Hey freshman! What house did you get into? Cabot? Hey, that’s great! I heard they have a lot of “community”??? Psych, kill yourself!
Once again it’s that exciting time of year when freshmen receive a packet of paper that decides their housing fate. For everyone involved, housing assignments are slightly more stressful than getting your SAT scores and slightly less stressful than opening up the results to your post-spring break syphilis test. As we’ve been through this inferno before, the Bell Lap can be your latter-day Virgil and help you get a better sense of the corner of hell you’ll reside in for the next three years:
Blocking Groups
Unfortunately, you already picked your blocking groups and made terrible choices. Needless to say, our advice about “peaking too early” probably fell on deaf ears and you failed to realize that anyone who is considered really “cool” in the freshman class is on a one-way track to becoming the worst person at the school by senior year. This metamorphosis is fueled by the misaligned schematics of the Harvard social scene, which ensure that everyone hyperbolizes their worst characteristics. But what are you going to do? People hate floaters even more than they hate transfers.
Is there a silver lining? Not really. Fuck this “neighborhooding” bullshit!!! All it does is ensure that you can live near even more people that you will probably end up disliking. Not like you’ll see them anyway—the truth is that if someone lives in a different entryway, let alone a different house, you will have almost no inclination to see them unless you need to borrow Drumline or some equally hilarious Nick Cannon DVD.
“I Want to Be Quaded”: The Fallacy
According to our “inside” source, an overwhelming number of blocking groups are making the bold claim that they want to live in the Quad. The great paradox of this mentality is that future blockmates tell each other that they will enjoy the closeness that living so far away from school will foster between them. In the back of their minds they all realize that they will eventually have singles where they can sit by themselves thinking, “Why am I so lonely? Why do I hate everyone?”
House Pride
In the olden days, housing assignments were not random and all the minorities on campus lived in the Quad. Having grown tired of explaining why all the white people lived in the best houses, the administration instituted a random lottery.
Technically speaking, then, house pride should have wasted away and died, like your hopes of a fulfilling life. But like the human appendix, this strange conceit remains, an evolutionary left-over from the time when people cared about where they lived.
It’s important to realize that house pride is like Eastern European nationalism: a lot of slogans and flag-waving that mask an undercurrent of broken dreams. It’s true that every house has its pros and cons. Some, for example, serve grape juice (little known fact). Some houses have huge dogs (jackpot!), and some have aggravating children (miserable!). Currier has multiple TV-viewing areas, yet it also feels like a mixture between a psychiatric ward and a Radisson lobby. The main thing to remember is that, in the end, they are all filled with the same faceless and miserable people.
However, according to chaos theory, all the New Jersey chaches will eventually end up in Cabot, so there is some hope.
