PROLOGUE
All the newspapers and TV pundits are calling this fall’s freshman college class the “Symnitol Generation,” but if the activity up and down my dorm hallway is any indication, this fall’s freshman college class is the “Stand Around Each Other’s Laptops and Play The First Thirty Seconds Of Every Song On The Hard Drive Generation.” The noise makes it hard to sit and write this but not impossible.
This dorm is called Allerton and it’s old and it used to be something else but nobody can agree exactly what. A Catholic girls’ school dormitory or a Catholic girls’ school school-building or a clothing mill where lots of Catholic girls worked. I am not used to old buildings, and the things that are commonplace to you if you’re from the East Coast or anywhere people have inhabited for a while, like radiators or old brass doorknobs covered in several layers of drippy white paint or windows that creak when you open them by turning a knob, are sort of exciting. Everything where I grew up grew up with me. I think the first time I stepped inside a building that was built before 1950, we were out of state on vacation.
Orientation Week they encourage you to keep your doors open to foster a friendly and open atmosphere. A girl whose name I heard several times in a getting-to-know-you name game last night but whose name I still of course cannot remember is draped across the open doorway of the room across the hall from us, shouting over the first thirty seconds of whatever song someone in there is playing on a laptop.
“I mean, it’s just stupid. Like, what example does it set where the first book we’re assigned to read in college, BEFORE college, even, we’re not even tested on? Not that I WANT to take a test, right? But it’s, like—”
We got a letter from the school about a month ago saying all incoming freshmen had to read this book The Silk-Maker’s Assistant, as an “introduction to our life in the Liberal Arts.” I read it and I guess a lot of other people did too. Anyway, it hasn’t been mentioned in any of our orientation seminars and there probably will never be a grade given. A lot of people are furious about their time being wasted and I think they are starting to realize that college may not be a hallowed academic proving ground where their finely honed MLA-citation skills will place them at the head of the pack. People are already pissed at the school, but I’m not. I am just happy they accepted a transcript that’s a Frankenstein’s monster of grades from different high schools. I’m just happy to be away.
My roommate is down in the laundry room but on his desk he has this book someone clearly gave him as a going-away-to-college present. It’s this graphic-novel-style thing called I Got In, Now What?: Getting the Most out of the Best Years of Your Life. I was leafing through it while I was putting off sitting down to write this, and in it, an amiable slacker guy whose beard is indicated by six black lines jutting out from his chin advises the reader to “just make mistakes!” I took his advice, without ever actually hearing his advice and a full two years before college, and made definitely the biggest mistake of my life. Probably a bigger mistake than most people’s biggest mistake of their lives. My brother started college two years before me, and he told me that the kids you’re friends with that first week of college you will not end up being friends with in the long run, for whatever reason. In a month, when we’re not friends anymore, I’m going to call or e-mail the kids I’ve been hanging out with this week (Elon, Roger, Kelsey) and tell them they dodged a bullet.
A big debate in the newspapers and among the TV pundits is whether kids with the money to afford over-the-counter Symnitol will have an advantage over kids who can’t afford it, or if schools should just go ahead and administer it to everybody. I think I’m sort of a unique case, and I also think who can and can’t afford it is the least of their worries, but they don’t know that yet. Before I leafed through my roommate’s book and before I sat down to write this I pulled a hundred bucks out of the ATM in the laundry room and I took that down to the pharmacy and got fourteen Symnitol, enough to keep me up consequence-free for two weeks. To tell you the truth I can kind of already not-sleep without it, and by getting this down I guess I’m hoping to end that.
Anyway, two weeks seems like a long time. I bet you all I really need is tonight.
