I’ve been thinking lately about the phrase “college experience” (let’s leave aside its more insidious sibling, “college career”). There’s a certain pressure to have an individual definition of this supposedly singular experience, a cohesive personal narrative of the past four years. This is what’s expected of you at graduation parties and on job interviews and when you’re asked, “How did you like Duke?” This is what’s expected of you in these senior columns.
I struggle with this. Perhaps because so much of my four years was spent at The Chronicle—learning the danger of falling prey to any convenient narrative—but looking back, it's difficult for me to find any consistent arc in the weird kaleidoscope of moments that has been my time at Duke.
Mostly, looking back, there is The Chronicle and the dumb way that I loved it.
These columns often talk about the work demanded of the paper’s upper masthead positions, but I will only say that top editors are encouraged to take a few hours off on one night per week. People generally look forward to this precious time, when they escape the office for ordinary human tasks such as sleeping and showering. I dreaded it. I fought my colleagues every Tuesday, begging to stretch the 60 hours of my workweek to 65, unable to stand leaving my desk in the middle of production. I hated thinking of the paper without me, I’d say. But really—though I didn’t quite recognize it then—I hated thinking of myself without the paper. This was how I loved The Chronicle.
As far as relationships go, The Chronicle and I were something very much flawed and illogical. But I don’t think we were a mistake. I think there is something to be said for loving stupidly and completely. I think there is something to be said for loving in a way that is not transactional, with no expectation that your devotion will reap you any returns, and I think there is something to be said for loving in a way that is decidedly uncool and so very not “chill.” There is danger here, to be sure, where love blurs into obsession or possession. But I like to think there is something to be said for investing yourself fully, beautifully, dumbly. For me, at least, there was.
The Chronicle was much of my "college experience," but it was certainly not all of it. And this is where the struggle for a narrative gets truly fraught, looking back on everything else.
Sometimes, it is hard to see anything other than the origins of my fault lines, these errors and regrets and heartbreaks. I am holding back hot tears in a professor’s office as I hear that I'm in danger of failing, I am fighting bitterly as a friendship disintegrates, I am miserably alone and struggling to breathe in a dormitory hallway. I am desperately making frustrated bargains with myself—if you just work through the night again, maybe you will be smart enough; if you just skip one more meal, maybe you will be thin enough; if you just erase yourself a little more, maybe you will be close enough to the sort of girl he likes. I am unable to fall asleep, again. I am sitting in the passenger seat of my mother’s car, parked by East Campus and telling her no, I don’t need to see a therapist, I’m fine, can’t you see? And she is saying, “Sometimes, you just sound so small,” as both our eyes fill with tears.
This little disastrous collection is part of the college experience often omitted from the “college experience,” but it's thankfully very far from my whole. I am laughing until I cry on the floor of my best friend’s room, over nothing at all. I am driving to the ocean at three in the morning, a little too fast, because a friend has said that if we leave now, we can watch the sun rise and get back in time for class the next day. (Seven hours later, I am in said class and struggling to stay awake, sand in my shoes, confident that what we did the night before was both iridescently fun and supremely stupid.) I am hugging strangers as the confetti falls on a national championship. I am eating at ten fast-food restaurants in one day. I am kind of aware that I am not “enough,” and I don’t care at all.
The past few weeks have been heavy with the weight of last times. I was, at first, concerned with making sure these last times mattered in the way I felt they were supposed to. Lately, I've cared less about this. For my Last College Friday Night, I watched old movies with friends as we drank the last of our apartment’s good liquor (“good” being a relative term).
But at one point, I snuck upstairs to watch the last innings of a baseball game. My favorite team lost, due in no small part to the fact that they struck out 18 times. Before I went downstairs, just for the hell of it, I looked up their record for single-game strikeouts. Twenty-one. In 1986, an away game in Seattle with paltry attendance at the old Kingdome, an absurdly insignificant September match-up between two really bad teams whose seasons had long ceased to mean anything to anyone. Twenty-one strikeouts in one game.
And they won, 5-4. They set the team record for failure in a single night, in a forgotten game that meant nothing at all, and they still won. I'm not sure how much this has to do with my “college experience,” but I very much like that it is true.
Emma Baccellieri is a Trinity senior and editor-in-chief of Towerview Magazine. She was news editor of The Chronicle's vol. 110. She would like to thank everyone who made v110 survivable (but especially Carleigh); mentors Lauren, Julian, Nicole, Anna, Danielle and Elysia; and all of the wonderfully talented babies she leaves behind. And for their endless love and support, her family, Corey, Taylor, Spiegz & Co. and BDGT.
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