I'm Not Even Hungry

And This? (you have to read down to see the other titles for that to make sense, and even then it's not that funny)

The summer before I came to Columbia as a first-year, I never got a haircut. By the end of August, my parents said I looked like a surly hobo; my friends thought angry but skinny drug dealer; my 6-year-old sister babbled something about a pony. The mortifying picture on my CUID—dear God, I still have to look at it every day—demonstrates that they were all right, except for my sister. That pony thing was just wrong. But nobody who met me at Columbia after that summer knew this. The day before I came, I got a really, really short haircut.

I don’t know why I thought that hair was the way to do it, but my motivation resembled that of many new college students: I wanted to create a new identity. The Onion brilliantly captured this desire, as it brilliantly captures most things, in an article titled “College Freshman Cycles Rapidly Through Identities.” It details the transformations of one new student. He starts out as a frat-guy wannabe, then moves through stoner, white hip-hop kid, and tortured artist before settling on really religious or film nerd.

The humor from this column comes from its painful familiarity. Especially at Columbia, housed in a city that promises renewal, people come to college to escape who they were and become something new.Some, perhaps in the quest to fashion an intellectual self, learn that the hottest academic theory considers this whole process of self-creation a charade. From Clifford Geertz in anthropology, to Stephen Greenblatt in literature, and Michel Foucault for pretty much everything else in the humanities, post-modern theorists have rested their entire project on a rejection of the self. Greenblatt aptly summarizes this view when he writes that the self is merely “the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society.” People think they control their self, but it is actually a blank slate upon which societal institutions carve out a meaning. Without these institutions, there is no there there.

Accepting this insight can prove remarkably painful. In the heartbreaking conclusion of Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare—which is not how one usually describes the conclusion of a book with a title like Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare—Greenblatt admits that, although he believes in the artificiality of the self, he still has “an overwhelming need to sustain the illusion that I am the principle maker of my own identity.”

Despite its wretchedly depressing nature, this theory has tremendous explanatory power. While applying to colleges, I always wished that I had control of a time machine and multiple universes. That way, I could see the type of person I would become after four years at all the schools I considered. I came to Columbia largely because I thought that Yale-me would be a douchebag, and that University-of-Chicago-me would learn to speak Klingon. This fantasy recognized that at some level I was giving up control of part of my identity to whichever college I attended.

But people give control of their identities to outside forces every day. The Core Curriculum, viewed in this light, seems less an example of the noble pursuit of knowledge than an attempt to give students the skills necessary to function in upper-class American society—which is why professors note that knowledge of Euripides can kill at a cocktail party. Participation in extracurricular activities imbues a person with a social status they wouldn’t have if they just stayed in their room. Even in relationships, people turn to another for meaning they can’t find in themselves.

Because college students’ selves are in constant flux, they have a particularly strong obsession with the accurate presentations of those selves, as anyone who has walked through a computer lab in Butler during finals week and seen rows of students madly revising their Facebook profiles can attest. If the same person walks outside of Butler and happens to notice the people sitting on the benches, smoking clove cigarettes, wearing blazers over ironic T-shirts, eyes covered by aviator glasses, and talking about how Wolf Parade was so June, she has enough material for an essay in a post-modernist review. It gets too easy if she follows this with a walk down frat row.

People fixate so intensely on their identities because they have to. “In our culture,” Greenblatt rightly claims, “to let go of one’s stubborn hold upon selfhood, even selfhood conceived as a fiction, is to die.” Eeep.

If nothing else, the changes a personality can go through in college demonstrate the painful fragility of this selfhood. On their first day, one of the only things that most first-years can probably say with certainty is that they want to be somebody different at the end of four years. By and large, they succeed, sometimes so quickly that they don’t even notice.

A few weeks after arriving at Columbia my first year, I visited one of my best friends from high school. While waiting to meet her for the first time since the summer, I skimmed over a newspaper. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her coming. I looked up to say hello, but before the words left my lips, she walked past me. Later, while I made fun of her for forgetting who I was after three weeks, she told me she hadn’t recognized me because I had changed. It was the hair.

posted by Tim @ 10:45 PM