Without spontaneity, Yalies fall into routine lives

By Allison Carter

My friends from home--they're nuts. It has taken me two and a half years at Yale to realize this. No, actually it only took me about three minutes during this past vacation. Of course, those three minutes consisted of going through a McDonald's drive-thru with three other people who had fuzzy animal hats on their heads. One was a bunny, another a raccoon, and the third a giraffe. I guess I was lucky, I got to wear the furry Russian hat that made me look like somebody's littl e babushka instead. There just weren't enough fuzzy animal hats to go around and someone had to sacrifice.

You see, this is all a part of our Big Fun project. The plan is to squeeze as much Big Fun as possible into the few vacation days we have together. Right now, Big Fun seems to consist of wearing fuzzy animal hats in public places, going to the greyhound racing track and betting on dogs named "Pooky Toots" and "Smacky Chops" and trolling for sailors during the Portland Rose Festival carnival. But we are constantly adding to our list. Big Fun is really a state of mind.

It's odd, because here at school, my friends and I don't seem to get into much Big Fun. People, myself included, are much more reserved. It's not that there isn't fun to be had. What else would you call the hundreds of different sports, clubs, groups and activities the average Yalie belongs to? Even serious fun, usually achieved on hazy drunken Naples Nights, happens quite frequently at Yale.

But Big Fun almost never occurs. I mean, occasionally, you can see people accomplishing what would appear to be Big Fun, but it usually turns out to be merely serious fun, or some sort of singing group initiation/mating ritual. I've heard the Yale Precision Marching Band sometimes has Big Fun, but that's usually only on cue and in pre-approved times and places. The spontaneity of Big Fun is somehow lacking here.

We get caught up in our routines too often at Yale. We go to our classes, we play our instruments, we eat in our dining halls, we watch our ER, we read our 500 pages of drivel about the plight of the weasels in Afghanistan and the political and economic implications thereof, and we go to bed and do it again the next day.

On the weekends we go to our parties and we drin k our beer that tastes like pee and party until the next morning. And we have our fun, we even have our serious fun because that's what we're supposed to do.

We're college students, and we take that job very seriously. We're 19 or 22 and there is a very limited number of specific things our dignity allows us to do for fun: drinking, dancing, hanging out, playing sports, hooking up, working out, emailing friends, and doing our various and sundry little activities. We're too cool for our own good, and "Random Stuff Day," though a nice idea, doesn't quite make up the difference.

We take ourselves very seriously. We work and play and relax as though our lives depended on it, and in many cases, we think they actually do. Like children pl aying dress up, we try very hard to act as though we're all grown up, try walking in shoes we don't quite fit yet and think if we pretend hard enough to be real adults everyone else will believe it too.

Yet, as Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls points out, & quot;it's only life after all." There's some truth to our play, but there's a note of falsehood too. Taking our lives so seriously obscures the real problems and makes us choose serious fun over randomness, silliness and Big Fun. And that's a shame.

I think there's room for a little more Big Fun here. It's good to study hard, do well in your classes, and get a job or go to grad school. But it's also good not to grow up before you have to, to fill the world with random fun and to get totally crazy once in a while. And the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. So grab your friends, drive to Mickey D's, and put on your fuzzy bunny hat from second grade. Oh, and ask for a side of lettuce while you're at it. They love that.

Allison Carter is a junior in Silliman.

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