SHANFIELD: BU is the real deal

In middle school, we are introduced to the idea of a person being ‘fake.’ The summer between elementary school and middle school causes some people to mysteriously change ‘- either grow boobs or obtain a deeper voice ‘- and thus receive the label of being ‘fake.’ Perhaps they ditch the values they had in fifth grade or shun their friends who aren’t allowed to shave their legs yet. Nevertheless, being ‘fake’ is the worst thing you can be at 13.’

I never really knew what ‘fake’ meant. It seemed to be given to the girls who were dishing out the labels themselves. Still, I got the idea that judging people behind their backs made one very unlikable on the cool kid benches. I watched a notoriously ‘fake’ girl in my gym class wash her hair with shampoo that had been replaced with Nair by girls who felt that she deserved to be taught a lesson. Whether she learned her lesson to not be fake, I don’t know. Her hair fell out in chunks all over the floor, so I assume some knowledge was gained. Now she probably always smells her shampoo before she uses it, and if it smells like the poisonous wafts of hair-thinner farts, I’m guessing she opts out of a hair wash that day.

In middle school, I had braces and bushy eyebrows. Awkwardly tall and starved for attention, I was often asked to leave the classroom for too many instances of talking out of turn. I was consistently in trouble at after-school dances because I was grinding to Usher songs with people of the opposite sex.

Being weird deterred me from my biggest fear: being labeled fake. I dressed in bright, ironic clothing bought at Hot Topic. I noticed that all the ‘fake’ people were also pretty, so to ensure that no one would be jealous of my radiance, I uglied myself up to prevent all the boys from falling in love with me and offering to be my slaves.

Eventually, I figured out that ‘fake’ just meant that you had a blabbermouth, which I had and could not get rid of. I adapted to this situation. These were the seeds of me becoming a journalist.

I learned that it was much more likeable to tell people how you feel about issues, objects, ideas, right to their face. Tears have been shed, but it would be a crime to let my sister walk out of the house when she looks like a bat in that dress, and I’m not going to sit and pretend I like my mom’s cooking when the chicken tastes like it was anorexic. Some say I’m a bitch; I say it’s being honest.

This idea of ‘fake’ is a manifestation that as 13-year-olds we now know how to be a judge of people, places and things in our lives. We are finally old enough to look at a person and label them as ‘jock,’ ‘nerd’ or ‘slut.’ These are labels that come from the judgment of that individual’s actions, and as kids in middle school, we feel that we are grown up enough to assign those labels.

Hopefully we know better now, and we still judge, just with caution. How much time has to pass after knowing someone or experiencing something that we can judge it in its entirety?

I thought of this when Elizabeth Gilbert’s book ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ came out and made its way into the hands of millions of Cosmo-loving women aged 14 to ancient. The book is about a newly divorced woman on a personal quest for some sort of fulfillment as she travels to three different countries. She eats in Italy, prays in India and loves Indonesia. I think she probably gets fat along the way, but there was no mention of that.

I never read the book. I didn’t want people on the T to think I was some sad girl who couldn’t keep a man; I want to wait for people to get to know me to figure that out. But I found Gilbert’s tactic to be a labeling process that was rather junior high. She was assigning a label to three places and trips that were monumental and indescribable. She couldn’t possibly have had enough time to gain the perspective that those trips will have on the rest of her life.

I now feel compelled to label the years I spent at Boston University as Gilbert did in ‘Eat, Pray Love.’ Eventually, I’ll be able to label senior year, but it’s not over yet.

My first semester freshman year went by in a whirl of booze and party tops. My friends and I spent the first few weeks of the school year partying at Rumor because we knew a club promoter who could get us in. We were too young to realize that there were lots of 18-year-old club promoters in Boston, most of whom were dealing cocaine by the age of 19. A night of debauchery at Tantric took a turn when police entered and shut the place down for selling alcohol to minors (mainly me), and so we stopped clubbing.

Like most freshmen, I made best friends that I didn’t speak to after they got a boyfriend or got weird, etc. Dramatic events were spurred by Facebook wall posts and messages written on dry-erase boards. Life was beautiful.

My second semester introduced my first non-CGS classes, a shocking discovery that there were other students at the school not as beautiful and tan as those who took their education at 871 Commonwealth Avenue.

In my sophomore year, I really wanted to be the girl from ‘Planet of the Apes’ for Halloween due to a Charlton Heston obsession. I bought 3 yards of fake fur and cut it into a fur bikini. It was held together with safety pins and Elmer’s Glue. When I woke up the next morning I was cuddling a giant stick with a plastic red cup tied to the end with twine. Sometimes, I wonder if it was even Halloween, or just a normal Tuesday in October that I decided to wear a fur bikini around Allston.’

Junior year, I decided to be productive and get ready for the job I would have to get very soon. I stopped waking up in my closet and telling my professors that I was late to class because I was hit by the T. I got rid of all the useless things in my life, like my collection of oversized hats and certain men. I got internships, part time jobs at places on campus where I could sit and do nothing but reap money from BU, and I cut down to two Spike’s Junkyard Dogs hot dogs a week.

It was junior year that Boston became a home to me. I finally began to look at the city as a place that was mine to live and grow in rather than some sort of summer camp that I attended in the wrong seasons. I developed a feeling of comfort that is making it so hard to leave Boston now.

If I had to label these three years like Gilbert did, I would say my college experience was ‘party, party and party while getting paid by BU.’ Senior year will be something like ‘party harder because I’m entering a jobless economy.’

On the last day of freshman year, my best friend Daria and I walked the halls of 7B, said goodbye to Julie in the last room and Jen in the single. We awkwardly waved at the two sophomores we never got to know. It felt like the end of camp.

Was it over? All of us were packing up to go elsewhere and leave freshman year in the dust. Wasn’t there something more to it? Finals were over, and since Warren was kicking us out, the fun times had to be over, too. It was as if we had other lives that we were supposed to be living that year. BU was just something fun we were doing while our other, real life, waited. We were just playing for a while.

As all of us wait in line at Barnes and Noble for our cap and gown, we ask each other, ‘What are you doing after graduation?’ not, ‘What’s going on in your life?’ We see graduation as a deadline, when we will go back to that other life we lead before we entered this farce called college. Much like Warren gave us a day that we had to move out, BU gives us a day that we have to give up everything we’ve amassed since Sept. 2005. It’s over, the memories were good and now we move on.

The comfort I felt in my junior year came because I finally felt that Boston was my home, and California was just a nice place to visit. I never realized that after graduation day, the city would no longer be mine, but just a place I went to school.

I don’t want to judge my time here at BU and give it a label, because then it didn’t mean anything, it was just something I did and is now over, not something I lived. I find it so hard to accept that the life I’ve built for four years is going to end on some day with crappy weather in May.

But, like the girl who washed her hair with Nair, I have so many lessons to keep with me. Physically, I may be leaving Boston behind, but those four years weren’t wasted. I can take my memories and my fur bikini with me.