The secretary leaned over her desk explaining in her whispered confidential tone: “I have a special knack for cracking open candied seeds. You mustn’t eat the shells!” This information proved fruitless, as I couldn’t manage to crack open the seed without bursting all the edible parts too, so instead I anxiously leafed through the 3-month-old Wesleyan Magazine sitting on the table.
When waiting at the doctor’s office, it’s mildly awkward, though not horribly inappropriate to ask someone what’s wrong, but in the middle of a waiting room for those suffering from psychological illness, malaise or trauma, it’s a different story.
The Chinese candies were a little Valentine’s gift from the Office of Behavioral Health (OBH), a place where the slogan might as well read: “We’ll certify your sanity in 10 sessions or less! And we won’t even charge you a dime, you crazies, you!” Sure, they would have the invariable grammatical mistake of “less” instead of “fewer,” and they’d have ignored the fact that we have one way or another paid for this service already, but nonetheless I’d forgive them, knowing that I was in the competent hands of men and women in the Business of Sanity.
If you want the back story of why I’m in therapy, I’ll boil it down to its most trite: I have a sharp, resonant fear of my own mortality (i.e. I’m a hypochondriac), I feel bogged down with commitment phobia, I am struggling with the metaphoric death that is graduation and I get emotionally snowed-in by seasonal affected disorder. All self-diagnosed, all 100 percent accurate. (Except that self-deception should be my middle name, considering the countless times I, through my own cunning and trickery, have fooled myself into believing that I’m not stressed about graduating, that I’m not attached to the person I’m dating, that I have nothing to worry about for my thesis, that I am not at all moody.)
If you thought I knew about the gossip at this school, the therapists on campus not only know every individual’s inner trauma and turmoil, they know how the interpersonal relationships have led to this drama. These therapists get to sit around, listen to me talk about Susie Q, Sandra D, Malcolm X or whoever, and then later that afternoon they get to talk face to face with the same Susie Q, Sandra D and Malcolm X.
If only they would leak the information, if only their extra insight from hearing multiple perspectives on the same story could be used without violating their code of confidentiality, then maybe we might all really be cured.
But I want to talk more generally about what’s spun us into this funk. I can’t speak to why other people are in therapy, but I can speak to what’s been plaguing me lately, and maybe others will relate.
Spontaneity is dead.
This is made most clear to me while lollygagging around campus. On good, that is spontaneous days, I saunter in full buoyancy, inadvertently running into some unsuspecting friend/victim and latch onto hir for a few hours. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find running into someone randomly a slim to none occurrence these days—these snowy, rainy, cold, heartless days of winter.
Yes, I’m nostalgic for Foss Hill, but it’s more than that. I’m nostalgic for the glory days of freshman year when I didn’t know everyone at the party, when I might meet someone new, when a spontaneous eruption of new and exciting friendships would burst from the Wesleyan volcano.
Because of its death, we desperately crave it. We need it back.
So what better defibrillator than Senior Cocktails. It’s no wonder it’s such a hotbed of lasciviousness and excitement. Like a zombie brought back to life, we writhed and moaned in the limelight of the spontaneous. Spontaneity made its presence impossible to ignore, and the yearning that accompanied it was the inevitable result. Cocktails begot spontaneity and spontaneity begot my friends bouncing around from lick-lock to lip-lock. Cocktails are full of sultry grabbing, jolty, exposed breasts and toga-torso-ed athletic studs, all desperately fumbling for fun.
The rest of the time, though, I spend feeling organized and scheduled, making dinner plans every night for the week, planning far in advance which parties to go to. My life is cramped into the boxes in my daily planner.
And to make matters worse, I’m a flaming homosexual at a school full of straighties. I’m sick of being gay. It’s such a bummer sometimes. The cup isn’t half full or half empty when you’re gay. Instead all I got was this damn sippy-cup.
So, while I won’t say I’m “desperate for ass” as I’ve been called in an otherwise charming wespeak, but I am desperate for some spontaneity (which doesn’t even have to mean a romance of any kind).
I know all the gays, and I’m sure they all know me. So even if I did kiss a gay boy, it wouldn’t be spontaneous or random so much as it would be at best “I never thought it would happen tonight,” or at worst “predictable and inevitable.”
While I think my case may be more extreme, I think many of us are suffering from spontaneity withdrawal. (Whether or not you’re on therapy, err, I mean in therapy.)
Before I bid you all la vida loca, I’d like to acknowledge how much I do appreciate the OBH: I love you!
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