There’s nothing small groups of twentysomething college students love more than tradition. Besides drugs. We love feeling like we are a part of something bigger than our individual selves, which is why some people turn to organized religion, and others choose to perform in an annual 12-hour outdoor improv marathon which provides essentially the same validation for more physical and less spiritual exertion.
In the circles in which I move, the word “tradition” is angrily hissed so often that whenever I hear it my subconscious substitutes Tevye and his shtetl’s triumphant cry: “TRAAA-DIII-SHUN!” (I have never actually seen “Fiddler on the Roof,” but I assume the cry is triumphant, as so many Jewish musical cries are.) This, you can imagine, is simply a joy.
Here’s what’s not a joy, and bear with me: Bulldog Days. I realize that they are supposed to be exciting and fun for current Yale students as well as for prefrosh (wait, do I realize that? Is that even true?) but you guys, I have so much work. How is there even enough time for me to do the work and do the shows and stand on Old Campus handing out pointless fluorescent yellow flyers toward which not a single prefrosh will be ethically responsible and recycle? There isn’t enough time, is the answer.
But it’s annual and it happens and it vaguely has a point and so it is tradition, just like Easter, and voting. Bulldog Days makes me sad on another level, though. It just makes me think of this one Stars song that’s like, “That’s that, you’ve agreed to give me everything, now I’ve got to ask you one more thing: Keep doing that forever!” Well, Yale literally can’t keep doing that forever and it’s going to kick you (me) out in four years (one year), give or take. And after we’re gone, these few, these happy few, this band of assholes is going to run their own Bulldog Days, hungover and crabby themselves, but smiling through clenched, unwashed teeth. TRAAA-DIII-SHUN! The circle of life! MUSICALS!
Speaking of circles and shit, I have been writing this view for a year! Happy birthday view! If you were a boy I liked I would definitely have made you a mix as a present and then stressed out about whether or not to give it to you. Just a totally normal college-aged girl feeling all the right feelings. Writing this has been a pleasant way to keep in touch with my emotions throughout the cycle of the Yale year, and to keep my mother in touch with my emotions, and the occasional friend’s mother who “doesn’t really get it.” Because I, too, like feeling like I am a part of something bigger than my individual self, such as a newspaper, just to choose a totally random example. Sorry. Sorry to be so awesome!
Also, I feel I should point out that I don’t actually think prefrosh are assholes, though probably some of them are. That’s just math. I’m just bitter that I have to leave this place in a year and also that sometimes I have tests and am tired and have a bunch of feelings, not all of them constantly positive, though you wouldn’t know it from my cheery demeanor. Keep on keepin’ on, prefrosh. But if you come here, you’re probably going to have tests too and not just be skipping from free food location to free food location. Again, math.