On Conformity

MGMT is coming to my school, and I’m pretty stoked. Many of my fellow Wildcats do not share my excitement. Two of the undergrads who do workstudy in the same office as me had never heard of MGMT. “SCOPE [the Student Committee on Popular Entertainment] has been bringing some good shows lately,” one of the girls said. “Like Akon!”

I cringed inside. They also mentioned an excellent show by Sean Kingston. “Who’s that?” I asked.

“You know, he does that song ‘Beautiful girls.’ You’ve heard it.”

They played it for me. I had never heard it. I wasn’t missing anything. I played them “Time to Pretend” and “Electric Feel” by MGMT. They had never heard either song.

The SCOPE message board was in the middle of a flame war. “Plymouth gets Drake and we get MGMT?” one user wrote, and pointed out that Drake has had twelve top-100 singles (including songs he’s been a guest on), and MGMT has only had one—therefore, Drake is the better musician. I wanted to point out that by his logic, Drake is a better artist than Nirvana, and twice as talented as Jimi Hendrix, but I refrained. Like my coworkers, many on the boards have never heard of MGMT (I hadn’t heard of Drake before yesterday).

This drives home something that’s been bubbling beneath the surface ever since I got here. There’s not a lot of diversity. I was warned about this before I came, but I didn’t realize how it would manifest itself on a college campus. College campuses are full of different types of people, I thought—jocks, popular kids, mods, nerds, hippies, goths, punks, business majors, stoners, hipsters, frat boys, and all the weird gradations in between. At least WWU was like this (although I suppose they were wannabe frat boys, since we didn’t have any frats).

UNH seems to have two groups: the hipsters—the people defending MGMT on the message boards, the girls who wear mod dresses and the guys who wear skinny jeans and thick-rimmed glasses and scarves, the people I overhear on the bus talking about Arrested Development—and everybody else.

Everybody else listens to Akon, Lupe Fiasco, Young Money, Ke$ha, or whatever else is killing the Top 40 charts at the moment. They drive spotless new cars, wear Hollister, and drink at the socials every Thursday night (Thirsty Thursdays) at Scorps (a local bar).

Everybody Else.

I haven’t seen a hippie since I got here. Several people who ride my bus are math grad students and talk a lot about their research, but they seem to exist uneasily somewhere on the hipster spectrum, and they disappear once we’re off the bus—faceless in a crowd of Abercrombie, North Face, and perfectly coifed hair. The conformity disturbs me a little, especially coming from Western and Bellingham, a town incredibly tolerant of personal eccentricity. One day when I was back in Bellingham over winter break I watched a woman wearing a top hat and a long coat she appeared to have sewn out of other clothes walk down the street and stand in front of the Bagelry. This would never happen in Durham, I thought. Nothing like it ever has and nothing ever will.

Hipsters, conforming to their own silly bullshit.

Back to school

Hamilton Smith, my home for the next 2-3 years.

Now that I'm back in school, my culture shock is subsiding. Students are pretty much the same everywhere. There aren't nearly as many nalgene bottles, and the Death Cab and so-Cal punk patches on backpacks have been replaced by Guster and Phish and Vampire Weekend, but other than that, they're pretty much the same. Weirdly enough, not many young people speak with that classic thick New English accent (you won't hear of an eighteen year-old going fah in the cah)--it's mostly a thirty-five and up kind of thing. Not sure why.

Also, people seem to wear flannel and plaid-print shirts here in a completely straight-faced, un-ironic way. I guess that's what happens when your home doesn't have a rich history of lumberjacking to stereotype.

I've had all three of my classes now, and I enjoy them. My professors are all great and the vibe in the MFA program is laid back and intelligent. I really like all the fiction people, and I can't wait to start workshopping. Off to write now.

Settling

Man, it's amazing what putting some furniture and posters up can do to a place. This is starting to feel less like an apartment where I sleep, eat, use the internet, and watch Lost, and more like a home.

The office, coming together.

Let me tell you the story of this desk. I contacted "Gabriel" on craigslist, who told us to come by and pick up the desk at 8:30. We arrived to find not Gabriel, but his two very confused (most probably stoned) roommates. They lived in a crappy, mostly empty college house that reminded me quite a bit of the one on Ellis Street. Their living room contained one falling-apart couch, a giant HDTV on a wooden stand, an XBox, and literally nothing else. The stoned roommates showed us into the basement, where Gabriel had disassembled and stored the desk, along with fifty or so years of cobwebs, mold, and mildew. We left our number on a sticky note, drove home, got a call from Gabriel, and drove back twenty minutes later to pick up the desk. Stupidly, we paid $45 for this. The picture probably makes it look better than it is. We had to wash the mold and mildew and crap off each piece before we assembled it (using only the pictures from craigslist and Gabriel's sometimes cryptic labels as a guide). The boards were slightly warped, the cabinet shakes, it's missing some screws, it reeks of basement, there's a rather large piece we couldn't find a place for and thus left out... it's a POS. But it's our desk, and I, if not Ashley, love it anyway.

I'm getting back into the writing mode. Unpacking all of my books and putting them up on shelves has something to do with it, I think. It's amazing how two months of summer can leave you so dumb and out of practice. I'm reading Creating the Story: Guides for Writers by Rebecca Rule and Susan Wheeler, who used to (and may still, I'm not sure) teach fiction at UNH. Donna gave me the book as a graduation present, and her name is on the inside cover. I'm also supplementing it with some old Borges short stories I haven't read since freshman year of college and the odd story from a Crab Creek Review or a MAR--unpacking everything I realized I've accumulated quite the library of old literary magazines.

Other than that, not much is happening. Still looking for a job, although it looks like I've got my work study taken care of--I'll be working in the HR department at UNH, doing office assistant stuff. Ashley's comp camp starts on Monday, and hopefully financial aid will drop soon, so I can pay off my credit cards, make a budget, and maybe even buy some more furniture (I'm pretty worried about money). I'll keep y'all posted.