The Lessons of My Father

I hate to admit it, but my dad was right. During my teenage years he warned of the three evils of college life: drugs, drinking, and, worst of all, staying up late. Though I initially ridiculed the comparison, I now acknowledge that his emphasis couldn’t have been better placed.

I’ve never had a problem with the first evil, and I’ll have to plead the Fifth on the second, but late bedtimes have been the bane of my existence since freshmen year. And certainly this humble, yet irritable and reactionary columnist is not the only one confounded by this difficulty.

Trucking along until the wee hours is one of the few things we students have in common—from pro-18th Amendment teetotalers to wild frat boys. Ten at night to two in the morning is party/study/deep conversation time. Phoning anyone before noon is considered rude because it may interrupt prime bedtime hours. We complain that 10 a.m. classes are too early. And many would gladly give up breakfast entirely in exchange for a late night snack fix.

What’s ridiculous is that deep down we all know that this way of living is crazy. We continue to happily munch Tommy’s Pizza’s constipation pies or the Hong Kong Chinese’s fried crab bowel dragoons as if the next day’s visit to the porcelain throne is going to be any different than the last. (From personal experience I must say that the absolute worst is indulging in 7-Eleven’s nachos with “free chili, and free cheese”—it’s not worth it, I’ll spare you the details.)

Yet crazy living seems to be what college is all about. Despite the heartburn from unhealthy midnight snacks and the hassles of shutting out the day’s most intense sunlight so we can sleep until 2 p.m., we are reluctant to change our behavior. “College time” is such a potent force that it makes the transition between the East and West coasts pale in comparison. After all, three hours is only about how long it takes freshmen girls to play a single game of beer pong (which they shouldn’t even be playing anyway—shame on them).

The only plausible explanations for our silly nocturnal behavior involve youthful rebellion, or a culture of openness and experimentation. But once we probe the fallacies of these rationalizations, I hope that an 11 p.m. bedtime will seem a bit more appealing.

Certainly staying up too late is one of the most time-honored affronts to authority. That’s why slumber parties were so great in grade school. We could eat horribly fattening food, throw ice cubes in each other’s sleeping bags, and make all sorts of obnoxious noises while adults tried futilely to calm us down—a situation not at all dissimilar from the Hong Kong on a typical weekend night.

Of course now we’re too mature and politically-active to rebel against our parents, instead directing our ire toward “the Man.” Darn him and his rigid hours, we say. Yet, “the Man” has watched and learned from our foolish nighttime antics and he has won. Business owners saw the long lines at Felipe’s and Pinocchio’s come their 2 a.m. closing times and have been bending over backwards to take advantage of our drunken or study-fried minds and correspondingly open wallets. B.good will soon offer “healthy” fried onion rings and double cheeseburgers as late as three in the morning so that students will have an alternative to the Kong’s monopoly on ultra-late-night fare and its “authentic” Chinese dishes: fried cream cheese, buffalo wings, and tempura shrimp. Stick it to “the Man,” Harvard, give him your money and let those breakfast eggs from your pre-paid meal plan harden away as you sleep the night off.

I apologize if the sarcasm in the preceding paragraph upset anyone’s utopian visions about college life, so I’m happy to entertain the possibility that late nights are a necessity in the open and experimental academic atmosphere. Some might argue that only by challenging absolutely every social norm—especially bedtime and eating routines—can a university produce the new progressive ideas that put it at the forefront of its goal to move society forward. Could it be that the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War campaign of the 1970s are cut from the same cloth as the late night pizza run and the surprisingly-alcoholic Scorpion Bowl?

For the sake of humanity, let’s hope not. Late-night thinking may have produced the keg-stand and the Taco Bell ad that entices us with all the “crunchy, gooey, melty stuff” we can handle, but beyond those strokes of brilliance it has been good for little more than bad hangovers, missed class, and missed opportunities. The night is a clever harlot tempting eager students with her promise of unlimited extra time to makeup what we miss during the day. Unfortunately she takes more than she receives. Hours are repaid in full whether in class accompanied by a pool of drool in your notebook, or at the computer, where zoning-out encourages such productive behavior as watching videos of monkeys kickboxing.

Fortunately, by senior year in college, some of us begin to realize the foolishness of our ways in grand, brilliant, epiphanies. No matter what you tell the nocturnal vixen, her homely sister, morning, is always there to tear you from her nighttime embrace. You may say that you’re not a “morning person” but she’s there even if you wake up after noon. It’s better to get done with her early. Several of my roommates recently discovered the joy of eating breakfast and “like having the whole day in front of you to do stuff rather than just the afternoon.”

For this perhaps I should thank my lucky stars, but the fact that it takes three years to learn what parents have been saying for decades speaks poorly about the rationality of Harvard’s best and brightest. At the very least, the growing swarm of economics concentrators should be able to stem the staying-up-late stalemate. One of the fundamental tenets of their “science” is that humans—eventually—can learn from their mistakes. I hope my children can learn from mine.



John N. Hastrup ’06 is a government concentrator in Dunster House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.