The first week of school this year my friends and I were asked to leave Freshmen Open Mike. In a moment of hyper—alcohol induced—abandon we had broken out into a wild dance while a girl was performing a song she had written on the guitar. When confronted by an Orientation leader, we left, drunk and disgruntled—as well as thoroughly pleased with ourselves—muttering about how we were the only ones not sitting on the ground looking like we were contemplating suicide.
“I don’t get it!” one of my friends pondered out-loud. “We were just dancing! Who did we offend?” There was a chorus of agreement. I too, found myself nodding, but as I replayed the moment in my head, something didn’t sit well. It gave me a bad feeling to think about the brave freshman who was gamely putting herself out there. We were only dancing, true, but we were line dancing. It might have seemed as though we were mocking the song or the event. On a campus where we are so concerned with political correctness and safe spaces and not offending people, often we forget about plain old niceness. My friend had a point, we hadn’t offended anyone. We just weren’t being that nice.
With each semester I spend on this campus, I become less nice. I think it has to do with the climate of abrasive cynicism at Wesleyan right now, where powers of wit and ridicule are valued over kindness. This is not a trend confined to students. Professors often write comments that sound like they think they’re A.O. Scott reviewing the latest Ben Affleck film. My friend’s CSS evaluation contained the following: “This student is like the proverbial girl with the curl. When he’s good at something, he’s very good. But when he’s bad, he’s very, very bad.” Another friend of mine found this at the bottom of his paper: “This is the worst paper I’ve ever read.” Recently the word “Ick!” was scrawled next to a passage of prose that I’d labored over. Whatever happened to “awk” (awkward) I thought to myself. Is “Ick!” the new “Awk?”
As a freshman I was terrified of the girls on my hall, not because they were especially cool or intimidating, but because they just weren’t that nice. The first week of school a sophomore girl came out and leaned out her door to yell at an overly enthusiastic freshman boy: “You think you’re cool but you’re not! You are So not cool!” The guy wasn’t that cool, but he wasn’t going for cool. He was wearing a white contact in his right eye, a Lilly Pulitzer blazer and drove a Passat with bullet-hole stickers on it. I don’t know what he was going for come to think of it—David Bowie meets 50 Cent with a touch of Greenwich, CT?—but I believed in his right to go for it.
The boys I live with now constantly brag about who they rejected from facebook.com. (You would think they were middle school girls and not male twenty-somethings if you could hear their dialogue about facebook.com.) It’s clear that with each person they reject as a friend—a gesture that’s simply not nice, among other things such as juvenile—they feel they’ve established a dynamic that places them in power.
There’s a certain attitude that powerful people on this campus and in this country right now share: embrace me or hate me. I think our generation should be called Flamboyantly Me, because to Be Yourself seems more important than anything else—like nice. It can get you power; it can get you on TV. Hippies were nice, hipsters are not, and right now nice is certainly not hip. It feels as though being nice is asking the world to like you. But if you already like yourself, why would you need to do this?
For Valentine’s Day, the mother of a housemate sent me a hat she had knit. It had three dimensional bumble bees sewed to it. Large bees, from far away it might have looked like you were being attacked. Attached to the hat was a card that said “Buzz-buzz: Beeee my valentine.”
“Do you like it?” my housemate asked. I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not. It was the kind of thing you’d see your elementary school music teacher wearing and realize she was a tragic figure. It was a hat my unstable grandmother might wear during a manic phase. It could also be a hat that nice people would wear. People who like bees. Either way, I couldn’t possibly wear this hat. Not even in private.
I guess the look on my face answered my housemate’s question, for all of the sudden he looked mildly hurt, and for a boy whose favorite phrase is “You got served!” this is a not an expression you see often.
“You like to wear hats.” he added meekly. This is true, I do wear hats. And here was a hat that a nice lady from Georgia who’d met me once spent hours making so I would “beeee” her valentine. I made a decision: I would wear that hat. First I’d just have to find some other creatures to pin on it. Like a red canary from a bin in some crafts store… a little parade of marching dinosaurs, or maybe I could coil a rubber snake around the brim? You know, so everyone would realize I was being ironical.
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