Student Life » Gabe Cralley

Skating through adolescence

Gabe Cralley — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:00:36 +0000

I had the privilege of going roller skating with some of my friends in St. Charles a couple of weeks ago. When they invited me, I had the image in my mind of the skating rinks I am used to at home: 12-year-olds tentatively inching across a dirty, greased sheet of plastic set to the soundtrack of cheesy oldies music and the admonitions of its crotchety old owner. What I found, though, was a group of people my age and older skating in circles at alarming speed.

It made me wonder about my reluctance and the hesitance of our generation to enter into a sort of conventional adulthood and responsibility.

A lot of the skaters there were crazily talented, skating backward and executing spin-jumps whose names I won’t pretend to know. On top of their ability to do things I would never dream of being able to do on a set of wheels (like getting around the rink without stumbling or falling down completely), some of the people there actually had their skates tricked out with striped laces, Nike Air shoes and even drag-racing under-lights. The whole Friday night skating thing obviously wasn’t something they did every once in a while, but, rather, they had made circling that track over and over again into a lifestyle.

In the same way, I know from my own experience that I’m terrified to think about the concept of stepping into adulthood (and by adulthood I mean the Southern Illinois version I’ve been raised with: job, house, marriage, kids, etc.). The thought of taking on such responsibility terrifies me, which I think seems to be pervasive in our generation. We have so many things to divert us from entering into that situation, though, that we can just hop into the rink and skate, going nowhere but in a circle. This, in turn, becomes a lifestyle, and not just a diversion on our way out of adolescence.

For the most part, people are getting married later, having children later, contenting themselves with living a lifestyle that for a long time before us would have been considered, for the most part, a kind of perpetual adolescence. It’s like we’ve created the time of deferral, pushing back what has been taken as normal for so long, so we can do what we want and maybe not have to worry about going out completely on our own or gaining financial independence from our parents.

When I say that, I don’t necessarily mean it is a bad thing. I know for some weird reason, I have a tendency to get lost in thought when I’m skating. Maybe it’s the cyclical nature or something? Either way, though, there’s something to be said about this period of deferral in which many of my older friends have found themselves. Maybe it helps younger people find out who they are before they have to jump into the real world (although I’ve always considered everything in my life to be as real as the world can be).

I don’t pretend to have the answers. All I know is that when my dad and my grandpa were my age, they were married, owned a house and possibly had a child on the way (once again, that could be Southern Illinois, but maybe not). Even the thought of marriage terrifies me, and I can’t imagine having such a link to another person. I just want to be able to find myself before anything else.

I guess as far as I’m concerned, I am content that I have this rink that I can cycle through for a while and learn a little bit more about myself. We’ll all unlace our skates when we’re ready, but in the meantime, I think I’ll worry about keeping my balance here and avoiding any collisions with the guy turning a triple axel over there.

Gabe is a freshman in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at gcralley@gmail.com.

Chronicle of an innocent murder

Gabe Cralley — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 06:00:36 +0000

I want to sleep. Badly. Last night I did not get to bed until 4:30 a.m. because I was working on a Spanish essay about Gabriel García Márquez and his work, “Crónica de una Muerte Anunciada.” “Crónica” is his work that is most grounded in reality, detailing the murder of an innocent man, Santiago Nasar. Anticipating the arrival of the bishop to bless the town, every citizen in his village hurries around distractedly in an effort to appease the expected desires of this holy man, and completely misses the slaying of Santiago by the disgruntled brothers of a woman who claims that Santiago stole her virginity.

In the same manner, I feel that I (we) have a tendency to grow so distracted by school and all of the obligations associated with it that I have come to lose track of my own desires in an effort to satisfy some sort of ideal that cannot be reconciled.

Granted, we all have homework and extracurricular activities that we have to keep track of, but I know that in my case, I have become so fervent about my studies or throwing myself into everything I have to read for class that I completely lose touch with the outside world. I spend all Thursday nights and Fridays working on homework so I can get it all out of the way, but then I wind up waiting until the night before a paper is due, staying awake until the wee hours of the morning and then pretending that I’m some kind of martyr for the literary tradition. And see, the thing is that I tell myself it is worth becoming so immersed in this spectacle of academia, writing papers and identifying arguments and slicing open old, old books, all for the sake of “knowledge,” and making myself better for that one ominous day when some boat brings the bishop to cross himself and give me a communion wafer.

I used to like writing fiction, stories with actual characters and plot, stories like the ones I find myself having to read for class, but not nearly as good. But now? Now, I’m too busy scouring and organizing my house before the priest gets here so I can be acceptable as a college student or intellectual or whatever it is we’re supposed to be at a university. An adult?

Whatever it is I find myself pretending to be, and whatever it is I’m preening over, I feel like I’ve lost a little bit of myself. I came here so I could improve my writing, and I’m even in a fiction class this semester, but now even that has become hurried, mechanical. It’s more about fitting myself to the expectations of my professors and not what I, myself, am really passionate about.

The problem with the citizens in “Crónica de una Muerte Anunciada” is that they become so concerned with preparing themselves for the bishop’s oh-so-holy coming to demonstrate how very sacred and sanctified they are, that right in the middle of their efforts, they watch as an innocent man is murdered and do absolutely nothing. In their efforts to be blameless, they end the story with blood on their hands, guilty by association, but still guilty.

I know I, at least, have done that, and I can imagine that I am not the only one. I have harbored and squelched the one thing that I enjoy more than anything else. I have claimed a title of scholar and augmented it with only superficial thoughts and readings. I have called for profound and ground-shaking action, all the while chatting on Facebook or continuing to contribute to the systems against which I protest with my words. I have prepared my temple for the Man of God, and I, in my inaction, have killed Santiago Nasar.

The greatest irony of “Crónica” is that the bishop never actually comes. In the blind zeal of the measures taken to make his visit a pleasant and holy one, the townspeople let one of their own die because they were too distracted by the promise of something that would make their lives what they were supposed to be, some ideal. In the end, though, they find that they have lost a part of themselves for something that was never worth it to begin with.

Gabe is a freshman in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at gcralley@wustl.edu.

When posters promote sexual objectification

Gabe Cralley — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 06:17:41 +0000

I feel awkward. Everywhere I go, I see posters advertising events like Dr. Judy’s Tantric Sex Workshop and Anal Pleasure 101, and I, with my sheltered life, can’t help but blush. Red face notwithstanding, I am fully aware that students will enjoy these events, and they have every right to do so. What bothers me, though, is the way that the posters that have been blue taped to every wall on campus portray women.

The only advertisements with real people on them show skinny women bent in some sexy position with their bedroom eyes assaulting passersby, which makes me feel like even here at our very accepting school we are perpetuating the cycle of the objectification of women and telling a lie about beauty.

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The look is thin. Everyone knows that. My friend and I were discussing the other day how chain stores like Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch have shrunk the size of their women’s clothing (she had to go up two sizes to fit in their clothes). Couple that with the skin-tightness of everything, and we find our nation’s girls trying to get thinner and thinner to fit the standards of the magazines they read and the television shows they watch. Preteen girls have begun to develop eating disorders as early as age 5 or 6. It’s easy for us to see that, shake our heads in derision, and say what a shame it is.

And it’s easy for us to call shenanigans and sexism when we see Beyoncé and Lady Gaga writhing in their music videos (“Video Phone,” anyone?), and talk about the degradation of society, and put the Federal Communications Commission on speed dial. I mean, even Miley is showing a little skin nowadays. They have every right to do whatever they want with their bodies, don’t get me wrong, but they are promulgating a super-sexualized body image for impressionable younger (and even older) females that has been around for centuries. You are breasts. You are hips. You are uterus. Throw in a little prophecy, and you are the makings of a Virgilian epic.

We have had a culture of misogyny and objectification of women created for us. We all know that.

What I can’t seem to wrap my mind around, though, is the thought that even here at Wash. U., where we find ourselves so educated, we fall into those same constructs. It’s more than just the posters, but they are a prime example. We try so hard to be politically correct here, and we read our Foucault and our Times, but then we slap these half-naked girls on our posters, falling right back into the cultural norms. If men and women were equally represented, I would understand, but that isn’t the case. Sport is still being made of her quality as a sexual object.

And might I add that the women presented on these posters are skinny white women? We’ve become so inextricably tied into this view (although it may be implicit) that the ideal woman is white, thin, curvy in all the right places and sprawled half-naked on the hood of a Ford truck, even here at our school.

Why do we continue to enforce these beliefs and values of beauty where we can actually influence beauty’s perception? When we fall back on the default of the super-sexualized woman (even when it’s something as small as a poster) we only augment years of the subservience of women and insult who they are as people. Check out the Tantric Sex Workshop, yeah, but remember that you and/or the women in your life are more than that.

Gabe is a freshman in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at gcralley@gmail.com.

In where do I fit?

Gabe Cralley — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 06:00:55 +0000

I have a tendency to use semicolons in text messages. It’s a compulsion, really, that I associate with my childhood affliction—an obsession with grammar. I think I started exhibiting the first signs of this as a 4-year-old when I so cheekily told my grandfather that “ain’t” isn’t a real word. Time passed, and I realized that I was bound in some sort of masochistic love affair that, while excusing me from being good at anything with numbers (thank God), singled me out from the rest of my friends, who had no qualms about saying “who” when “whom” was obviously appropriate.

This obsession manifested itself for a time in the form of my refusal to end sentences with a preposition. I went obnoxiously about my day, hopping from conversation to conversation, saying things like, “About what did Mr. Mooney teach today?” or “Does anyone have a pencil with which I can write?” I was insistent; my friends were frustrated. They had a right to be. While, technically, prepositions should never dangle at the end of a sentence, oftentimes it’s just so awkward to rearrange the way in which you speak so you can comport yourself in a manner that won’t upset the English gods. But really? I have finally come to the point where I don’t even know what to do about those prepositions. I am supposed to keep them away from periods, but they don’t seem to fit anywhere else.

I felt exactly the same way when I went home for Thanksgiving break.

I traveled back to Illinois last Monday, exhausted from a night of only three hours of sleep. Home promised to be a warm refuge from work and sleep deprivation, if only for a span of five days, that would help me recuperate from a long semester and prepare me for two more weeks before the break between first and second semester. I dozed away the trip and awoke to find myself back in the cornfields, now stripped from the autumn harvest.

It wasn’t the same. I found myself floating from my room to the living room to watch movies, or to the kitchen to eat, or to my grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving dinner, each place making me more keenly aware of the fact that I had not been there for three months. Furniture had been rearranged. New inside jokes had been born. The microcosm of Mt. Vernon, Ill., had continued to evolve while I was gone, and I felt less a part because of it. They were different. I was different.

People seemed to appreciate being around me more, but still, it was too formal, too sterile. I felt I didn’t belong.

After talking to a few of my friends, I realized that we all experience that feeling on some level or another. We’re all at a point in our lives where it’s hard to tell where exactly we are supposed to be and where exactly home is. Wash. U. has too many people and the beds are too small to be home, but home seemed almost foreign, too small, too pre-med-less.

I suppose the whole coming-of-age story is clichéd only because it’s true. We go away to find ourselves and find when we return home that the people we left actually are people, not these idealized, constant figures of mother, father, grandparents. They change. They mess up. They feel uncomfortable and don’t know how to behave around the college student. It’s awkward beyond all belief, and though both parties try to fix the relationship, to reach back into the past, it can’t be done. We’re left like dangling prepositions or shoved awkwardly into some phrase in the middle of a sentence.

Good writers can bend the conventions of English with the flair of artistic license, though. They can take a cumbersome sentence and make it fluid and natural with just a little bit of effort. I finally came to be comfortable with my new position in my family, not a child but not quite an adult either, and maybe at home in both places.

I’m not quite sure whether I’m supposed to be at the end of the sentence or somewhere in the middle, but I think I’ll keep reading and see how the tale unwinds.

Out from under my umbrella (ella ella)

Gabe Cralley — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:00:24 +0000

Mike Hirshon | Student Life

I realized the other day that I’ve gone through three umbrellas since I’ve been here at school, quite a change from home, where it rarely rains after May. I never carried an umbrella before this past August because it simply wasn’t necessary, but now every Thursday and for other long spans of time in between, I find myself standing under my umbrella. None of them has lasted against the torrents long enough to create a legacy, though the first (God rest its soul) perished outside Seigle on account of a rogue spring, and the second fell in combat during its tenure as a shield in an epic Nerf war last Saturday. The third umbrella now looms over me like “Fantasia’s” Chernabog, spreading its black wings to defend me in my hydrophobic endeavors.

These umbrellas serve as nothing more than mere excuses, shielding me from the pressures and reality of college.

I came to Wash. U. with high expectations. I knew that it would be one of the best experiences of my life, filled with more euphoric moments and happiness-obliterating instances than I could even imagine. Along with that, though, I knew I would have to work because, well, it would be hard.

Like most (if not all) of the students here, I never had to study for tests or try too hard on homework in high school; it just came easily. In spite of my knowledge of the difficulty of Wash. U., I still came here with a high school mindset.

I slept away the afternoons without doing homework. I waited until the night before a paper was due to start it. I didn’t study for exams worth 30 percent of my grade.

When my papers came back with less-than-desirable grades or I stayed awake until 3 in the morning reading Augustine, I didn’t accept responsibility. I told myself, “You’re at Wash. U.,” or, “It’s OK, you’re just getting adjusted,” or, “Well, I’ll never read Cicero after this, anyway.”

But that is complete garbage. Honestly, it’s because I’m too afraid to actually try anything.

What I’ve come to see is that all of these ridiculous excuses about why I’m not doing well are merely some nylon sheath fighting back the truth as it pounds overhead and soaks my pant legs. They have no validity and do nothing but enable me to continue to be lazy and scared.

My new umbrella is so obnoxiously large that it actually echoes back the sloshing of my feet in the water as I walk. In the same manner, my excuses are beginning to reflect back at me my own failures.

Three weeks remain in the semester, and yes, my grades have improved dramatically, but I’m still not doing my best. I defer to others in my seminar classes to answer the questions because oftentimes, I read through my texts too quickly and don’t want to look like a moron when I speak. I’ve been hiding behind these stupid reasons of why and why not, and the echoes are growing too loud.

I can tout my ability to reason or write or walk and chew gum at the same time, but until I actually commit to any of them and stop procrastinating and under-qualifying them, I will never actually prove to myself that I can survive here, because the fear is too much.

Too often, we fear failure, so we only act half-heartedly to safeguard ourselves from disappointment and embarrassment. What we wind up with, though, is wet feet and a disgruntled attitude and frustration with ourselves.

The only solution to this problem is to actually try. Give it everything we’ve got. Maybe that’s a bit contrived, but it’s the truth. We will never be able to fulfill our potential if we don’t invest ourselves more than partially in our endeavors.

As the structure seems to follow, my new umbrella will break soon enough under the weight of the miniature clouds that fall from their parents or from the rapid-fire of foam darts. I can handle it, though, because I am tired of hiding from the rain. Yes, it may be cold. Yes, it may make my hands and feet pruny. Yes, it may smear the ink in my notebooks. I have found, though, that life just is not as fun if we don’t play in the puddles and the downpour.

I will never wear girls’ jeans again

Gabe Cralley — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:01:10 +0000

(Mike Hirshon | Student Life)
They are too tight, too uncomfortable, and my thighs are too big, but it was for Halloween, and I chose to be a hipster. My friends and I planned it two or three weeks in advance: We would dress up as random counterculture groups and beg for candy at the Central West End as a nostalgic act of silliness.

Our plans, however, unwound into a mildly disgruntling but still quite exciting journey, us having found an adult block party in the middle of Euclid, complete with a dancing deck of cards and many women (and men) dressed up as tawdry-looking Disney characters. Because of all the drunken debauchery, I would assume, no one within a three-block radius would open their doors to a bunch of poor, pathetic college students. Still, it was all too funny to see.

Decked in a scarf and pants about five sizes too small for me, I realized that no one truly ever grows up.

Life has a tendency to put restrictions on us as we grow older: Play nicely with others, go to college, pay your own cell phone bill, get a good job, stop picking your nose. The list goes on, and we wrap ourselves in these costumes of “adults,” responsible, caring, good citizens who contribute to the greater good, and try our hardest to keep order, peace and reverence and not hit our cousin Jimmy when he tries to steal our Tonka trucks.

Adulthood is an expectation that has afflicted generations and generations before us as we maintain propriety rather than express how we truly feel. Oftentimes, it isn’t adult-like to act silly and let loose. We become so caught up in what we have to do that we forget who we used to be; we’ll put on the suit or the corporate mask or the soccer-mom wig, and when we finally do look at ourselves in the mirror, we don’t even know what is staring back at us.

The block party, though, is proof that given an opportunity, the child in us will get out. All it takes is one occasion, one little chance to revert back to adolescence, or even childhood, and adults will jump at the opportunity, whether responsibly or irresponsibly.

If adulthood is so uncomfortable, why do we bother trying to perform as adults? I don’t mean to say that we should just let everything fall into anarchy, and I know we do have to behave responsibly, but why is there so much tension in the world? Why do we kill ourselves putting on this image of some stereotype that is generations old? We’re all trying to do well in school or in our jobs so we can make a better life for ourselves, yes, but if we don’t take a second to look around—past the textbooks and the minivans and the taxes—we will miss what life is about.

It is more than just this performance starring the over-18 crowd. From time to time, we need to look back and see where we came from. We need to laugh, enjoy ourselves and be who we are, free from worries about what anyone else will think.

I can tell you from experience that some pants are just too tight to wear and should not be seen on your body or mine. Step out from your imposed adulthood and seriousness, and I think you’ll find that it’s much easier to breathe.

Journeying back to the land of censorship

Gabe Cralley — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:00:48 +0000

Remember that part in “The Odyssey” when Odysseus returns to Ithaca and finds that everything has changed, up to the suitors prancing around like 50-year-old men at a prostate exam, legs clinched and manliness on full showcase? Well, I journeyed back to my old high school last weekend, voyage unimpeded by one-eyed monsters and evil whirlpools, to find young Telemachus under the authority of evil, ultraconservative men who would like nothing more than to corrupt Odysseus’ kingdom and take his sweet Penelope.

Sorry…I’ve been reading a lot of Greek literature lately, and I needed a slightly relevant lede.

Though at press time I find myself childless, I felt almost paternalistic and most definitely outraged when I returned to my high school and discovered the state of censorship that had fallen. I had a chance to talk to my old newspaper adviser, only to find out that my old principal, against whom the Vernois News staff and I fought for free speech for two years, censored another portion of the newspaper and has now voiced his disapproval of the teaching of “Of Mice and Men.”

I can’t believe he’s gone back to bleeping spots out of the paper. I almost feel like being here has made me forget what that time in my education was like when I had to worry about what the authority might think of what I have to say, which is something that should not be forgotten.

I was censored four times in my last two years of high school by this man, as were the works of other students. This time, the principal struck the entire artistic section out of the paper because of “questionable” photos of a graveyard. What’s wrong with a graveyard? Furthermore, the idea of cutting “Of Mice and Men” from the curriculum is ridiculous. While it may have some issues with violence and language, it is still a classic that reveals to the reader a little glimpse of some of life’s truths.

I write this not to give a 600-word complaint about my old high school, though, but rather to remind us that there is a world out there that is not as free to speak and read and write as they would like. So often we get caught up in the Wash. U. bubble that we don’t realize how lucky we are.

Where are those professors who try to prevent you from saying what you want to say? Where is that editor who will not let you run a column because of “questionable” content? For the most part, you will not find those people here.

We need to see that we are now in an empowered position to speak out about what we don’t think is right, especially if it is a case of censorship. My high school paper can’t speak out against the closed-mindedness of their principal’s cuts because he is the ultimate authority on what is printed in our school’s paper. I, on the other hand, can.

I am no longer hindered by him, just as many of you are no longer inhibited by some administrator who kept you from expressing your opinion. As a result, we have a responsibility to speak out against this sort of control. So, I will.

To high school students (and even to the administrators who insist on monitoring your reading and writing), I want to assure you that there is a real world where you can write and draw and express yourselves in the manner in which you know you should be able to.

I am by no means Odysseus, but I, just like you, can be an advocate for those who feel like their opinions aren’t being heard, or even those who feel they are being silenced. All it took was one man to string his bow and shoot an arrow that made Penelope’s oppressors run away.

Mike Hirshon | Student Life

Hammocks and expectations hamper true intentions

Gabe Cralley — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 05:00:50 +0000

I realized the other day that there is no dignified way to climb out of a hammock. I was lying in one outside my dorm, sprawled against my most favorite philosopher, Plato (sarcasm), catching up on some reading that was long overdue. After reading about his Theory of Forms and the Shadows in the Cave, I lay there, basking in the glory of enlightenment and the afternoon sun. But I had to leave because I was supposed to go out with my friends.

Getting up wasn’t quite as easy as I had anticipated. Still scrunched in hammock posture, I tried to swing my legs over the side and climb off, but every way I moved, I turned the ropes in some ridiculous angle that made my escape impossible. I finally wound up falling flat on my derrière, gaining a dirty pair of jeans and sore tailbone in the process.

Sometimes it hurts to climb out of a comfortable place to a new one, but just as often, it is completely worth it.

My rendezvous with gravity and ancient Greece pulled my attention to memories of graduation and move-in day at Wash. U. People told me college was a place where I could be different. I could redefine myself, go from passive to assertive, timid to bold, apathetic to passionate, insecure to confident or the reverse of any of those, if I so desired.

I had a chance to transform who I was into the person I wanted to be, everyone told me, and I had every intention to do so. They didn’t tell me how hard it was going to be.

I have a tendency to be a little quieter than I’d like at times, to the extent that I don’t even express my opinion. Coming to a place where I wasn’t known as the guy to whom everyone tells their problems and who is too nice to yell at someone if they make him angry seemed like a great opportunity. I was merely a blank slate, ready to define itself according to its own terms, which is quite a refreshing and invigorating thought. I was tired of being a doormat.

Like being in the hammock, though, all I wanted to do was lie there idly and enjoy the smell of almost-autumn, clutching in my hand the toxic tome that I had learned to hate silently. Yes, it was comfortable; yes, the weather was nice, but still, “The Republic” was on top of me, its dialogues an oppressive force on my chest.

I felt similar sentiments about my compliance and whom I thought everyone else thought I was supposed to be. I have slowly developed into this person over the past 13 years, becoming diplomatic, polite, silent, saying that people wouldn’t care to hear what I had to say or that some remark was too sarcastic to actually say aloud. This attitude transformed from some convention into how I defined myself and the bed in which I lay, and a comfortable, well-shaded one at that. But still, the sting of something I hated remained in my arms, required reading for how I should think about justice and the perfect society.

Society isn’t perfect, and neither am I. While talking to a good friend about this a few chilly nights ago, she told me that I just needed to stop worrying about how everyone would perceive me and just be who I want to be, which I found quite a shock, really. Through the shivers and lamplight, I had to physically stop and examine who I wanted to be.

I think oftentimes we get so caught up with fear of how others feel about us that we stay in these molds that we, not they, think define us. It becomes our mask, our safety, our name, and we refuse to be anything more or try anything else. After all, if the breeze is blowing, who cares how many pages of ridiculous philosophy we have to read? We can’t spend our entire life in the same place because we’re too comfortable or too afraid of looking like an idiot when we try to get out. We have to get out and go further.

Yes, I hurt my butt and got dirt on my jeans and possibly made a fool of myself in front of my entire building, but when I dusted myself off and headed to the Loop, I realized that walking, unimpeded by ropes, made me so much happier.

On drunken ambiguity

Gabe Cralley — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 05:00:48 +0000

Aviya Lanis | Student Life

I stayed up far too late a few nights ago, talking with my friends, venting some frustrations and laughing about Napoleon (ambiguous jokes are always the best kind). There I sat, crunched against the wall, knees pulled into my chest, when a group of loud and obviously drunk freshmen stumbled past my withdrawn feet, shouting about finding a friend of theirs.

They ran off with quite a bit of noise and left my friends and me to think about what we had seen. The others returned to bantering about the Corsican, but I still couldn’t shed the image of those people stumbling down the hallway.

I don’t understand it.

In my mind, the concept of getting drunk has always evaded even a hint of logic.

Think about it. You pay a ridiculous amount of money for every drink, chugging can after can or bottle after bottle, knowing full well that the next morning you could (and most likely will) wake with a pounding headache and maybe even a bed buddy who looks a lot like Quasimodo. On top of that, everyone knows that enough partying can lead to a Freshman (or Sophomore or Junior or Senior) 15 and, later on in life, that wonderful condition that doctors call cirrhosis of the liver. Am I using a slippery slope argument? Maybe, but everyone knows that drunk people have slower reflexes and impaired balance, so the argument still stands.

I write this not, though, as a nutritionist or MADD lobbyist or even as someone who is tired of people stomping on the floor above him every morning at 3 o’clock. I write this because I am genuinely curious as to what drives someone to drink until they don’t know where they are.

When does life become so bad that the only possible escape is from a cup you scored from some Greek letters or your roommate? Why is it that almost every non-CS40 event we have on this campus is so awkward that we have to lubricate our social gears with a disgusting-smelling drink that looks like pee? What triggers us to drink and drink until we find humor in the vomit dripping down our shirt and saturating those shoes that we hoped so badly would match our outfit for the party? I asked myself those questions that night as I took a walk through the rain.

It still doesn’t make sense to me. We all attend this amazing school with these amazing people and opportunities, yet we feel so compelled to get wasted every weekend. Is there solace in it? Because all I have seen is someone in tears, retching up their dinner. Is there happiness in it? Because all I have seen is someone staggering around with a dejected look on their face. Is there pride in it? Because all I have seen is someone babbling incoherently about how drunk they were.

That same night as I had just come in from my walk, a girl bolted down the stairs behind me, looking around frantically with confusion in her eyes. She finally looked at me and said with an urgency in her voice, “How do I get out of here? I can’t find my way out of here.” I showed her that the door was merely a few feet behind her, and before I even had a chance to ask her if she was all right, she was gone.

That really resonated with me because it made me wonder if that was the reason: Maybe we just want to get out of here. Maybe we’re all so miserable, and we think there’s no escape until someone points to that easy-access door right behind us, and then we have it, our answer. Or, at least we think it’s our answer, but what does it tell us, really? I’m still trying to figure that one out.

I probably will not make any friends with this column, but I think someone needed to say it. As much as that girl was trying to find her way out of the building, we are all trying to find our way to someplace a little better. I have seen people try to find their way through a drunken stupor, but it never quite works out. No, I’ve found in my experience that the best way is maybe just sitting up until 2:30 in the morning with a group of people that understands your ambiguous jokes and listens to every qualm you have, however small it may be.

Men’s group flexes muscles, judged 3.2

Gabe Cralley — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:00:37 +0000

Mike Hirshon | Student Life

The most anticipated event of my college career (so far, at least) came last week in the form of the Activities Fair. Considering I was over-involved in high school, as I’m sure most of the other students at Wash. U. were, I couldn’t wait to check out all of the different clubs in which I could get involved, because reading 300 pages for my Text and Tradition classes just isn’t enough of a time killer for me.

As I made my way through the overwhelming display of tables, the over-committed, over-involved maniac in me died a little when I found so many groups of which I could not be a part. Women’s advocacy groups peppered the landscape that is Brookings Quad. Amid a myriad of extracurriculars, only one group even hinted at men’s interests. There is nothing wrong with women’s groups, but I suddenly felt rather alone and underrepresented (especially since I only signed up to be on the e-mail list for 12 groups).

In an article published in March by a student at University of Chicago, he proposed the creation of a group called Men in Power, which would focus on the hardships that men face and help them connect with successful male mentors. Much of the female population became angered at the thought, claiming it sexist and degrading. Dissenters mounted protests during the first meeting, carrying signs bearing messages like “Misogyny has never seemed so Maroon.”

But I don’t understand the problem. A men’s support group should be able to exist without the worry of cries of “Misogyny!” and “Patriarchy!” and would help both men and women.

In a world of heightened political correctness, it would be so much easier for me to take the stance opposed to the formation of such a group on any campus, but I simply cannot do that because the fact of the matter is that men face just as much pressure as women do.

As much as we as a society emphasize political correctness, we also force certain expectations on men. A man must be assertive, emotionless, athletic, driven, courageous, polite but not too chivalrous that he offends a woman and sets her on the shelf as a trophy, and the criteria stretch on and on and on. In much of our culture, if a man does not conform to the Herculean mold, he is not a real man, as women are not real women if they are not skinny, coiffed, sassy, made up and obsessed with “Twilight.”

The pressure is intense enough that in the United States, the male-to-female suicide rate is four-to-one and has been for quite some time. Men must be stoic, silent, solitary, until, of course, they become so overwhelmed by the pressure of it all that they end their suffering in a truly manly way: self-murder.

As a guy who doesn’t abide by every single male more (I think my 12-year-old cousin could probably beat me at basketball, and I tend to get my feelings hurt a little more easily than I should), I believe a forum where I could talk about my own issues with life and the problems that I face without having to worry about scrutiny or jeers or jabs at my manhood would be a great organization.

I understand the argument, though. I recently read a book entitled “Privilege, Power, and Difference,” an examination of how gender, race, sexuality and disability status affect a person’s life and the society around him or her. An argument in the study said that maleness is a quality of privilege in American society and makes men privy to a bevy of benefits that women, as a result of male privilege, have no chance of obtaining. It’s a zero-sum game that can only be dissolved by increased awareness and action at the hands of those with and without privilege.

Seemingly, this organization would only increase male privilege, but what if the men involved were able to be who they really are? Would they realize the system of expectations, both male and female, that has been created around them? Who’s to say they wouldn’t? Who’s to say this wouldn’t open their eyes to those problems that their “maleness” made them overlook?

Maybe I’m idealistic and maybe I’m naïve, but it’s gotten me this far in life (although I guess I still don’t fit the mold of the perfect man). Maybe we could get a group together and talk about it?