There's a fly in my Creme Bruleé

Author: Katie Hylas

Anonymity is absent from our college campus. With 2,400 students, it's almost impossible to go a day without seeing an abundance of familiar faces. This usually positive feature, however, often proves to be logistically and emotionally awkward for all of us.

We all pass scores of people we really should acknowledge around campus everyday - maybe we've been in a class with them, lived on their hall freshman year, worked on a group project with them or encountered them in the matchless mayhem of McCullough's dance floor. The proportions don't work in our favor here - if we chose to say hello to everyone we know in between classes we would be faced with a medical problem. By the time we got to class our throats would be parched, our brains would be fried and we would just be plain annoyed (we might also be forced to remember our weekend antics). What a rash waste of energy!

The small numbers especially come back to haunt us if we would like to forget our rough weekends. College is the time in which you can get away with being silly and stupid. Here at Middlebury, that attitude definitely prevails - it's just that those things that you do end up coming back to haunt you as you pass everyone you were an idiot in front of last Friday on the way to Modern Logic class.

The solution for Middlebury students at large seems to be ignoring or barely acknowledging each other. There are a few distinct tactics we MiddKids resort to in order to avoid wasting time talking to each other. We pretend to be absorbed in reading, in talking to someone else or just daydreaming. There is also the half-smile, the partial but ambiguous head nod and the most offensive of all - the look-straight-at-the-person and say nothing.

I can't figure out what this phenomenon says about us. Come on, when you're standing in line to put your tray away in the dining hall next to someone you shared a bathroom with last year and they don't say hello to you - that's pretty darn awkward. It makes me want to scream, "Hey! You can't ignore someone who definitely heard you pee three to four times a week!"

Selectively overlooking each other might just cause more stress than saying hello would. Think about it - when we see someone we don't want to be bothered with we start plotting our avoidance tactics yards in advance, trying to figure out which approach is best for the situation and wondering if we can even get away with it. It's certainly awkward when one person goes for the greeting and the other clearly can't be bothered. It makes for very strange inner dialogues, "I totally nodded my head at her… did she just ignore me? Maybe she didn't see me - impossible. Maybe she was just tired… or maybe what I thought was a nod just looked like a weird neck contortion to her. Oh sigh."

Maybe we're all just really lazy. Or maybe we're looking to create the fiction that students at Middlebury College can be anonymous. Either way, it's pretty weird.