This is a tough month at Duke. There's the weather, the tents, the contagious I-just-got-back-from-abroad depression, the recruitment and rush, the general atmosphere of sickness and judgement and fatigue.
To counteract the suckiness of winter I decided to make the most of my academia-ordered time off for four inches of snow, and occupied myself looking for careers. Alas, the euphoria of concrete activity crashed quickly: after realizing the limitations of the Career Center website, I became the other spring downer, the senior realizing that outside life is within smelling distance and that I'm with neither a viable employment option nor a trust fund/large rock on my left hand/winning lottery ticket to render said employment optional.
So, what did I do? Spell-check my resume, call in connections and borrow a suit? Or listen incessantly to depressing music, make slightly bitter valentines out of construction paper/old magazines on the floor with my friends and go to the Down Under Pub, only Durham watering hole open in in the snow? Take a guess.
I wrote that this is a tough month at Duke, but "tough" is a relative and probably inappropriate word. On my list of life goals, "survival," "eating enough" and "not getting AIDS" are taken for granted, left off in favor of hiking the Appalachian Trail and writing a decent play.
My future life is uncertain, but the relatively pathetic backup of moving back home is still pretty cushy. Certain phrases have been ringing in my mind, though, and I can't get them out, things along the lines of contribution and responsibility. To whom much is given, much is expected--stuff like that. The admissions office didn't decide I should have this education for me to live all hedonistically and spend my greater years as a bartender. On what basis should I plan my life? How should I judge?
There's been a rash of judgement on campus lately, largely regarding recruitment and feminism and appropriate versus realistic female behavior. Parts of those attacks I probably would have written as a freshman, when rush, as it was still called back in the day, literally decorated my dorm with door decks, and male friends dropped me for their new brothers, and I spent bid week all depressed that first semester had fooled me into thinking I could have friends without writing a check. I don't think that anymore; I can drink from my roommate's Delta Gamma mugs without rolling my eyes and realize that as a member of a selective house I shouldn't throw so many stones. But the discussion has made me think hard about judgement and its place in our lives.
Last year I wrote a column blasting a professor for refusing to let me into a class because, I presumed, he thought me too blonde. I couldn't remember saying anything stupid when I met with him about the class, but had revealed that I'm from New Jersey, went to private high school and had worn a sweater set. Clearly, I thought, he'd judged me. It was a rush I hadn't signed up for, all getting cut on small talk and the wrong shoes.
I wrote the column as closure, to tell myself that he was wrong, I am not completely lacking in intellectual promise, but I still think about the conversation almost two years later, and my stomach still flips when I walk past his office en route to class. Something doesn't fit. I think I was right, that it didn't matter what I had to say about Willa Cather novels or the Duke education, but that I responded the same way he had attacked, with judgement and a patchy basis for it. What can you know about someone without really knowing them? It goes both ways. Whether it's begging for permission numbers, "mutually selecting" a social group, or interviewing for a job, it's all about communicating through surface.
I suppose that's why I like theater; it's openly about communicating through signals and signifiers and submitting your work to the approval of an audience and a critical community. It looks for deeper meaning through the literally superficial.
Auditions, based entirely on judgement, are some of the most terrifying and exciting times in the run of a show, with the sense of opportunity and fear. Rather like rush. Forget judging the fact that it's all about judging, and move on, start practicing that winning interview smile.
So brush up your resume, start padding it now. I've written my cover letters for training programs in the extremely non-lucrative field of theater directing, and begun to think about contribution and responsibility and how they'll fit into my life, whether in the extremely unlikely possible situation of a thriving theater career, or somewhere else.
Maybe I should go into government or lobbying, and do what I can to stop our government from attacking other countries on the basis of fabrications, or take baby steps towards getting the U.S.'s stockpile of anti-retroviral AIDS drugs to Africa, or somehow block Bush's commitment to bring back 1950s-era sex ed. Maybe, instead of whining about people not liking me for no reason and driving on ice to drown my sorrows in dark lager and Davidoffs, I could start making some plans.
Meghan Valerio is a Trinity senior. Her column appears every third Thursday.
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