Keep Pushing 'Till It's Understood

Move-in day for incoming freshman at my college was Thursday September 3^rd. I remember my own first day at school – butterflies, handshakes, forced smiles, teary mother, nascent friendships – and I became nostalgic watching a new generation of kids cliché their way down a new path full of journeys.

Some freshman looked overwhelmed with the sheer size of their new campus and its enormous student body. An uneasy mixture of ambition, angst, and Axe hung in the air. As with all freshmen, the men mainly wore cargo shorts and ill-fitting polo shirts and the women mainly wore nothing. Much like that recent Seth Rogen/Judd Apatow film Butt Cancer, I thought this was in incredibly bad taste.

New Student Orientation, or NSO, is among the most fun times on campus since dozens of open parties are thrown each night. Two friends of mine, also juniors, joined me in going to a few such events last night. I acknoweledge that I am too old to be doing this, but my alternatives were playing a Madden 1995 emulator and watching a rerun of Hung.

Parties during NSO frequently have crowds spilling out from houses onto the street. Campus security prioritizes student safety over actually enforcing any laws. Upon entry at the first party, I heard some guy brag that he had “eight beers, three shots, plus some jungle juice…no, was it nine beers? Yeah, I had ten beers!” Fortunately, I had taken him with the first overall pick in my Fantasy Drinking league so I knew that my team, Lendale Lite, was going to win its first round matchup against Dante’s DWInferno.

Too soon?

The conventional frat party was fun enough, despite my sobriety. The dance floor was sufficiently awkward, with enough people making the “hey check it out I’m fist pumping lol” joke that I knew it was time to go. We left around midnight and decided to see what else there was to see.

We crashed a hipster party. I braced myself for the worst. I assumed the women would be sporting ironic moustaches and the men would have ironic ovaries.

There were indeed enough snobbish hipsters to prevent me from fully enjoying myself or having self-confidence due to the fact that I weigh more than 45 pounds. That being said, the vast majority of them were wonderfully friendly and welcoming despite the fact that I was clearly a non-ironic fish out of mainstream water at their party.

It became clear moments after entry that the difference between the two parties could not have been more pronounced. The hipsters had set up a giant projector and screened Fast Times at Ridgemont High across the side of their house. I saw Damone impregnate a girl on a sixty foot screen. Hand-drawn cartoons covered the place and were inked directly on the walls. The frat brothers threw a bigger party and therefore felt that they should have a larger say in how the new republic was governed, but a hipster we met published a New Jersey Plan giving each party equal say. Bicameralism is one of the more ironic forms of government.

I got to know a few of them. I liked their music, their swagger, their comfortably predictable efforts and nonconformity. They were great conversationalists and drank Yuengling, a proud American beer. Most generally agreed with the mission of the United Nations, but found it too weak to affect real world progress and were alarmed by its anemic third down conversion rate. I liked these people.

The first hipster I approached was wearing a wife-beater with New York Times headlines all over it. These weren’t famous headlines, just ones like “Staten Island Councilman Stubs Toe”. He also wore a keffiyeh, mutton chops, and had hair down to his hips. He told me had had graduated, and I knew he looked familiar. I finally placed it, I went to Cheesecake and he was a mu-a-fi-a waiter there. I asked him what kind of music he liked expecting him to name some garbage by Animal Collective and Fleet Foxes. “I’m a huge Springsteen fan. Actually, pretty much everyone around here loves him.”

I met a girl named Ivy next. She had a friendly face, bangs, and light skin. She wore an oversized teal t-shirt, striped leggings, red shoes, teal earrings, and some very bright red lipstick. My friends and I kept making jokes about how “Ivy is probably a little out of our League” and “let’s just go hit on her less attractive friend, NESCAC”.

The night was nearly over. But then, from about twenty feet away, I heard a familiar chord progression as a guitarist and his drummer sang about trouble in the heartland. “Badlands”, perhaps my favorite song by Bruce, was being played by a hipster named Luke at the corner of 39^th and Spruce. He had a giant Adam’s apple, skinny jeans, and looked like a cross between various recessive and dominant traits.