Senior Social Suppositions
October 4, 2005 by David BlackmanAs a senior, I've developed a number of theories about life at Stanford and I will share them with you here.
Dating Theory #1 (modified): Stanford guys are delusional. Most males on campus will tell you that Stanford girls are unattractive. These people, me included, are idiots. We expect females to look and sound like Marissa Cooper. In the reality distortion field that surrounds Stanford University (on loan from Steve Jobs), we forget that these are the same girls we competed with back home for valedictorian. The ones we thought were amazing because they had both breasts and a command of Russian literature. When we show up at Stanford, the dissonance is irreconcilable. Being the dorks we refuse to admit we are, we come up with bizarre rationalizations -- such as the author's own original Dating Theory #1, affectionately called "the ladder theory," in which it is taken as fact that the hottest males at Stanford are hotter than the hottest females (find me when I'm drunk and I can explain this with hand motions and bar graphs).
Friendship Theory #1: We are all broken. Dating Theory #2, Oh god, we are all so horribly broken. Stanford is like a eugenics experiment gone horribly wrong. It is what happens when you take 6,400 kids who spent their childhoods being overachievers -- kids who were told they'd grow up to be nothing less than the President -- and add the expectation of being well-adjusted. We were never well-adjusted. We are all still competing to be the teacher's pet, because most of us were, but now we can't admit it. This new pressure manifests itself in odd ways, such as an inability for Stanford students to form meaningful friendships.
Friendship Theory #2: We don't see each other enough. We learned how to have friends in high school, when we had mandatory daily base exposure to each other -- in classes, in the halls and in our innumerable extracurriculars. That was the basis of the friendship, everything else was extra. We didn't need to constantly catch up on what was happening in each others' lives because we saw it happening. Here at Stanford, our only close friends are those who live near us, because they are the people we can have high-schoolesque relationships with. We don't need to rush in between classes to have meals with our housemates to catch up on major events. There is no catching up; there's just friendship.
Social Theory #1: We don't know what we're doing. Stanford gives us nerds a clean slate, upon which we attempt to make a photographic copy of the high school world we left behind -- but we end up with a surrealist vision where the actors don't know their roles and motivations. We know no other social order, so we recreate it in our own horribly twisted way. We end up with CS nerds who drink too much and sorority girls who are afraid to talk about how much they love sci-fi. We leave out the undesirable elements, the punks and the goths, and marginalize the interesting people into co-ops, because these people discolor the black-and-white everyone-is-happy Brave-New-World of Stanford.
Social Corollary #1: We don't know how to be chill. We're a special breed of "the best and the brightest," the ones who won our spot at the chill near-Ivy by being neurotic and high-strung. We hoped to learn how to relax, but forgot that the people teaching it to us would be ourselves.
Dating Theory #3, Stanford is a wasteland. The prospective freshman asks, "Where is the student union on campus?" The Stanford student answers, "What's that?" Exactly. There is no social place on campus at night. Late Nite dining doesn't count because it smells like an interstate truck stop and is located in dining halls. The CoHo almost counts, but requires fighting with people who came there to study, and is so small and closes so early that it misses the mark.
Dating Corollary #1, Palo Alto is also a wasteland. As a freshman you can't have a car. As a sophomore you realize that having a car is worthless because everything in Palo Alto closes at 10 p.m. anyway, with the exception of Safeway. The town (barely even that; it's five blocks long) is expensive and lacks anything approaching a student-friendly hangout. In conclusion, there is nowhere to go on dates, so no one dates. Let me explain how normal human beings go about dating. Two people meet, one asks the other out, they go out, they decide if they wish to do this again. If so, they do so; if not, they never see each other again. This is hard when you can't leave campus, made worse because there's no real point to leaving, and completely impossible when you need to see the person every day in your dorm.
Party Theory #1: The University is a purgatory from which there is no escape. Dating Theory #4: You can't meet people at parties (but we try anyway). Stanford, in its tradition of being chill, takes a lax stance on alcohol consumption. That is, it's allowed. Staff are not police, and as long as you're still breathing, you're okay. But Stanford is paranoid about being sued, so they've cracked down on the frats until we only have one frat party on Friday and one on Saturday. The frats cannot accommodate the entire campus, so the parties are overfull and underpleasant, and too crowded for people to meet anyone new.
Party Theory #2: Animal House is worse than crystal meth.
As a result of people's expectations of parties, people forget that the best ones are the small ones where each person is at most one degree removed. At a normal school, which is usually run like a prison, everyone drinks in secrecy in their rooms or off-campus, with friends and friends-of-friends meeting people and having a good time. Everyone gets so drunk that they don't notice frat parties suck, have lots of meaningless hookups, and go home happy and hungover. This is beautiful.
How to remedy this situation in four easy steps: 1) Raze downtown Palo Alto and replace it with downtown Mountain View. 2) Free Xanax for everyone! 3) The school must either become totally lax about alcohol, or completely authoritarian. 4) Start an exchange program with the University of Arizona to teach Stanford kids how to be normal human beings.
David Blackman stole much of this from his friends Morgan and Danica, to whom he should probably apologize, because he's even more broken than he seems. He can be reached at blackmad@stanford.edu.
David Blackman stole much of this from his friends Morgan and Danica, to whom he should probably apologize, because he's even more broken than he seems. He can be reached at blackmad@stanford.edu.
