...written late one night in a fit of bitterness. It is a truth, not the only truth, about the Swarthmore experience.

Swarthmore is all about fuck. Students spend their scant spare time getting fucked up, fucking, chasing after someone to fuck, or bitterly investigating who's fucking. Professors have a well-deserved reputation for fucking students over with work (several professors also fuck their students, but these they usually marry after a hasty divorce).

Swatties don't date, they attack the first available person within lunging distance. After hooking up -- "kissing" would be too dignified a term -- there follows the obligatory talk about whether or not this is a "relationship." Many just ask, "So, do we have a thing?" What the hell does that mean? A chair is a thing. Does their interaction mean about as much as a chair?

You'd think that relationships based on physical proximity would be less stable than ones based on emotional sharing. But no! The "relationship" label is a band-aid which binds the wounds of deep loneliness. (I worked for the admissions office and -- honest to God! -- they told me to trash any applications from prospective students who seemed to be completely comfortable with themselves, saying "content students tend to not be able to acheive Swarthmore's standards of excellence." So it's true: loneliness and insecurity are a prerequisite for admission)¹. It's astonishing what suffering a person will endure in a dysfunctional relationship to avoid confronting the deep feelings of isolation the relationship was supposed to cure. Deep emotional bonds fuck up relationships because before you know it, one person hates the other person and dumps their sorry ass. Lacking those pesky emotions which just get in the way, a "thing" relationships can outlast an "emotional" relationships by months or even years.

Everything is intense. Focus on work, focus on extracirriculars, and focus on friendships. There are no lower-case relationships, there are only Relationships. Swarthmore students spend their spare time finding ways to believe that they don't have spare time. God forbid you're happy just being with yourself; people will think you're a lame socially inept slacker. Even the fine art of vegitation becomes a competive sport -- "I was so tired all I did last night was sit in my room listening to music for an hour. I was such a slacker." "Oh, I know. I must have watched three hours of TV last night. Now I have so much work to do." "Me too. Gotta go."

Play is a kind of work. When Swatties drink they drink with precision, always factoring in the next day, the people they're with, the cost of the alochol they're consuming against the benefit of beating their bodies into relaxation and being seen drunk in fashionable company. We all know the familiar Friday night angst of trying to choose between the movie you don't want to see, the party with bad music, whatever pretension appears on LPAC mainstage, or hanging out with lame friends; usually you go wherever you have the best chance of hooking up. Some groups set up kitchy play activities like meeting in the lounge to read children's books or baking cookies for all their friends, but these play activies rapidly solidifiy into a frightening regime of expected relaxation time and friendship maintainence, and become just another kind of work. Spontaneous gestures of playfullness are almost always met with an icy stare and the five words "I have work to do." Students are actually relieved when they have real work which excuses them from the obligation to relax. It's surprisingly easy to live under these circumstances. Most frosh spend the first few weeks busily constructing a persona which can shield them for years. If friends grow to despise you, it's because they don't know the real you; if you fail, it's the persona that failed. It frees you from emotional responsibiltiy for your actions.

Abstraction is another useful tool. Is there any situation so simple that it cannot be abstracted into a gratifying Issue to rally behind? And what about the warm intellecual glow that comes from reducing every factor of your life to a set of principles? Or the malicious joy of analyizing a mutual friend to the point where they're just a contempible mass of confused intentions and needs? Girls call themselves women (sorry, I just can't bring myself to call them womyn), boys call themselves guys, organizations call themselves marginalized. It's some kind of mad game without referee or rule book with 1,200 players who madly run about alternately trampling one another, hooking up, but usually just bouncing off each other.

1. OK, so that's a lie. But you believed it for a little while, which just goes to show something.