Spinoza was wrong. Only some men are social animals. The best I can be labeled is "not an anti-social animal." If you don't know anyone here, and are shy and slow to make friends, the Big H will be a lonely place. One of the few valuable skills Harvard gave me is the ability to make shallow party chit chat with people I know nothing about, but the lessons came too late for the time I really needed them: Freshman Week.
During that week, Harvard offers orientations to various minorites it thinks will have difficulty adapting to the environment. But the University forgets about the one that could really use that service--the shy kid from the sheltered glades of suburbia who lacks the family or prep school connections for a showing of the ropes. Without it, Freshman Week is a blizzard of stammered conversations and embarrassed silences, a cocktail party scripted by Samuel Beckett.
Of course, many of you freshmen already know this. What you don't know is that Freshman Week is a concentrated sampling of what your social life will be like for the next year. If Harvard cared about its students, it would allow anyone who didn't love Harvard after Freshman Week an automatic transfer to Stanford or Amherst, to spare them a wasted and unhappy year. How come you can return anything you buy if it's unused, except for your freshman year?
Because there are no easy outs from the second circle of hell, that's why. Those stuck there have three choices: getting a personality transplant, being extravagantly generous--buy everyone in your entryway a gram of coke!--or teaching yourself solitaire. As the president of a final club once remarked to me, "The meek might inherit the earth, but they won't get punched for the Porc."
Circle 4. Roommate Hell
Strictly speaking, this circle should be named Canaday Hell, after the den of architectural perversity masquerading as a freshman dorm. It's a little known fact that the building of both Canaday and Mather House was secretly funded by Yale.
I was docked in one of the aptly named Singles. My room had previously been occupied by someone with infectious hepatitis. Great, I thought. Strictly speaking, I had no roommates; but the eight gents on my floor who formed a bathroom unit, became one meta-rooming group. I never ventured fully into this circle of hell, living as I was in a sensory deprivation tank of a room.
Nevertheless, I managed to detest one of my "roommates" as much as if I actually lived with him. I shall call him Alan. He was a blond, blue-eyed bisexual from Long Island, a high cheekboned boy wonder at whose door many a frosh female threw herself. In one month he used up as many Trojans as I had in my entire life. That we shared a thin wall is indubitable proof, I think, of one of the following two propositions: (1) there is a God, and He is a Bastard; or, (2) Harvard matches roommates to maximize malice.
Circle 5. Romance Hell
The circle of romance hell is divided in half: the realm of the long-distance relationship, and the realm of Harvard. I traversed both.
When I left Seattle I was desperately in love with a girl named Christina. Our relationship was showing the first signs of going ballistic when I left for Harvard. As time wore on it began to bear a distinct resemblance to a Six Flags roller coaster ride, complete with loop the loops and reality-defying twists and turns.
As is often the case with the instinctively monogamous, my interest in Harvard women varied inversely with the state of my relationship with Tina. In November it looked like a permanent tailspin, and I began to take the fall for a femme on the fifth floor of my entry, coincidentally also named Christina. Nicknamed the "Ice Queen" by one of my friends, she ignored every advance I threw her way for some weeks. Finally she took pity on me and patiently explained that her heart belonged to another back in the Old Country, and even though I was charming and sweet etc., there was a commitment between them that nothing could break.
A week later the Secret Santa program began. This is a game you will join too, whereby students are randomly assigned a person of the opposite sex to give presents to, things like Christmas Carols under the window or surprise decorating of the bedroom.
Soon a message for Alan appeared on the suite door, promising an erotic massage with exotic oils from a willing elf. The next day I was working on a paper at my desk, the door to my room open as usual. I saw Christina in a miniskirt-and-net-stocking elf costume, pay Alan a very personal visit in his bedroom. Hearing the noises through the wall, I sat wondering who had given Alan this incredible present. Perhaps Christina herself suggested it.
Circle 6. Counseling Hell.
All of Harvard's vaunted safety nets and counseling resources are no better than the people who staff them. My proctor, Carla, was a former Eliot House crew and gov jock establishing her professional credentials at the Law School. She was nice, her live-in boyfriend was nice, her study breaks were nice. Whenever you talked to her about your problems, she would tell you how rowing helped her when she was depressed. A great help, she was.
I went into the UHS walk-in mental clinic after a week of anxiety and nightmares. The psychiatrist on duty listened, then suggested encounter group therapy. He told me a group would be starting up next semester. Great, I thought, I might be on the bottom of the Charles by then.
I also tried Room 13, the student volunteer counseling program. It was not really the fault of the guy on duty that he couldn't understand my unhappiness here, or that he was as thick as a table. He meant well.
BELIEVE IT OR NOT, there are some existential tortures that I missed as a freshman: lottery hell, work-study hell, extracurricular hell. Next party you're at, pull some wise senior aside and get him or her to talk about it, if they dare. Otherwise, repeat your mantra, rub your lucky rabbit's foot, and keep a crucifix handy, and you probably will sail through freshman year unscathed. If not, don't say I didn't warn you.