Life is all about transitions. Once you were a tiny, useless baby; now you’re a big, useless adult. Once you believed in unicorns and Santa; now you believe that your crush will text you back. Once you thought that the secondary education system was mainly a means of distributing sports merchandise; now you wish that that weren’t true. We have to deal with these changes all the time.
And our time at Vassar, too, is full of major shifts. College is like a world in miniature, a world in which each human being lives only four years and then vanishes forever. By graduation, we see new friends become old ones, old friends become new loves, new loves become old flames, and old flames become student workers at the library who we have to see every time we go there to do homework. We get older, taller, hairier and, because this is Vassar, a lot gayer. We skip class, take substances and learn the hard way that “chlamydia” isn’t a character in “The Iliad.” Vassar changes us, changes us like a Starbucks barista writing down your name, and it’s safe to say that no one here can imagine what our lives would be like if we’d done anything different.
At the end of our four years of college, though, we have to move on. Hell, I have to move on next month, which is why I’m writing this affected little column full of hand-waving platitudes. Discussions about the future after Vassar are filled with snark about the “real world,” an incredibly unforgiving place where this campus’ weirdness will never be tolerated and where there are no Safety & Security cars to run you over in case you need to pay off student loans. In this realm of monsters, we imagine, there will be no more cross-faded TH hookups, no more homoerotic men’s rugby games, no more safe spaces where we can discuss intersectional Foucaultian anthropology and the best strains of weed in the same conversation. It will, we imagine, suck major ass —and not in a good way, either.
In fact, however, there is no “real world.” Vassar’s weirdness is its own, to be sure, but beyond the borders of this campus, well outside the Vassar bubble, lies an endless variety of other oddities. As we speak, human beings all over the world are going to gay board game nights and lawn mower races, sometimes both at the same time. They’re tasting hard kombucha and experimenting with new and bizarre party drugs. And if there’s something you like that’s hard to find at Vassar—rock climbing, for example, or good beer, or healthy, stable romantic relationships—well, the rest of the planet is going to be full to brimming with it. After graduation, it certainly gets harder to find your place, but the possibilities the universe can offer are literally infinite.
Because of that, though I’ll miss Vassar, I’m not sad to be graduating. Yes, I’ll miss bitching about the food at the Deece. Yes, I’ll miss negotiating the complicated moral philosophy of trying to hook up with somebody in a polyamorous relationship. Yes, I’ll miss debating who would win in a fight, me or the Sunset Lake geese—and then thinking about how long it would take for my body to be found after the geese stomped the life out of me. I came here a loser, and I left a world traveler. I came here a scared little child, and I left a slightly less scared adult. I came here a boy, and I left a girl. Yes, there’s a lot to leave behind.
But the world awaits—not some cruel “real world” full of horrors, but rather a place just as varied, unpredictable and utterly bizarre as our college itself. Our campus boasts one kind of weirdness, but after leaving it, I’ll get to experience every other. No, it won’t always be an easy journey, but neither was Vassar. For me—and for all the rest of the Senior Class—Mr. Bones’ wild ride is just beginning.
I promise you this, though: If I come back here and you nerds are calling it the “Gordon Commons,” we are gonna have a PROBLEM.