillest I’ve sat all day.”
At least four people began with, “I guess I’ll tell you about my day.”
Some people had impressive stamina. We had to cut off one person after 15 minutes, though she probably could have gone all night. She did not stop talking about the tragedy of unreasonable peanut allergies, about her first-year floormate who returned at ungodly hours with mysterious golf clubs, about how she would “rather be happy than funny.” Unlike other participants, this girl said she was talking because she likes to talk, not because she was uncomfortable with the silence. We question this in retrospect.
Our second-longest lasting subject went for around seven minutes, and sat in complete silence.
“It was fine,” she said afterward.
For Tessa, it was decidedly not fine. As soon as the girl rounded the corner, Tessa had a conniption and needed to walk it off. The silent space felt emotional for Tessa, who was busy crafting an internal narrative of all the connection that was occurring in the space between them. As blank canvases, we committed ourselves to not revealing our personal responses so that the subjects could have his or her own space to experience. In practice, though, it was admittedly difficult when this participant articulated no significant reaction.
In Introduction to Psychology last semester we learned that people are hardwired to recognize faces in their surroundings. But when we look closely for an amount of time that feels unnatural, faces cease to be faces and become Picassos and aliens, all eyes and noses and skin. We become hyper-conscious of our own faces and movements while under the unwavering gaze of another.
We found ourselves wondering: what does all this say about a person? We never get someone that sits across from us silently and gives us their full attention. Something about this non-verbal, non-tactile interaction triggers something deeper. It allows for both introspection and connection; you can be deeply alone yet irrevocably engaged with another person at the same time. There’s nothing to hide behind. What emotional connection would happen if we did this all the time?
In a six-by-six foot study room on the third floor of Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, we made eye contact with each other for a predetermined four minutes. We willed it to be an emotionally significant moment for us. It was not. With the pressure off, we felt only calm.