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How do you say goodbye to a column that you’ve been writing for two years? How do you wrap it up, sum it up, just like that, when there is still so much more left to say, to reflect on, to think about?
When I took my first campus tour of Penn as a high school student, I fell in love with Locust Walk. I was enamored of its ancient, beautiful brick buildings, their elegant columns and stained glass windows. I envisioned myself taking seminars in those buildings, working on homework late into the night while sitting in large armchairs, talking with friends. But then when I got to Penn, I realized that 12 of those buildings were, in fact, fraternities.
I was struck by something Alec Baldwin said near the end of his talk at Penn on Friday. When asked what advice he would give to college students, Baldwin immediately replied that we ought to travel, to explore the world when we are single, young and free. Yet he also pointed out the contradiction at the heart of this advice, which had manifested itself in his own life: “When I was young I had the time to travel but didn’t have the money, and now I have the money but I don’t have the time.”
In my Africana Studies class, we talk a lot about perspective: how things that seem acceptable or normal to a society at a given point in history can often seem incomprehensible to that same society several generations later. Oftentimes, the professor asks us to think about things that we take for granted about our own way of life, things that we do without ever really stopping to consider why we do them in the first place. She asks us to think about the fact that these might be the very things that, 50 or 100 years from now, people will learn about in their classes or hear about in stories and say, “Wow. How was that still going on in 2017?”
I was watching one of my brother’s baseball games over spring break when a parent asked me why I wasn’t living it up in Florida or Puerto Vallarta or some other tropical location with my friends. “Isn’t that what everyone does for spring break?” he said. “I remember going there in my college days. It must be pretty boring to come home.”
If you type the word “expectations” into your search bar, the first suggestion that comes up is “expectations versus reality.” The search yields endless memes that attest to the vast discrepancy between what we expect the result of something to be and its actual result.
GROUP THINK is the DP’s round table section, where we throw a question at the columnists and see which answers stick. Read your favorite columnist, or read them all.
GROUP THINK is the DP’s round table section, where we throw a question at the columnists and see what answers stick. Read your favorite columnist, or read them all.
Sometimes I feel like the most tangible thing I’ve gotten from my college education is a broader and more refined understanding of just how many things are wrong with the world, how many terrible atrocities have been committed in the past and continue to be committed, how many people are suffering in many different ways. Literature, history, science, art, math — all of these disciplines contain within them, either explicitly or implicitly, narratives of oppression, suffering, injustice and struggle.
Maybe it’s because I’m graduating from Penn soon, but I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on how I came to be here in the first place. I’ve been thinking about how naturally and easily people say things like “College is the best four years of your life!” and trying to ascertain if my college years have, in fact, been the best years of my life thus far.
GROUP THINK is The DP’s round table section, where we throw a question at the columnists and see what answers stick. Read your favorite columnist, or read them all.
This semester will be my last one at Penn.
When I finish my last day of classes each semester, feelings of happiness and relief sweep through me when I think about how I no longer have to wake up early, no longer have to speed-walk to class and come close to twisting my ankle on the Locust cobblestones. I can finally get a reprieve from the stringent, hectic schedule that I’ve been following for the past 15 weeks. Yet this final thought also makes me feel slightly anxious, slightly uncomfortable. This feeling is exacerbated whenever I look at my planner and am confronted with the seemingly endless expanse of time allotted for reading days and the ensuing week of finals.
“So how’s school going?”
This past week has objectively been full of intense emotional and mental turmoil. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my newsfeed so consistently full of such long statuses written by so many people. After a while, it got to the point where I couldn’t read the statuses anymore, couldn’t log onto Facebook, because I literally felt like my brain was oversaturated. The reactions just kept pouring in and mingling with my own reaction and reactions to other people’s reactions until I could no longer tell which was which.
I got a C-minus on my last Shakespeare test.
This past week, I went to go see the Mask and Wig show “Magic Mike and Ike.” The last skit was about why they hadn’t performed any skits about Trump. It was my favorite skit of the evening, not only because its paradoxical nature — a performance about the very thing about which they refused to perform — appealed to my English major sensibilities, but also because I agreed wholeheartedly with the message it put forward.
When I learned that I had received a scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge this past summer, and consequently would be going to Europe for the first time in my life, I was so excited I couldn’t sit still. Over the remainder of the semester, I made a Google Doc with multiple different headings: “Things to do in Cambridge:” “Things to do in London.” I wrote down all the obvious things to see: Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Houses of Parliament. I did endless “best restaurants” and “most fun museums” Google searches. By the time summer rolled around, I was ready and armed with a long list of things to do, eat and see.
GROUP THINK is the DP’s round table section, where we throw a question at the columnists and see what answers stick. Read your favorite columnist, or read them all.
I dread waiting for the elevator in Penn’s high rise buildings almost as much as I dread the actual elevator ride itself.