Leaving Mojo: n. 1. an individual’s heightened ability to attract the opposite sex, or an individual’s general willingness to take romantic risks, due to his/her imminent departure from a town, city or region.
In the context of college, leaving mojo is that “last chance dance” mentality everyone gets right before graduation. There is a mad scramble to grasp at any shred of emotional or physical intimacy in an effort to deceive yourself into believing that you actually had a social life during college. The reality is that you spent most nights slogging away in Olin Library while neglecting your personal hygiene and subsequently your libido. (By “you” I really mean “me.” I like to write as if my experience is universal because it makes me feel important, less pathetic and less self-absorbed.)
Anyway, the onslaught of graduation festivities provides ample occasions when you can reveal those secret crushes, those long-harbored feelings and those repressed desires for your college crush. The reality is, if you really got to know your crush you would most likely find out that he is just as riddled with insecurities, bad habits and bad manners as everyone else.
Still, it is springtime and graduation is a wonderful excuse for that last frolic above Cayuga’s waters before leaving for (hopefully) greener pastures. Your momentous scholastic achievements imbue you with a surge of self-confidence and daring — you put yourself out there with reckless abandon to see if your college crush is really as fabulous as you have imagined. If you are successful in negotiating a liaison with your college crush you will discover that — surprise, surprise — he snores, doesn’t particularly like or respect you, drags mud into the house literally and metaphorically and is incapable of bringing meaning to your vacuous life: same story, vaguely different set of disappointments.
Nevertheless the impending graduation can sway you towards risky investments despite a logical cost-benefit analysis of love. Normally, the fear of months of humiliation and regret usually out-way the infinitesimally slight possibility that someone is truly fabulous, entertaining, trustworthy and good in bed. However, around graduation time, you think, “Ah well I will only suffer two weeks of humiliation and regret, after which I will be so stimulated by a new setting that I will forget my idiocy.” By my highly sophisticated method of reasoning (bolstered by months of studying for the LSAT) the benefits of the graduation fling outweigh its risks. Well, this is how my brain works; am I alone in this line of thinking?
Now, for where it gets tricky: who — from the vast and varied assortment of perfect men at Cornell — will you let into your life for the last five minutes of your college career? With whom will you share that intensely vulnerable, passionately illogical side of yourself? Finding a graduation fling is rather crucial because you want to have another pretty face in your grad photos. Imagine it — bleached teeth, perfectly coifed hair under that ridiculous hat, your pearls, the digitally enhanced too-green Arts Quad stretching behind you and by your side the beaming face of the male version of you. Fantastic!
But before you get too carried away with this idea, let me clarify a few elements of a graduation fling. Firstly, I hate to disappoint you, but your heightened feelings for this person may actually be a projection of your general anxiety about leaving the cloister of Cornell and facing the real world. Any teen magazine will advise a young man to take his date to a scary movie for the outside chance that the girl will confuse her media-induced racing heart for a sign of true feeling. Similarly, the overall panic of graduating may be stirring your insides — the stirring of which may feel somewhat similar to an electric egg-beater frothing your heart and/or other internal organs. That electric-egg-beater-on-heart feeling may sort of feel like love, but it’s not: I’m sorry to say, you’re just panicking.
But hey, for those of you who are emotionally guarded and petrified of intimacy, you can channel this feeling to trick yourself into liking your crush more and thereby may convince yourself that you are capable of emotion for a person other than yourself. (By the way, in the relationship category on Facebook I tried to put that I was in a relationship with myself — I like to represent myself accurately — but the Facebook application wouldn’t let me. I guess there isn’t room for irony in this cyber world. Sigh.). Leaving mojo can work all sorts of miracles: if you play your cards close to your chest, you may reveal your Royal Flush to someone. Or you can do what I did — emotionally vomit on some poor and unsuspecting scholar
You would think that as a generation texter I would have honed my leaving mojo. I have moved almost every year since I left home ten years ago. I have lived in a total of seven different cities — that is seven different apartments, seven fresh starts, seven opportunities to recreate myself, and seven times of skipping town with no good-byes. But the positive side is that I have had seven times to relish my leaving mojo. Every time I leave a city, suddenly men crawl out of the woodwork and want to date me (that is a total exaggeration, but I like to remember it that way.) Maybe I am more attractive because I am “not looking” (I fucking hate that. I mean who, with any sex drive whatsoever, stops looking?) Or maybe I am more attractive because the men know that they only have to put up with my domineering, overly demanding personality for a week.
I believe that I use my leaving mojo to narcissistically imprint my presence upon a place by forcibly searing my being upon someone else’s memory. The graduation fling is the erotic version of that sentimental urge to write on your dorm wall “I was here ’08.” It’s almost as if you can prove your own existence and solidify your own experience by spending some time, however short, with another human soul. You can suppress this urge to connect with others throughout your academic life — while your studying for the LSAT, applying to graduate school, writing your honors thesis, shooting for cum laude. But after swimming in the sea of your own ambition, you may have to come up for air and finally realize that no one is there.
Claire Readhead is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be contacted at creadhead@cornellsun.com [1]. Silk Blue Stockings appeared alternate Mondays this semester.
Links:
[1] mailto:creadhead@cornellsun.com