This will hopefully go down as my first attempt at the pseudo-autobiographical novella. That means there will be many attempts to re-write this book and my life.
One of the first things I did when I got off the plane was procure a phone – a cute off-the-cereal-box model that would allow people to reach me. I didn’t know any better and got a Sprint phone and got limited texting and no data plan. This, along with the fact that smaller, thinner towels work better than the big, luxurious ones I craved. (That last bit turn out to be entirely pragmatic – the thing, smaller towels dry faster and are less prone to smell of humidity)
The phone was to be my landline to America. For my parents and friends back home I had MSN messenger and Skype. The former I would learn was a relic of times never had in the U.S. where people preferred the then outdated AIM messenger. I tried convincing them that the rest of the world used MSN and hotmail. That AOL and Yahoo were a thing for those who weren’t in the know. That Hotmail was known as hucchimail in Brazil and that it had proven to be effective in keeping me in touch with my summer friends from Europe and South America long before facebook ever became a thing.
So I was limited to calling my parents via VOIP on Skype and the occasional splurge – calling them from my cell phone. My friends and I emailed, email still. We often chatted at night. It is a matter of time however before you start letting go of those late night text-driven conversation in favor of going out with your new friends.
For the first time ever I was exposed to 2500 new individuals pre-selected for the interesting qualities or incredible smarts or both or something I’d never even heard of. I was no longer a slave to having gone to the same school for 12 years with the same 75 people.
The friends I keep – Sarah, Ingrid, Sergio, Carlos and Odette – those were just happy coincidences of faith. All of them were happy souls that happened to find as many smiles with me as I did with them.
But I had the potential to meet new people.
To do things I’d never done before like go to my first BYO, eat a cheese steak or go to a Frat party. Wait around, feigning interest, around a keg until I could get my hands on that nozzle and pour myself a cup of Beast or Fratty Light.
I tried to understand things like the three-point stance, the idea that a guy and a girl could both be texting while trying to meld together on the dance floor. How two guys would sandwich a girl and both ignore the fact that they were using a warm body between them as the only line between straight and no-homo. The way people moved between parties at nights – migrating in packs, flocking on the streets like birds – from one crowded party to the next, was worthy of an anthropological study and something I might still consider looking into.
I’ve learned about the hook-up culture. I’ve learned that here you make-out with someone. You do this a couple of times and you might be bumped into regular booty call. If you perform well you can move into a thing. No complications (or so the theory goes), just having fun, crazy kids in college doing their thing. Then maybe you get asked to a formal or a date party and that pushes things up a notch. It might be time to have the conversation. And the conversation is had, no formal date in the traditional archetype yet. No dinner and a movie, no formal way of asking her to be your girlfriend. Simply a let’s be exclusive talk. And you hope she’s on the pill and your RA is stocked.
I pledge a fraternity and though I will discuss that later I will say this now: it was one of the best things I ever did. My frame of reference was based around movies like Animal House and American Pie. To compare my fraternity to movies like Band of Brothers or the story in Atonement would be a stretch. But I learned a fair amount about the human condition and the capacity for good and evil in unexpected places.
Learned that the best time to do laundry is 3 am on a Monday morning and that the conversations had there can lead to everything from a dinner at a Japanese sushi bar to discovering that the three-in-one sheets are much easier to handle than bulky bottles of detergent. You can never have too many quarters.
In short I’ve learned a lot, I think. And I haven’t even begun to discuss the things that happened in the classroom where the learning was supposed to happen..
But that has been lost to all but a few of my friends. My parents, as much as I love them, have a skewed version of what my life is here. It’s not that I meant it to be that way, it’s just that it happened.
Most college kids live in fear of their parents finding out that they drink or smoke in college. Reputations change from nerdy girl with the cute classes to smart girl, make-out slut. No longer the smart-kid in the football team. Simply jock.
That wasn’t my case. I knew I wouldn’t be a big fish here that I’d struggle to be more than a canned sardine tossed into an ocean of North Eastern and Californian prep-schoolers. I just wanted to tell them about my life here. And I wanted to tell my friends.
But nobody had a reference point. Most kids I grew up with stayed in school in Mexico like I almost did. You go to school in the same city, you live with your parents until you’ve gotten some sort of promotion and then maybe you marry the girl you’ve been seeing for 4 years. And you do this by formally going to ask for her hand in marriage before you propose. You go out with the same friends you did in high school, to the same clubs and bars. It’s a tightly knit community that easily forgets outsiders but welcomes those ready to not change the order of things. You belong to the same country club your parents did.
If I had to, I would describe it as an interesting place where the aristocracy of the American South meets the back-roads of middle of nowhere Mid-West – combining these stereotypes leads to my city.
There are no college dorms. No frats. No international body of students and professors.
So how was I supposed to describe a picture or a color to those who couldn’t see? Who at best would see a hung-over version of me on a weekend visit. Phone calls and chat screens do very little in the way of providing understanding. That’s why video chat was invented, and even then, it was limited to the back of my room as the camera framed my face well with a bookcase and a fridge in the background.
Details went by the wayside. My friends here often didn’t even have names because the English versions of them would go in one ear with people at home, and out the other. My stories seemed petty and inconsequential at times, especially in the later years where the violence became widespread and everyone had heard of Ciudad Juarez and nobody was going to “Pulco” for Spring Break. The idea of doing an “Econ Scream” (Penn’s tradition before the first economics midterm of first semester in which midnight is marked by a vociferous and collective scream supposed to vent out frustration and stress though really it’s just another opportunity for free food) has little worth in people who can’t even begin to comprehend the stress. Who still worry about the cliques and groups they never rose above of in high school.
So the truth as I am about to depict it is a new truth for those who knew and know me.
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