The Extras in Our Lives

There are supposedly 6,500 undergraduates at Harvard College, but empirical observation suggest that the number is probably closer to 150. Like some kind of bad movie set where a few dozen people represent a crowd of hundreds by walking around the block again and again, our lives on this campus often appear to be populated by a very limited cast of characters. Some-how, the same ten people keep showing up everywhere.

Each of us has our own concentric circles of roommates, friends, acquaintances and mortal enemies. But lurking around the periphery of people we know, we all have our own distinct set of people who we've never actually spoken to, but who have obviously signed contracts to act as "extras" in our lives. These people come in two types: the 2-D people and the 3-D people.

The 2-D people are the ones we read and hear about all the time, but never see in the flesh. They are the student leaders, the sports heroes, the actors, the community-service organizers, the Rhodes Scholars, the Undergraduate Council presidents of our world. Or maybe they aren't particularly distinguished in anything at all, but chance throws them onto the front page of the paper again and again. Maybe they streaked in Primal Scream, or they were sitting up late in the library and appeared in a "slice-of-life" photo, or they were in line to get into some big event and ended up quoted in a news article somewhere. For us, the ones reading the paper, these people only exist in black and white. We won't see them in class, because they take all their classes at the Med School or the Ed School or the botanical gardens at Dumbarton Oaks, or they're so busy being famous or getting quoted about how much their source-books cost that they don't bother to show up for class at all. After a while we come to know a lot about them, certainly more than they know about us. We talk about them, admire them, think about them at random moments. But if we should ever see them conjured up in flesh and blood, crossing paths with us as we walk through the Yard, we wouldn't even dream of stopping them to say hello, because to us, they aren't real people--they only exist on paper.

The other class of people we know-but-don't-know are the 3-D people. These people exist in living color, but we never see their names mentioned anywhere. That's because they don't have names. They simply show up everywhere we go, but for whatever reason we have never bothered to find out who they are. Unlike the 2-D people, who are more or less public property, each of us has a personalized set of 3-D people who are clearly getting paid to follow us around. They show up in our course sections, in group tutorials, in restaurants, in dining halls, in lines for washing machines, in the audiences at concerts and at other events. We remember them as "The Girl Who Always Wears My Purple Shirt" or "Fifth-Floor Lamont Guy" or "Laundry-Basket Boy" or "Pre-Frosh." We might even remember when we first saw them. They are the people who shopped that seminar with us last semester but didn't take it, the people who waited in line with us for an interview but didn't get the job, the people who auditioned with us for a play but didn't get the part. Or maybe we were the ones who didn't get the job or the part, and one of the 3-D people won it in our place. Either way, these people fall into an awkward category. We met them in some situation that we would either like to forget or believe that all normal people have already forgotten, and we therefore aren't allowed to talk to them. And after avoiding eye contact with them for a year or more, unwritten rules forbid us from ever smiling at them again--and we would never in a million years think of asking them their names or reminding them of ours.

Our personal "extras" are a problem because they embarrass us. To themselves, they're just going about their daily routine, but to us they represent opportunities missed, projects abandoned and friendships unstruck. They are the could-have-beens of our college careers. Maybe someday one of them will discover a cure for some disease, and then people will say to us, "Laundry-Basket Boy just rid the world of multiple sclerosis. Weren't you in college together?" Or maybe Pre-Frosh could have been a great friend of ours. We'll never know. What's embarrassing is not that we aren't part of their lives, but rather that they aren't part of ours. We see them everywhere and have never bothered to talk to them, and now we simply can't anymore.

During the first week of the semester, when class schedules readjust and student organizations choose new leaders, some of our "extras" might change. But chances are good that our old friends--the Unit Test Grader, The Crimson's Reader Representative, the Gilbert & Sullivan Girl, the Random Law Student--will still be around. (They usually are.) The next time you see your "extras," pay them their due. Don't say hello, of course, since that would be way too direct. Instead, throw a glance at them, raise your eyebrows and wink. If they don't read the newspaper, they'll just think you have something in your eye. But if they do, may be they'll introduce themselves.

Dara Horn '99 is a literature concentrator living in Eliot House. Her column will appear on alternate Tuesdays.