On the way to a bar the other night, my friends and I decided to play one of our favorite games: the spit chain.
For those of you unaware, this is an activity for very bored or very drunk people in which you try to connect everyone in your room/apartment/life by the people you’ve hooked up with. It’s kind of like the game six degrees of Kevin Bacon, only without Kevin Bacon.
These chains can get very complicated — and when they are done, they are generally pure works of art. If you’ve never seen one, by the way, there’s probably a reason for this. Like Enron documents, they tend to get destroyed immediately after use. And like masturbation, it’s generally something most girls won’t admit to doing.
This particular game did not take much time. Our car was rather incestuous — most of us were connected by two or fewer people. And within a matter of minutes, we were able to connect everyone. My friends were thrilled; I was depressed. Is this what hooking up has come to?
Apparently.
Northwestern is a small school, made smaller by the fact that we tend to hook up with the same few people. It’s like the show “Trading Spaces” — only instead of trading rooms, we trade partners. The rend has made things simpler; now with one phone call — sometimes two — you can find out a person’s complete dating resume; who they’ve hooked up with, how long it lasted, any weird quirks they might have had and the names of at least two references or referrals. But random hook-ups, if they ever really existed here, seem to have gone the way of Ricky Martin — they’ve disappeared from public view.
I have a friend who set out one night to defy this theory. It seemed at first that she would succeed — the boy she picked was a junior, she was a senior. He wasn’t even in the extended group of her extended group. If she was Colorado, then he was New Jersey — that was about the proximity of their geographical closeness in terms of friendship.
But the next morning, when she told her friends about it, the connections started emerging. “He lived down the hall from me sophomore year.”, “Oh, he hooked up with x and x.”, “I was his resident assistant freshman year.”
She pretty much gave up after that.
The problem with all of this interconnectedness is that things get relayed back. One guy tried to pick up my roommate on Gone Greek Night last year, using the cheesy pick-up line, “How does the most beautiful girl in the room not have a flower?” When this failed to move her, the boy simply recycled the line on the next girl. She called him on it, but apparently it did not deter her too much. She hooked up with him, only to have her friend call the next day, “How could you hook up with that guy? He’s the sketchiest boy ever.”
Connections like these do not just exist within the NU community. They extend outward, like radiants. On Spring Break, a friend started hooking up with some random guy, only to find out later that the boy was not at all random. In fact, the boy turned out to be “great” friends with a sorority sister of hers. The boy thought this was great. The friend thought this was great. The girl, on the other hand, still fails to see any of this supposed greatness.
Another friend started corresponding with a guy via e-mail. The two of them found they had lots in common — including a shared history with my friend’s ex-girlfriend. The e-mailing stopped after that, but my friend can take solace in the fact that he and this boy are now perpetually linked, making the spit chain one loop longer.
