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.

Five questions for New Hampshirites (and New Englanders in general)

1. What's up with all the bunting? It's everywhere, along with tons of American flags. I've never been to a place that has so much red, white and blue. We drove past a house that had an American flag in every window (and the old houses here have lots of windows)! There are Obama-Biden stickers everywhere, and a surprising number of still-hanging-on Kerry-Edwards stickers. Some sort of New English pride thing, maybe? All of this I can understand, except for the bunting. I don't think I've ever seen bunting outside of period films, and now it's everywhere. What's up with all the bunting?


2. How are west coasters supposed to eat here? Food here is generally cheaper than back home (no sales tax, sweet), but we're finding it difficult to find some of our staples: no Tilamook cheese, yogurt, or sour cream; no Adam's peanut butter or gourmet peanut butter of any kind; no Hershey's syrup (that one's weird); and on a weird note, it's not called Dreyer's ice cream over here, it's called Edy's, even though it's the exact same product.


3. Why so serious? A mean way to put it would be that everybody is just a little uptight, but that's not quite accurate. Ash characterized it as a lack of west coast earnestness, which is a good way to put it, but I think there's also a lack of self-deprecation. Everything is important. And with good reason: Dover was established in 1623, a donation from Andrew Carnegie helped establish the University of New Hampshire, and many local restaurants, no matter how skeezy, proudly trace their history (Asia Fantasia! Fine Chinese and Korean takeout since 1958!). This all isn't to say New Hampshirites don't joke or have fun—we bought our bed from a jocular, elbow-nudging old guy named Frank—but there's kind of a current of seriousness running beneath everything.


4. Why does your traffic suck so bad? Everybody gets backed up at the tolls as people frantically lane change between the cash, EZ Pass, and exact change lanes—that's to be expected. But why does Dover, with barely 26,000 people, get swamped by bumper-to-bumper traffic during rush hours? I have two theories about this. Firstly, the town is so old there's no grid system—streets intersect at weird angles, there are no stoplights where there should be, occasionally stoplights where I'm used to seeing stop signs, pedestrian-only roads, giant six-way intersections where two or more of the roads are one-way.... it's a giant mess. I'm getting used to it, though. Secondly, nobody here takes the bus. Everybody drives. I'm hoping this changes when school starts and the students return.

5. Why is wine so expensive? When we find bottles we recognize from Bellingham and Seattle, they're four to seven dollars more expensive. The local stuff is expensive too, although oddly the French imports aren't too much more than they are at home. What makes this even weirder is that beer is much cheaper than in Washington (haven't compared liquor yet). As we are too poor to afford a $13 bottle of wine that tastes like a $6 bottle, this makes Ashley very sad.

This came out a little gripier than I intended. Sorry New Hampshirites, I really do like your state! It's just the little things that hang me up and make me remember I'm not at home. Last night my friend in New York posted a Facebook status update about a meteor shower from midnight to five a.m. Man, I thought, wouldn't it be cool to be on the east coast so I could see that? I didn't realize until this morning that I am on the east coast, and, had it been clear last night, I would have seen the meteor shower. This is going to take some getting used to.

Road Trip Day 5: Out east

People told me that New England was different, and I knew it would be, but I didn't think it would be this different.

We drove through upstate New York, and I did not feel like I was in America. Something about it tickled the back of my mind—the way the farms were so small, how little fences butted up against little fields and little thickets of trees. It was farmland, but compared to the country we'd been driving through for days, the unending fields of corn and wheat extending to the horizon, it was dramatically reduced in scale.

Then it hit me. This looks exactly like the French countryside Ashley and I drove through in December. But for the cars, the freeway signs and the trees, it could be France. It's a weird feeling, knowing that you're still in your own country but feeling out of place, gawking at the landscape.

The weirdness increased when we stopped at a travel oasis (I-90 is a toll road through New York as well). The people looked and acted different. They wore different clothes and different hairstyles from their west coast cousins, cashiers acted differently, everybody talked in unfamiliar accents (“Harold, wait in the caah”), and they knew we were different too. We got stares whenever we stopped. It's a weird place, this New England.