"SO, WHERE are you living this year?" my friends asked me excitedly when I passed them for the first time on Grounds this fall.
"Uh, Brown College," I muttered under my breath, bracing myself for the inevitable.
"Ohhhhh ... cool," they replied, backing away slowly.
"Hey! Don't judge me!" I squealed as they ran in the opposite direction.
While the frat boys I know boast that they're "living in a house on JPA with five dudes" and a lot of girls I know are living "on 14th street behind the Corner," I have the privilege of pointing to my room as I tell people where it is. This may be the only advantage of living in Brown College.
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I'm not here to beg on behalf of Brown and unabashedly praise its virtues. The truth is that stereotypes come from somewhere and it really is a weird place to live. It's analogous to what I imagined it would have been like to live with my high school marching band. But despite the defensive, mocking edge it puts me on, I can already see the marking of what will be an unusual and satisfying living experience.
Before I arrived here, I'd heard about the going-ons in Brown College and I wasn't too happy about them. I had heard about the boy who played African drums in the tunnels. As if those dim, neon-lit, Clorox-scented halls weren't creepy enough already. I'd heard about the parties in the bathrooms since there was no other place to hang out. The first week we were here, I heard about a group of kids who were busy running around to the first years' rooms with a disco ball and a flashlight. The plan was to knock on the innocent child's door, squeeze 30 people into his room, turn off the lights, turn on the disco ball and some music and start dancing around. Hopefully, the kid would wet his pants and the revelers would then leave, satisfied.
I didn't understand what the Brown residents were doing. Did they feel like they had to prove something? Did they feel defensive like I did, but translate it into aggressively odd behavior rather than tone it down? Why couldn't they just be normal?
"My roommate likes Star Wars," my friend said to me one day.
"That's okay," I said. "That's not like, 'A Brown thing.'"
"No -- he likes it a lot ," my friend repeated more urgently, making me wonder if his roommate slept in Darth Vader pajamas and clutched a Yoda doll at night.
At first I thought that there was a uniform genre of people who lived here, making Brown as homogenous as the rest of the school is criticized to be, but on the opposite end of the spectrum. From what I gathered, they were Declaration-reading, UTS-Bus-driving, WTJU-radio-listening drama majors. I was disappointed by what I thought was a lack of variety and instead an array of people who shared the same, if somewhat eclectic, interests.
I soon realized that there were plenty of people like me and my roommate -- students who simply wanted convenient on-campus housing and who did wear some suspiciously Gap-like attire. Students who went to the Comm School and were on the Honor Committee and weren't afraid to be persecuted for their "mainstream" interests, a perspective that I thought was shunned here in this haven of quirks and odd tastes.
I am now realizing that Brown is not really a place where you'll find "Bush for President stickers" or posters that celebrate the 200 types of American beer. On the other hand, it isn't a place where people hold hands in a circle and chant as they sport black leotards and beanies. It is simply a cross in between and is just somewhat more tilted to the left. While at first it irritated me that residents were always trying to play the part of "the weird Brown kids" and ham themselves up as if to impress people, I am coming to appreciate the unusual array of bright, talented, extremely friendly students Brown has to offer. And for the most part I would argue that they are normal.
"I think if I could be any type of nut, I'd be a pistachio. Because I like that it's red," I overheard someone say as I walked past them in the Brown dining area.
Well, almost normal.
(Diya Gullapalli is a Cavalier Daily associate editor.)
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