Virgil in pink, and other trips

The World According to Carp
    By Benjamin Carp

Man, I'm bored as hell. Or at least I was. Sunk in ennui, I was playing Minesweeper for purposes other than procrastination (sounds like a purity test question...call it the boredom test: have you ever played Minesweeper so often that you dreamed about it? Actually, I did). I was just playing because it seemed like the best thing to do at the time. Life at Yale can be constant excitement, and sometimes you're too busy to think about it, but then you just hit a rut.

In your second year, you call it the sophomore slump, but the rest of us have no name for it. You can have cool friends, stimulating classes, mellowing alcohol, exciting extracurriculars, a winning home team, a great relationship, good life prospects, and you can still be bored as hell.

I'm going on five out of seven right now (no one considers graduate school a good life prospect, of course, and I hate the Yanks), but the slump still hit me last week.

Already you're asking yourself, "What is this smug, arrogant nimrod complaining about?" Your antipathy will probably deepen when I tell you how I found a cure.

"AmStud 258a.: Wilderness in the North American Imagination." Read: all-expenses paid weekend trip to the Catskills. Bonding. Hiking. Good food. Fresh air. Sublime mountain views. Sentence fragments. It was like an adrenaline shot to the soul (and, as it turned out, I did need minor first aid).

This is the paragraph where my columns usually degenerate into some ridiculous nonsensical point. For instance: "All seminars should have such field trips, because they engender good feeling in small classes, and are loads of fun." In other words, you previously knew that guy only as a rude, overtalkative jerk in your section. Now you know that rude, overtalkative jerk's life goals, family background and music tastes. Well, I am the rude, overtalkative jerk in my section, and I'm definitely looking forward to my next class.

Because it's true that you can't learn everything in an acid-blasted, Gothic-looking ivory tower (except how to pull bells, but even the Carillonneurs go to Germany). The trip gave this class a point of reference; now, having shared our experiences in the wilderness, we can feel more qualified to discuss how Thoreau, Cole, and others have encountered the wild.

"Those obnoxious punks from Queens," we said while on Saturday's hike, with our new, qualified perspective. "I'm sure they could drink plenty of beer back home without bringing it to these lovely mountains." This isn't true, of course. You have to go to Manhattan to find the decent bars. But, Becks-swilling downstaters aside, we had great discussions and expect to have a great semester, complete with reunions.

So all seminars should get endowments for field trips. I think it'd be fun. Wouldn't it be great to use the blue book as a travel guide? Take Econ majors on a tour of Wall Street (although a word of caution: the last time I was there, I got my shoes powdered and my tie cut off. The floor of the New York Stock Exchange can be a lot like a seventh grade boys' locker room). Send Chinese history and literature students to Beijing, American government concentrators to D.C., and Religious Studies majors to the Mideast. And if you're in a class on Dante? Well, hmm. Maybe you can visit an organic chemistry class and hope Virgil comes along in a pink dress and tells you that you've always known the way home. Just click your heels together and run the endowment dry! I mean, do you really care about future generations of Yalies?

I returned from England lauding the virtues of study abroad [1/24/97, YH], and applications to Yale-in-London more than doubled. I complained about noises through the fire door [3/6/97, YH], and that rowdy girl next door piped down. I claimed that the sun always shines on prefrosh days [5/2/96, YH], and...well, actually, it rained the following year. Still, no YDN columnist can boast such accomplishments. Perhaps Virgil will float over in a pink dress and allocate the endowment to universal field trips. You'll thank me then. In the meantime, think about the next few weekends. It's no tragedy to miss a few frat parties if you can get away and clear your head. Yale is a great place, but as Burt Reynolds said in Deliverance, "Sometimes you have to lose yourself before you can find anything."

Let's just hope those punks from Queens don't have shotguns.

(Cut to "Dueling Banjos," fade out).

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