At the age of eighteen I was vaguely resentful, as most middle-class children are, that my parents did not imbue me with sound advice upon my leaving home. As I sit here feeling a not wholly unwarranted maternal concern for the freshmen, I realize the dilemma my parents must have faced regarding preparation-for-the-world-advice. There is really nothing I, nor anybody, can say which will prepare you for the hurly-burly chaos of life. However, I can give a few pointers that may guide you through those half-dozen blocks that comprise Collegetown.
1. Don’t assume that everyone in Ithaca is associated with Cornell; it really pisses off the locals.
2. Get on Jason’s good side. The guy who owns Jason’s on College Avenue is — surprise, surprise — Jason. He’s a stickler who prides himself on spotting fake ID’s. He staunchly refused to sell me a bottle of Frambroise and very nearly tore up my perfectly valid license, and I am 26!
3. The owner of the Palms is extremely particular about keeping the sidewalk in front of his establishment clear. DO NOT fight him on this point. He will win. Ask him how his evening is going; he’s actually a nice guy underneath his walkway fastidiousness.
Beyond that I have nothing, except what you’ve already heard: watch your drink at all times, use the buddy system and always practice safe sex.
You may wonder what makes me think I have the authority to give unsolicited advice. The truth is that I may very well be the oldest undergraduate on campus. I am a 26-year-old junior. The only cure to my feeling utterly pathetic about this fact is to pretend that I have acquired some knowledge of the world. My being older than the average student provides for countless awkward situations, mainly along the lines of undergraduates assuming that I am their T.A. Often, I carry on with the charade to see how long students will suck up to me before they realize I have no power over their GPA.
Usually, I try to see how long I can pass for a nineteen-year-old, but I’m usually “outed” within five minutes. I did manage to successfully conceal my identity as an older person in my Spanish class last spring. The truth came out midway through the term when I was asked, in Spanish, how long I had been driving. I responded, in Spanish, that I had been driving for ten years, at which point the entire class burst into laughter. I was then faced with the decision of looking a) stupid or b) old. I chose the latter and explained to the class, in broken Spanish, that I had indeed been driving for ten years. As any Cornellian should know, 16 plus 10 amounts to 26, and the class looked at me as if I had seven heads.
The reason for my late start in academia is that I spent seven years after high school employed as a professional ballerina. This brings me to the I-had-it-worse-than-you-when-I-was-eighteen section. When I left home, I immediately had my own apartment and was grappling with the world outside the ivory tower. I like to think that I was thrown out into the wide world and battled it with tenacity and stoicism, but the truth is that the ballet world was just as insular as university life.
Unlike most eighteen year-olds, I was not learning the fine nuances of college humor and beer-pong. I was dealing with the theater life, touring and artists’ temperaments. My experience was somewhere between the “reality” of Project Runway and The Apprentice. In fact, the young dancers in a ballet company are called “apprentices,” and they are, or at least I was, frequently fired.
My first year away from home I made the mistake of living with two other ballerinas. We had a cramped apartment on Buffalo Speedway, which was appropriate since we were living in Houston, Texas. My one roommate, Stephanie, was a sullen girl, who treated me as her personal valet. I cooked, cleaned and drove her to the Houston Ballet Academy where we were training six hours a day. The other girl, Julie, who looked like sex on a stick, was an exhibitionist and nymphomaniac. She was, however, monogamous – bless her heart. Both were avid Baptists and Bible study fanatics. Despite the disparity between Julie’s nightly activities and Sunday prayer, I accepted this situation as best I could. That was until the day when I found a list Julie had compiled of souls for which she should pray. Mine was at the top of her list.
This may or may not have been an accurate assessment of the state of my soul, but the hypocrisy of the situation drove me mad. I put my foot down. You see, Julie shared a room with Stephanie, so Julie had to have sex with her boyfriend in the living room. This was all very well, but it perturbed me to come out of my room in the mornings and have my toast and tea with the view of Julie’s mountainous breasts with her boyfriend, who was all of 5’2” and a hundred pounds, resting his q-tip head between her bare and enlarged mammary glands, as if they were a new type of earmuffs.
I found it odd that while she was “living in sin,” she felt the need to pray for my soul. I was, after all, a virgin at the time. So I told Julie she could only have sex on Mondays, Wednesdays and the weekends. I wanted my toast and tea in peace at least a couple mornings per week. I have since learned that chore charts and sex schedules never work out, so I have more or less lived alone since that time.
What evoked these strange memories of those days is the fact that I, once again, have an apartment on a street named Buffalo. It makes me wonder whether, in some imperceptible way, I have come full circle. My experiences have not been of a steady linear progression. Sometimes I must make many repetitions of the same mistake to learn its lesson. But I do not believe that life is entirely circular either — living on a street named Buffalo is merely a coincidence and hopefully not a sign that I have completely regressed to that which I was at eighteen. I do believe, however, that time and experience has a strange way of looping back on itself. Like the red stripe on a candy-cane, it loops around and around, and, as with wandering along a winding mountain road, you pass the places you’ve been before, but you see them from a greater and greater distance as you climb.
Claire Readhead is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be contacted at clr39@cornell.edu. Tarnishing the Tiara appears alternate Mondays.