The Gentleman's Guide to Pantomime

(As of yesterday, my four years at Vassar College are over. A week before that, I was asked to write a retrospective for the last issue of the school paper which somehow became one very honest piece of writing. I’m proud of it, so here it is.)

At some point in the near future, I will be filling out an online survey in a doomed attempt to live from gift card to gift card; before it asks me what medications I would be open to trying in the name of science, I will be asked for my occupation, and I will have a new answer: “Unemployed.”

For the past four years, I’ve been saying, “I’m a student,” or “I go to Vassar,” and the time window in which those statements are true is coming to a close. For what it’s worth, I never did understand how being a “Student” could be considered an occupation – it falls somewhere short of working a grueling 9 to 5 and just ahead of sitting catatonic in front of your computer all day – and so I’d much more readily call it glorified joblessness or a masochistic hobby, depending on your course load for that semester.

You could call me disillusioned. The most salient point that you might take away from my words so far is that I’m regretting the imminent loss of a very useful piece of small talk. I understand that I’m coming across as emphatically jaded right now. As someone who was asked in a very courteous fashion to contribute to this final issue, I realize that I am probably making something of a huge misstep with this opening. But, (1) my mind’s a mess, (2) I’m burnt out, and (3) depending on where they print me, you should be able to look up/down/left/right and find someone who has a more positive outlook on their time here if you were hoping for that sort of thing.

To those of you still with me: allow me to take you on a trip down the moderately enjoyable memory cul-de-sac that was my time at Vassar College. Good times, bad neighbors, and all.[1]

I’ve met many people that I plan to keep close for the rest of my life. I like to think of my identity as something that was refined through continued collaboration with these people. If a conversation was enlightening, I would bookmark that topic. If an opinion sparked an argument, I’d polish my thoughts. If a joke made them laugh, I would surely remember that one for later. I wouldn’t be the absolutely, amazingly, and fully committed terrible person that I am today if it weren’t for these people. I enjoy being me a lot more than I used to, and even though I’ll just say that my best friends “know who they are,” I hope they also know that if there’s one thing that they can count on coming before my ego, it’s my gratitude towards them.

While I’ve always considered my friends as belonging to “real life” I suppose it would be impossible to separate my classes, my professors, and my activities from the “Vassarian” idea. I learned a lot here. I’m sure that most everyone can agree with that simple thought, even if we can’t readily recall every single detail of our education. I am a drama major and I learned how to act better. I am interested in fiction and I learned how to write better. Some professors taught a great deal from a distance, but I’ve been lucky enough to know a few who taught a small handful of things very thoroughly and personally. I certainly leaned on some of them when they didn’t need the extra pressure, but they always helped. They’ll always be here if I’m thinking of them.

I’ve tried to make the previous two paragraphs less saccharine because these people deserve better, but they probably know me well enough to imagine me saying this glowing praise with a slight sneer and an insistent elbow to the ribs. My thoughts are succinct, but these were good things.

However, you can’t have good without some bad. For everything I enjoyed about Vassar, there seemed to be a niggling problem that would develop in lockstep. There were many people who knew me, but there were also many people who never bothered to know me and some that thought they knew me oh, so well. After the first couple of years, there arises this sort of dead socialization that never introduces new ideas or people that ingrains itself and surely continues past graduation. People talk shop and discuss emotion at a distance. There are quite a few people I know from whom I’ve never seen an honest smile.

Vassar places stress upon stress on you, both academic and social, until you either give up or give in. I pity those who didn’t find their place here and I kind of hate myself for fitting in with some of these people like I do. Because I had to. Because there’s no one new. Because no one sane would want to run the gauntlet of these harsh, social learning curves in order to gain a few new buddies who all talk the same. Even my negativity reads more potently than the opposite because that’s another thing that this place has done to me.

We have lived the past four years in a bubble and condescension has no smell.

My time here was well spent making honest connections and learning from people who knew a lot of stuff that they knew very well. I certainly hope that this school and its members have found me, on average, more entertaining than not. It was interesting. For now, I’d just like to say: no offense, but I wash myself of the whole thing.

Somewhere between now and the last time I saw him, my friend Nick Halgren died in a car accident of which I know no detail. I don’t care to imagine it. Two weeks or so have passed since I heard the news – his number is still on my phone and will probably have a permanent home there until I get a new one and it doesn’t successfully transfer. That makes for three Nicks on my phone. I don’t think I call the other two. Nick Halgren was the Nick I knew.

The things I knew about Nick were his passion for jazz, his teaching ambitions, and the ever-increasing number of girls that he seemed to fall in love with (but actually had the guts to pursue, so there’s that). But my fondest memory of Nick by far is that he was bad at Magic. Magic: the Gathering is a trading card game in which each player takes the role of a wizard, casting spells and creatures in an attempt to overcome the opponent. Nick was nowhere near bad enough at the game that he should be considered, “bad at it,” by any means, but friends can’t help but joke.

When he made Top 8 of a large tournament only to convincingly lose his first round, he cleaned up his cards, smiled, and said he was quite “bad at Magic.” When we went out to late lunch, late dinner, or by closest definition, early breakfast, and he lost in the casual game we played with our decks while waiting for our meal, he heartily agreed that he was “bad at Magic.” When we were just listening to music on our way to or from some Magic event that was either closer to him or closer to me and far-flung from the other, he would maybe say something charmingly stupid and we would laugh and say that this was definitive proof that he was “bad at Magic.”

We spent a lot of time together, playing a silly card game. In an odd way, I find it comforting that I can look at my tournament history and locate the event where we first met (Dec. 27^th, 2009). I think he did OK in that one as well.

Magic was our stress relief. Whenever we were both in the same general, geographical area, two things would undoubtedly be true: (1) that there was an upcoming tournament full of opponents that needed to be taken down a notch, and (2) one of us had something to complain about. Between the flurry of match wins and losses, we vented. Somehow, we would always land on the topic of “life – our lives, man,” and we got to know each other.

I know that his number’s still on my phone, and it is. I know that we had been friends, and we were. I know that he was bad at Magic. I know he would have laughed at that.