What a miserable bonfire.
I was there last Wednesday, and I suppose we had all the required materials - a big basketball win, burning benches, open containers of alcohol, that sort of thing. All that was missing was us.
It was a massive display of going through the motions. We jumped up and down and we screamed a little, all on cue. We acted like a bunch of crazy college students are supposed to act at a bonfire. But did anyone there miss how forced the whole thing was? I'd say that 90 percent of us were there because we felt obligated, and that includes me.
Of course, it's pretty hard for a bonfire that's been organized ahead of time and granted a permit by the Durham Fire Department to be really joyful. That doesn't mean the key to a good time is random arson - the problem is that Wednesday night was nowhere out of the ordinary by Duke standards. Forced is the word to describe a lot of what goes on at our University. Listen hard on a Friday or Saturday night, and you'll hear the sound of Dukies trying desperately hard to have a good time.
We'll always be able to find a decent frat party or sorority bid night, and if that doesn't work we can always go to George's. But if we stopped and turned down the music? Are we really having a good time? Or are we just making sure to have an "I-was-so-wasted-last-night" story for Sunday morning? The truth is that I don't see very much joy at Duke - I just see kids doing what's expected of them. Of course, there are plenty of people who love Duke's social scene, and I have no beef with them. The problem is those of us who participate because they can't think of anything else to do.
I'm not sure if this is a universal problem or one specific to Duke. But I do have an idea of where all this forcedness comes from: It's related to both how we're brought up to think about college and why Duke students complain so much.
Our culture values nothing more highly than youth - and this is our last chance to be young. A lot of us came from elite high schools that taught us nothing but "college, college, college." And it's almost universally held that these four are the best years of our lives. College is the Promised Land, and we enter it with all sorts of expectations and the pressure of knowing it's all downhill once we graduate.
But when we get here, something funny happens. We discover that we aren't a foot taller, women don't suddenly flock to us, and we're mostly the same people who just left high school. The Promised Land isn't as wonderful as we'd been led to believe, and it's a bit of a shock for the first few months. Soon enough, shock is replaced by anger - how dare the administration ruin our "college experience"? The construction noise from Science Drive is twice as loud, the alcohol policy is twice as annoying, and Edens might as well be the Ninth Circle of Hell -
because the clock is ticking. This is it. Only a few dozen more best weekends of our lives and it's all over. How many of us will still be playing pickup basketball games, or reading books for pleasure, in 10 years? Pretty soon we'll all have jobs and backaches, and we know it.
So while we complain, we're working hard at making our time here memorable, somehow. It's work - and that was the bonfire on Wednesday, a night of quiet desperation.
We fill out the checklist. We're supposed to think deep thoughts in college, so we have a "Race, Sex, and God" contest. We're supposed to protest things in college, so we ask the administration's permission to take over the Allen Building. We're supposed to party like animals, so we set things on fire and get drunk in public to stick it to the Man. But we do it with all the joy of a problem set; we don't mean any of it.
That's life at Duke, one giant Chinese finger-trap of a campus. The only way out is to stop trying so damn hard.
Rob Goodman is a Trinity sophomore. His column appears every other Tuesday.
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