I flip over onto my stomach in the morning. 11 a.m. Fuck. No recollection of turning off the alarms set for 7 a.m., 8:15 a.m., 10:45 a.m. Missed morning training again. The rugby girls won’t care. I’m American; therefore, all my misbehavior is somehow excused and/or overlooked. They won’t even remember me by September — just the girl who peed on the faculty lawn and jab-cross-hooked an Oxford guy in the neck thrice at the varsity drinks reception. Yawn. Three new Tinder messages? No, I’m not interested in entering the Bone Zone, not today, thanks.
I’ve been reading a lot of Kant lately. Not pretentiously — I just can’t help it. I’ve found it’s a little too easy to lose your head in your readings, but I can’t help that either. Today seems like one of those days to forcibly cease my intellectual masturbation and take in the essence of the sublimity around me. I could really go for an aesthetic blow to the head in order to appreciate all this beauty. Shouldn’t I be concussed by now? Or comatose from perfection overdose? I couldn’t place the source of my ambivalence toward what is arguably the world’s best university. It’s the same case at UC Berkeley I guess: You lock yourself in Main Stacks, self-flagellating while sunshine and Strawberry Creek sexily call your name from above.
Walking down the cobblestone streets, I actually think that it’s not all that different here from Berkeley, really. There are homeless people here. They play guitar outside of grocery stores; they play guitar inside of trash cans as a quirky party trick. They have cats and dogs. There’s the Kip’s equivalent called Cindy’s, where you can go and cry drunkenly with your friends over Third Eye Blind and feel shitty about yourself and at least no one will judge you for wearing Sperrys in the club. Take away the menacing gothic churches and the British accents and the creepy traditions, and it’s just a university town underneath it all. There’s even a mini-Berkeley inside King’s College, where feminist cool kids and LARPers coexist in socialist, molly-induced harmony. Both schools are fucked-up utopias, both sustained autonomous bubbles in their own ways. Both schools have the same stress, the same competition and the same average number of suicides per year.
The truth is that a very strong part of me is ready to forget the past and leave Berkeley behind, never to return — retire my pajamas-to-class aesthetic in exchange for a blazer-a-day kind of life. I could trade in the smell of weed and urine on Telegraph Avenue for eucalyptus and greasy sausage rolls on King’s Parade. I could casually sip Pimm’s while playing croquet and discussing the cosmic microwave background with Stephen Hawking, all the while pretending white privilege doesn’t really exist.
The inevitable phenomenon of culture shock almost sends me running from the flat land of the straight-faced to the singing Berkeley hills. I crave refuge amongst my often overly expressive — albeit emotionally in-tune — friends. Mental health is not a thing here. The other very real truth is that I’d also just as willingly ship my ass back to the Bay at a moment’s notice. This crossroads between a suppressed longing for Cal, nostalgia for what is soon to be a closed chapter of my life, and a general ambivalence toward my experience here was putting me on edge. I couldn’t even enjoy my iced latte from Cafe Nero. Did it even matter that I couldn’t decide how I felt? It probably did, because my innate existentialism was sending me into something of a crisis on the first day of English summer. I decided to see a therapist at £60 an hour. No Tang Center here.
“Can I ask you what sparked these sudden tears, dear?”
“Oh, um, sure … I don’t really know exactly.”
“Indeed. I bet you’d love to just crawl back into the womb, wouldn’t you?”
At first I thought this woman’s Freudian diagnosis was unbecomingly far-fetched, but maybe it really was the womb I needed most at this moment. That lightless sack of jelly promised no room for free will, thus no room for error or discontent. I could be carried around all day instead of ambling aimlessly. I wouldn’t have to play favorites between Berkeley and Cambridge, wouldn’t have to choose between my American and British heritages. Best of all, I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about laying under the duvet for a couple more hours, letting the beauty of the day go to waste without needing to exert my power of subliminal judgment over objects of supreme aesthetic value. Trinity Hall would be there tomorrow. Hell, I’ll always have Dwinelle.
“Off the Beat” guest columns will be written by Daily Cal staff members until the summer semester’s regular opinion writers are selected.