There are times in a man's life when months of hard work suddenly seem worthless. When in the space of a few hours his dreams are clubbed to death like so many baby seals. When dozens of cold showers won't rid him of mediocrity's foul stench. When he looks back on months of warm beers, second-hand clothes and those dark, cold nights, and asks, "Does anything really matter after all? Do I matter?"

You see, Eliot House finished fifth in the Green Cup. What's the Green Cup, you ask? I answer: It's because of people like you that there's no forest in the rainforest and those darling little snail darters are no longer darting. You should be ashamed of yourself.

The Green Cup is a monthly competition in which Houses try to out-reduce, reuse and recycle each other. The winner gets a trophy which, yes, is reused every month.

The folks who run the competition are fellow travelers with the Environmental Action Committee, a gaggle of Birken-stocked lefties whose hearts are a little too large. They're the sort of guys who give more than a hoot about the spotted owl, who know that it's inhumane to treat other creatures like bugs. After all, if we have no qualms about killing innocent arthropods, can puppies be far behind?

Probably not, which is why it's a good thing we have environmentalists of every stripe, Green Cup not least among them. Last week they carpet-bombed Houses with table tents and flyers (all printed on 100 percent recycled paper, no less). Some shouted saucy slogans, others combined Orwellian starch with the sort of gentle, nudging reminders one finds on the refrigerator doors of overweight aunts: "GREEN CUP SAYS: Please don't waste food," "GREEN CUP Reminds you... Don't forget to recycle!" (Green Cup is watching.)

I had just sat down with a scrumptious salad and a glass of fizzy water one evening last week when I found one of said table tents tented on my table. And that's when I heard the news.

Eliot led the pack in recycling, took the bronze in waste reduction, but finished next-to-last in power reduction--consistently our worst event. A decent showing overall, but not nearly enough to catch the upstart squad from Dunster.

I took the news pretty hard. Eliot had fallen short in previous competitions and everyone thought it was our month. We were due. We had a promising young transfer from the Quad who was an all-state recycler in high school, an aqua green dome that all but screamed "environmentally conscious!" and with the Charles so close it was easy to reduce waste. Power reduction was, unfortunately, another matter entirely.

Nevertheless, team spirit was practically bubbling over after Adams was disqualified. Yes, disqualified. From the Green Cup. Maybe for shooting squirrels in the courtyard? For mixing aluminum with glass? It's tough to say, but one guesses they were less than heartbroken. Disqualification from a contest loses some of its sting when the competitors don't know they're competing.

Which, ultimately, is the problem with the Green Cup, and perhaps the reason why my fellow Eliotites couldn't muster the energy to reduce their power. Some things--like Easter egg hunts, synchronized swimming and especially recycling--just shouldn't be made into competitions. No matter how well-intentioned its leaders, Green Cup wrongly assumes that the most ambitious students around will compete for damn near anything--even the honor of being the best waste-reducers in school. Even Captain Planet would have a tough time getting excited for such a competition. So, while I was dismayed at our loss, I can only hope that the Green Cup organizers will provide Eliot House with a better motivation than pure unbridled ambition next year. Because, if nothing else, Green Cup has proven that other Houses' ambition is more unbridled than ours.

Hugh P. Leibert '01 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House.