A Remedy for the Harvard Sickness

ABOUT this time of year, I'd really like to slam my door shut, hang out my "Do Not Disturb" sign and just hide, because there are so many things that I am so incredibly sick of.

But the things I'm sick of have nothing to do with the environment, tabloid TV, the government or all those other Big Issues. In fact, I'm sick of big issues, and I'm even more sick of the people who talk about them. The biggest issue in my life is that I'll be graduating in just two months, which means I probably will not have enough time to enact my shaving cream plan against all those people I'm sick of.

What, you ask, is the shaving cream plan?

It all started when I was a freshman and found myself in a messy situation with a compulsive womanizer with whom about six of my friends were similarly involved. When it ended, he and I had a long talk, and he was so pompous and full of himself, going on and on about my welfare and his wellbeing. And it all seemed so excessive because our relationship--which didn't even go on long enough to qualify as a casual affair--was just no big deal.

Later, as I rehashed the discussion with my friend Roberta, as I shall call her, because that is her name, she suggested, "We should just go over to his room and spray some shaving cream all over his face so that he learns to stop taking himself so goddamn seriously."

ANYWAY, I've now been at Harvard nearly four years, and I can't tell you how often this desire has gone through my head. There I'll be, sitting at lunch, minding my own business, discussing the Hedda Nussbaum mess or plans for next year or pass the salt, and suddenly some person will come join us.

She's probably someone with dyed black hair who concentrates in Literature or Social Studies, espouses bisexuality because it's politically correct and works part time for an organization devoted to research on Central America. The mere sight of such a person is enough to make me cringe, because I know what's coming next: suddenly this perfectly inoffensive conversation will shift to an intense examination of the phallologoandrocentric nature of the universe as it relates to Derridean theory and...blah blah blah.

This conversation goes on for a while, and pretty soon she's referring to Professor Chave as just plain Anna or Professor Jardine as just plain Alice and talking about the struggle she is going to have with writing a purely theoretical thesis. And the whole time, I just wish to myself that I had a can of shaving cream with me to spray on this woman's face so that she would shut up and recognize that she is essentially a goofball like the rest of us.

Actually, what I really want to do is say, "Oh please" or "enough already," but I don't because then we'd just end up in another annoying discussion about what in my psychosexual mindset has caused me to be offended and then offensive and...well, you get the idea. There's just no nice way out of a pretentious discussion.

DON'T get me wrong--I'm not saying that I am any less guilty than the next person of getting really sententious about stupidity. And Harvard, thankfully, is the ideal setting to let your mind and vocal cords wander into the postmodern recesses of the human condition, before you get out of here and have to deal with things like does the toaster work and paying the insurance bill and taking the car to the Jiffy Lube.

But there's a big difference between being interested in discussing intellectual ideas--which is a good thing--and completely losing perspective, losing the ability to laugh at oneself--which is really, really bad.

And I'm sick of it. I'm just really sick of people who don't get the joke. Any joke. And since I don't think I'm ever going to have the courage to walk up to these various oh-so-sincere types and spray shaving cream on their faces, here are some of the people I'd like to do it to:

.Theater people. And I don't mean actors, directors or producers. They're fine. I mean theater people, people who can't see beyond the pages of Sam Shepard or Pirandello and act as if a single production can change the world and tend to get bogged down in the so-called creative process and go on and on about "motivation" and being "in character" and all that other jargony stuff.

.Male feminists, if such a thing exists, who tell me that something someone is doing to me is a form of sexist oppression and an example of societal conditioning that doesn't allow me to recognize my own pained existence (these are the same men who think that the greatest accomplishment of feminism is the dutch treat).

.Everyone in the whole bohemian preppie stoner set, who do the reggae Deadhead-tie-dye-long-hair-down-to-earth trip while they're here and then go to deb balls and work on Wall Street when they leave.

.People who fast to show their solidarity with the South African Black community and then don't do anything about racism and homelessness right here in Cambridge.

.Politically correct people in general.

Writers who don't write and artists who don't paint, but nonetheless feel no shame in sitting around the Signet or Adams House or Pamplona or their rooms talking about the books that they're never going to write and the portraits that they're never going to paint because they're too busy sitting around talking about them.

.The entire staff of the Advocate.

.Anyone who has read all of Ulysses.

.People who call movies "films."

.People who smoke but don't inhale.

.People who talk about the breakdown in the relations between the signifier and the signified and use all sorts of lit-crit terms like "transgress" and "privilege" as a verb.

THERE are also various forms of rudeness that I have noticed in greater abundance at Harvard than elsewhere that I would like to correct. I mean, I am really sick of the way people always tend to get into endless conversations while standing in the middle of an entrance, not bothering to notice that 22 people are trying to get by.

And I really hate it when people use the centrex phone as if the wall it's attached to outside of a building is their own room and not a public space. Mostly I'm sick of people too lost in their own worlds to notice how lost in their own worlds they are.

But hey, that's college. And I hope I don't sound stupid, after all I've just written, if I say that really and truly I love Harvard, pretensions and all. I'm just sick of it. And probably, at this point, it's sick of me too.

Which is why it's time for Spring Break.