Final Bell Lap: Reflections on Harvard

Reflecting on our time at Harvard is a totally depressing exercise. These four years have been packed with strikeouts, weak dribblers up the middle, blown saves, and even a few caught stealings, none of which are baseball metaphors. So we try to only concentrate on this last year when we ruled the school with both an open door and an iron fist. But that makes us seem even more terrible, especially since we wouldn’t tell anyone about the 18-inch iron fist until they had come through our open door and we had locked it behind them.

The worst part is that this column has been a total failure. We put our hearts, souls, and every joke that we had made in the preceding week into every column, but it netted us nothing except tens of links to tasteless humor when you google our names. Even when we bared our disgusting, slutty, and totally irresponsible sex lives to the world, we didn’t get so much as a mention on IvyGate.com or a column in the Boston Globe. But the column helped us pick up girls, right? Not exactly, the one girl DA got through the column had a moustache and none of the 17 guys Peter hooked up with had the beautiful, full bodied, nose-tickling moustache he was looking for. So we were pretty disappointed with that.

These are self-centered ruminations, however—what leaves us even more distraught is the lack of effect we’ve had on the student body. Nine months of peddling genuine Wisconsin-made wisdom butter in Harvard Yard may have been one human gestation cycle wasted. Had we had access to amniocentesis for our column, we would have had aborted it faster than DA’s parents chose him over the less developed fetus he shared a liver, kidneys, and large intestine with. Our sales pitch, “Let us butter your domes,” drew in more perverts from the square than interested Harvard students.

Midwestern sensibilities, puerile humor, and visionless writing were all things we tried to bring to Harvard, but they were rejected. Nevertheless it was a lot of fun trying to force ourselves upon you, no matter how times you socked us in the nuts and dove for a blue phone panic button like it was the peak of the Aggro Crag. Though six out of seven days we fall asleep in the basement storage room of some anonymous Yard dormitory feeling like the boy who just placed third to two girls on Global Guts, it’s that seventh day when we wake up in UHS with one of our best buddies in the bed next to us that keeps us happy and sane.

Mental Health Services tends to disagree with our self-diagnosis and self-medication, but there are only so many ways to make it through a school like Harvard. We crawl out of here beaten, stripped of our clothes, whipped, and heavy with severe messianic delusions, but we know that we have a degree and the knowledge that at least a portion of the class of 2007 is worth a damn.

Before we graduate we want to reach for the ropes and tag out of our Sisyphean task of making humorless Harvard undergrads smile. So with Drew Faust executing a perfect figure four on our mangled legs we lunge towards Erik Groszyk ’09 and Alex Pease ’09. With Erik bringing the Mass-hole perspective and Alex keeping the Milwaukee dream alive, we believe that these two will actually be able to get at least one girl from the class of 2011 to make out with them. The competition was intense, but we sympathized so much with their mentions of universal truths like “Human beings are genetically programmed to reach sexual prime at age eleven,” that we had to choose them. Plus they’ll probably be so high on PCP that they could do just about anything.

So we leave you underclassmen in the hands of two kids who carry more currency in the form of expired Subway Club Cards than cash in their wallets. Remember that Wisconsin is a friendly place, our door is always open, the Ad Board confiscated our iron fist months ago, and most importantly, that “I need a place to sleep” is not a pick-up line, but the honest truth.

We’ve got the blues on the run!

Zing! Boom! Ta-Ra-Rel!

Yours for only three more weeks,

David-Andrew Wallach, Peter John Martinez and Derek C. Bok