After moving to the suburbs in the seventh grade, I developed an unoriginal theory for why all the pretty, itty-bitty blonde girls sat together at lunch and traveled together with the coordinated grace of a human slinky. I figured beautiful people were recognized for their fine bone structure early on in life, hence increased self-esteem, hence poise. In addition to beautiful people being predisposed to being socially well-adjusted, socially well-adjusted people communed with socially well-adjusted people, and left the rest of us to make do among ourselves.
Seventh grade was not a great time for me.
I credit the quantum leap that was eighth grade to the fact that I stopped twisting the data to fit my assumption that principles of profound likeness actually undergirded the cafeteria caste system.
It's funny. In our official capacity as Duke students, well-versed in the craft of the perfect Student Affairs brochure, we are not apt to assume compatibility is contingent on likeness. Diversity is the magic word when it comes to relationships, and we bandy it about to signify visible difference.
This obliges us to disapprove of what we (literally) see as people seeking out people like them. We see Asians hanging out with Asians and pink-panted men with pink-panted men as signs of our collective failure to take advantage of all this great diversity that Admissions has carefully parsed out for us.
I argue the problem is not that we actively search for people like ourselves, but that we don't. It is surprisingly passive, our tendency to approach people who are like us in skin shade, pocketbook, fashion sense or bone structure. These are the easy things. And who knows? Maybe they distract us from finding people who are like us ethically or spiritually, artistically or philosophically: whatever it is that allows people to talk passionately about things that matter most to them.
But college is a fun time to figure out how to compensate for the fact that whether someone is wearing a Yankees or Red Sox cap has a serious impact on our ability to make conversation and potentially uncover spiritual kinship.
I admit we seniors are notoriously nostalgic and wonderfully reckless, as we are in countdown mode. But honestly, our sense of carpe diem is only a slightly morose version of the courage every freshman should feel about taking the worthwhile social gamble. Some of us only have two months left, but nobody gets (much) more than four years. The implications extend beyond the quality of our college experience. If we can't find it in us to develop that kind of courage within a campus community like Duke, then where can we?
The current senior class knows that the "tradition" of campus-wide cocktail parties is actually a phenomenon borne of fairly recent events, circa Spring 2006. In the fall of our freshman year, Nasher Noir and the library party were inconceivable, and this was only in part because the buildings that house them were still brand new. These large-scale semiformals are now a campus staple and are probably credited for accomplishing more than what they actually accomplish because they seem to provide visual confirmation of different segments of the Duke population getting excited about being under the same roof.
But I conceive the UnMasquerade this Friday of being something different (full disclosure: I am the chair of Honor Council, which is heading up this event). But it is not a grand conspiracy designed to squeeze new best friendships out of a thousand students based on their answers to a dozen survey questions. At worst, it will be a party like many others-a chance to eat, drink, dance and leave with people you know. At best, it will be an open opportunity to try these things with people you don't know.
Einstein said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Insanity, to me, is staring at a bottle of vinegar and a box of baking soda and expecting a reaction to will itself into being. Consider the depressing implications of putting these definitions together.
This Friday, at a party. Next Tuesday on the quad. Freshman. Senior. It doesn't really matter. Let's get greedy for the kind of conversation we came to college looking for. Maybe in a moment of courage I will approach someone who looks nothing like me with a brilliant opening line... only to get shut down. To use a particularly lame analogy: Despite regular, highly devastating malfunctions, my Dell of four years consistently musters up the energy to restart without offering so much as the option of going into safe mode. I think I can aspire to as much.
Jane Chong is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Tuesday.
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