“Love to Hatred Turned?”

“Going out?” That’s out of touch. “Getting wasted?” Waste of breath.

If it’s Friday night (or Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday for that matter), cool college kids are ditching drinks and snubbing soirees, opting instead just to “rage.” Or go to a rage, host a big rager, be a big rager, or spend the night raging. Cocktail hour now screams country club, pre-gaming echoes back to the Yard, old-school partying is passé. So in the world of semantics and spirits, it’s no wonder that raging’s the rage.

I first heard the word “rager” from groups of men (generous description of these boys) planning a party. The party no doubt promised loud music and several athletic chants and guaranteed a few belligerent guests and a hundred plastic cups, sticky to the touch and scattered among discarded hoodies and a pair of high black heels. Fist pumps and throaty grunts often accompanied the pronouncement of these ragers, linking a sort of primitive energy with potentially ruckus festivities.

During the morning-after recap, swollen-eyed revelers regularly utilized their contemporary vocabulary. Over plates of Sunday hash-browns and brunch quesadillas, they would tout the greatest rager of them all, the man who did not go gently into that good night, the one who “raged” very very hard against the morning light and Harvard University police.

But what was once humorous, even facetious in its own testosterone-connoting nature, has now become commonplace and far more widespread than locker rooms and athletes’ suites. It’s like The Cranberries said: Even everybody else is doing it. Rage, that is. Not to be confused with “rave,” of course, a very mid-nineties word (think Empire Records and Claire Danes) that defined an all-night party, usually in a warehouse-like club, most likely featuring numbing techno, and almost always involving drugs and military boots with baby-doll dresses.

Raging is a far more extroverted action:rowdy rather than racy, overdone rather than underground. It entails whooping instead of whispering and will almost always feature Heineken over a hallucinogen. An improvement, some could say. A collegiate prerogative, you could argue. And it’s true that outward excitement sounds better than its experimental predecessor.

But technically the word “rager” isn’t misleading: Late-night social events are often full of violent debauchery. Rarely does a house party pass without a few thrown punches. Chest shoves and blistered toes are the norm, screaming is assumed appropriate, and broken bottles signify accomplishment rather than an accident. Definitively immoderate and possibly injurious, raging is an angry exertion, one neither easy on the lungs nor the liver. But the questions remain: Why did having fun become so furious? And what are we so mad at?

It could just be the alcohol. Rage denotes drink and drinking portends problems. Doesn’t being under the influence basically beget a brawl? We don’t drink because we’re angry, the logic goes, we’re angry because we drink, too much.

But “rage” isn’t just showing up after scorpion bowls and beer kegs. Road rage plagues the highway and air rage is only the latest response to tightened regulations aboard mid-air flights. Passengers are increasingly dishing out dollars for the airline alcohol, speaking abusively to flight attendants, and behaving erratically in response to strict restrictions. (I’ll be quite upset too if they take away my face moisturizer.) We expect rolled down car windows, tailgating, and hand gestures on the street these days. When I can’t get home in time for American Idol, if the older lady ahead stops at a yellow light, and when the SUV behind hasn’t turned off their brights, it’s easy to get angry and feel myself enraged.

Which makes me want a drink, which makes me want to rage.

So if white freeway lines and no turns on red, tray tables down and iPods switched off are all responsible for making people go mad, perhaps weekend nights spent raging respond to similarly imprisoning rules here at school. Between dinner schedules and hourly church bells, it’s easy to feel shuttled from lunch to lecture hall, seven minutes in between to make a quick call. We maneuver our majors and lever four courses while grinding out papers and working on labs. This tiring slog then makes other restrictions on campus feel all the more burdensome, from no nails in dorm walls to office hours by appointment only.

We should be accustomed to this stress and structure by senior year, but it seems several summers of urban independence have only made brick walls and handbooks harder to handle. Freedom can be hard to find. And we’re angry about it.

But not willing to complain and much too proud to slow down, we drive forward and fly further, facing one-ways and turbulence the whole ride. Thus it’s really no wonder we’re left worked-up at the end of each week. It’s more than understandable that here at Harvard we need time to go out, loosen up, and to rage... against a particular machine.



Victoria Ilyinsky ’07 is a Romance languages and literatures concentrator in Leverett House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.