Once a Dork, Always a Dork

If I have learned anything at Harvard, it is this: We are all dorks.

Clearly, there are a number of permutations of the word dork, varying in degree from nerd to dweeb to geek. Even the most handsome Fly Club members and the most avant-garde Advocate artists have a suggestion of dork coursing through their veins. The lush lacrosse players of the Mather 12th floor, no matter how many kegs of beer they consume in one sitting, will still show up in the dining hall for an early breakfast surrounded by abstruse physics formulas. My roommates and I, disregarding our pronounced penchant for parties, cloistered ourselves in our rooms this spring preceding a number of senior year rights-of-passage: thesis deadlines, orals and general exams. All the things that make us fun and normal (like other college kids from Boston College and Boston University) are tempered with bookish propensities, obsessive-compulsive proclivities and stringy-haired, bespectacled, plump, nail-biting, acne-spotted predilections.

My favorite Harvard moment occurred in the Bahamas during Spring Break 2002. About 30 of us found ourselves in a vast resort on Grand Bahama Island with a number of cheap-o liquor stores and a bevy of buxom high school girls. We seemed sure of ourselves, strolling about in pastel Polo shirts with a few pairs of Prada sunglasses, sipping rum-and-tonics by the sea. For all intents and purposes, I think we looked pretty cool, but after the experiences of one fateful evening, we sunk into the inevitable effluvium of dorkdom. No matter how many girls sported this season’s horn-handled Gucci bag and how many boys showed off brand new tailored Nantucket Reds, the Harvard within stood out like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter.

Since nothing in the Bahamas tended to work the way we expected, it came as no surprise that the electricity went out all over the island soon after we arrived. Packed into a humid hotel suite, all of us, bored of our rum drinks, began to play a group game to dispel the boredom of the dark.

One of us suggested the game involving predictions called “Most Likely To…” One person asks a question to the group, such as: Most likely to have their name printed in a supermarket tabloid. All the players must choose one of their friends that fits the bill. All of a sudden, when “Most Likely To...” became the game of choice, the relaxed spring breakers shed their cloaks of cool and displayed their pimply, freakish dork underbellies.

Ian D. Broadwater ’02, perhaps the most insouciant person I know, tossed his Red Stripe to the side and bellowed with the forcefulness of a freight train, “I’ll write the names!” Hovering over the frail light of one tiny candle, Ian, who is usually seen late-night at the Spee doing interpretive dances, carefully scribed the names of every person in the room over and over and over. A makeshift assembly line emerged on the balcony while people compulsively ripped tiny scraps of paper into equal sizes, each annotated with a single name. A great heap of white bits was illuminated by the light of the candle while Harvard’s resident Daedalus rabble rolled up their starched white shirtsleeves and argued vehemently about the nuances of the game. The coolness of the crowd disintegrated rapidly as the paper piles of names became confused and we started hissing at each other about “organization.” All I could think as we crouched over the tiny flame, shuffling madly, was, “Well, forget the facade of leisure—we are all immutably anal retentive.”

I think about those scraps of paper often. Now that we are all inserting ourselves into proper grown-up roles—buying toilet paper, toiling at Goldman, travelling the world, haggling over leases—our dork propensities may come in handy. No matter how famous my roommate becomes in Hollywood, or to what auspicious levels my Crimson associates reach in the hierarchy of the Wall Street Journal, the geekiness instilled in us by fair Harvard will shine with the light of veritas. When I first see my blockmate, L. Zoe Tananbaum ’02, in the pages of Sunday Styles, I know that her blonde ringlets and Miu Miu sandals will barely hide her passion for Post-It Notes and colored highlighters. (Zoe’s books are usually adorned with about 6,000 paper flags and practically drip with fluorescent ink.)

Rather than an elite cadre of future world leaders, let us be known as an all-enduring assemblage of eccentric, compulsive dorks. Harvard, for all its opportunities and endowment and superiority, certainly does one thing superbly: foster the hidden psychoses of its strange and extraordinary students.

Frances G. Tilney ’02, a history and literature concentrator in Mather House, was a magazine chair of The Crimson in 2001.