Brettia

Savor this, because it might be another month before the next one. I am not really sure what I want to talk about right now. I’m not as bad a blogger as I seem; I’m constantly planning new entries in my head - they just never end up getting written down. I often wish I had some way to just plug myself into my laptop and let it read my thoughts. (And let it be remembered henceforth that I was first to welcome our future sentient computer overlord.) I need some sort of light, low-tech, readily available recording device. I think it might be called a pencil and paper. One day I will remember to carry it around. But then again, the idea of hand writing something in the age of keyboards and word processors seems so painfully slow. Plus, my handwriting, once so perfectly formed and girly, has begun to devolve into a much more masculine scrawl. Now you see both why my ideas don’t usually make it to the database and just how completely disorganized this entry will be.

There is a girl walking around in my hallway and the nearby stairwell talking loudly on her cell phone. Normally I wouldn’t be one to eavesdrop, but when the talker shouts her conversation to the world I can’t help but listen in sometimes. Unfortunately, the girl is just spouting gob after gob of mind-numbing drivel. Probably her victim has already hung up and she’s just talking to herself at this point. (Wait, she just walked by again and I could hear a voice at the end of the line…I pity the poor soul having to listen to her.)

I have found that the level of maturity here is lower than I would’ve expected. Keep in mind that I can only contrast my experience here with my two months at Stanford, and maybe that’s a flawed comparison. At Stanford, most of the students in the summer program were between our junior and senior years, and plenty of juvenile things happened there: citrus fights, nutball matches, mattress parties, etc. However, kids’ actions were for the most part carefully controlled - they did childish things for fun sometimes, but they weren’t childish by nature. When you talked to someone individually and seriously, you found them to be responsible and intelligent, even if they didn’t act that way in social situations.

At Wisconsin, instead of high school students acting like adult college students, there are college students acting like childish high school students. The girl in the hallway (who after about 45 minutes has finally ended her call) is a classic example, talking about all kinds of random, insignificant social “events” (”this cute guy let me borrow his jacket!”) and sounding exactly like one of those brainless popular girls from high school. Similarly, many of the guys here seem to have no purpose in life beyond partying, drinking, and getting laid as much as possible. Whereas at Stanford the idiocy of high school was superseded by simple, joyful, intellectual camaraderie, at Wisconsin kids just do everything they couldn’t get away with (publicly) in high school. Everyone drinks fairly heavily - for some, the weekend starts Tuesday night; on average, it begins on Thursday. The hallway often smells like alcohol, sometimes with the scent of vomit or urine mixed in. The bathrooms and lounge can be worse. Academics are always second to partying, an annoying barrier to having a good time. Nerdiness or geekiness is looked down upon. At Stanford I told a number of people about my web design hobby, and most seemed to think it was cool or at least mildly interesting. Here, I’ve gotten enough dumb looks and blank stares that I generally don’t even bring it up. Not being from Wisconsin is looked down upon too (”coasties” generally cluster together in private dorms and get made fun of by the natives for their low tolerance for the cold). Originally I would mention that I’d graduated from Oconomowoc but also had ties to Arizona; now I just say I’m from Oconomowoc whether I really feel that I am or not.

Of course, there are exceptions. I’ve met some people (unsurprisingly, none from Wisconsin) who are much more intellectual and mature and less driven by alcohol and parties. There’re many shades of gray. I’m only describing things as I feel them from where I’m sitting in room 201 on the second floor of Witte Hall, tower A. From what I’ve heard, there can be a very different vibe depending on what dorm you live in or even what floor you’re on, and my dorm in particular has a reputation for craziness (”gettin’ shitty in Witte”). There were differences between the houses at Stanford too: Eucaliptolites were a little quirky and liked to goof around in weird, random ways; Granadans seemed a bit more rebellious; Ujamaa was rowdier; and so on. I might find next year that things are completely different.

Even so, the immaturity - and especially the culture of alcoholism - seems pervasive here. I sense it in the snippets of conversations I hear in the Southeast dorms’ central cafeteria. I can’t go into the Walgreens on State St. without hearing someone talking loudly about their drunken exploits the night before, or about how they can’t wait to start drinking “around 4:30, when class is over.” I see and meet ditzy girls like the one in the hallway all the time. Even some of the more levelheaded upperclassmen that I’ve met get taken in by it, though they certainly don’t seem to plan their lives around it like some of the kids in my dorm. It’s like Wisconsin’s party-school reputation (we’re #1 on the Princeton Review’s “Lots of Beer” ranking, and some years we’ve been high up on the “Party Schools” list) is an excuse to go crazy. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t have a problem with partying - with or without beer - but it’s not my favorite activity either, and I tire of it quickly when I’m surrounded by it as I am here. To some kids Wisconsin would be a dream school - finally they can do everything they did in high school but always had to hide from their parents or teachers or the police. Here, authority is pretty loose, especially in dorms (RAs don’t care about the drinking and, in the rare event someone gets busted for it, they don’t really get punished), and kids get away with just about anything. At Stanford, anyone caught drinking or smoking was flown home immediately. That’s a pretty draconian policy, but not caring about it at all is similarly extreme.

Faced with the situation here, the logical question for me to ask is, “Are all colleges like this?” I would think not, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe college is all about being stupid and pushing one’s body to its limits by eating badly and ingesting illegal substances. And it’s all okay because I’m just a young adult learning about life through “experimentation.” Maybe being passionate about academics doesn’t matter, and I should just concentrate on socializing as much as possible and graduating…eventually. Maybe my problem is that I am too rigid, too reluctant to change myself and embrace the partying and the binge drinking and the shallowness.

I was never very sure about coming here. I knew this school’s reputation, I knew that it was huge, and I knew that it wouldn’t be quite like Stanford, though I hoped that it would at least be similar. I had the chance to go to Pomona and potentially have a much more Stanfordesque experience, but attending the school wasn’t really possible financially. Now I begin to wonder if I traded happiness for in-state tuition, some scholarship money, and a lenient transfer credit policy. I begin to wonder if by coming here I continued my rather mistake-prone tradition of ignoring my gut in favor of my mind. Hopefully by the end of the year I will feel better about my choice.

It reached 33 degrees outside today and I can’t believe how warm I felt.

Until next time (which could be quite a while, sorry)….