Kids love college, apparently. Another night where the noise will not let me forget where I am; my speakers are too weak and the students are too genuine in their hope for their new lives to keep it the fuck down.
Holing myself up in my castle I do feel boring and naively misanthropic, but to be down there means I must cultivate excitement. Maybe there are worse things than that, and maybe that's what makes me a boring and depressed person. Maybe it implies an unwillingness to have fun, a laziness, an expectation for the exciting things in life to come to me. Screaming and banging on things and being ridiculous is not something I'm inherently against, and neither are surreal rituals. Fire, fireworks, and drunken revelry are things I like, as far as I know. But my the part of me that things like the Noise Parade are supposed to air out--the one that drives you to scream and bang on things--is not willing to expose itself in the name of Reed College. I can't get drunk on something so watered down. As of now, the fact that I happen to go to this college is not something I've become excited about, which I've only just now discovered is something that sets me apart from a lot of other people I'm around. I'm excited about school but as I've said before, I'll go to Reed but I won't be a Reedie. There's something that seems wrong about this, that makes me feel a little sick really. Things that smell like herd mentality and nationalism, they smell petty, they smell thoughtless: the old alma mater. The idea of Reed College, I go there, I am Reed, I am a Reedie. There seems to be something wrong in that and I can't tell if it's anything bigger than my tendency to avoid The Thing That Everybody's Doing. Maybe the fact that it is so widely accepted and expected is enough to write it off as frivilous and uncool. And although being one of the only people around me with no desire to participate makes me feel self-conscious, it doesn't feel dishonest.
And so it was on this night that I learned, through concrete interaction with the idea, that I am in fact not a Reedie.
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