I wasn’t well-versed in the strange dance of the “awkward moment” until I came to Northwestern. Before I came here for college, the term “awkward turtle” would have made as much sense to me as Neutral Milk Hotel lyrics. Like everyone else, though, I had to learn this subtle art the hard way.
We all know how it goes by now. First comes the unintentional eye contact (the trap), then the strained hellos that lead to several painfully polite minutes of conversation. While we do our best to hold a smile and come up with more tediously innocuous topics to make unfunny jokes over, we can’t help but think of the usual questions over and over again: “How could I have been so wasted that night?” “Why did I leave like that?” “Why haven’t we hung out in so long?” Etc.
This behavior never made any sense to me. I had half-hoped NU would be more like my home, New Orleans. The Big Easy really feels more like a small town than a city. I’m perfectly accustomed to hearing someone call out my name from across the street, and it’s not odd for a perfect stranger to start up a short conversation with me in an elevator. I once even watched my mother pray for the family of someone she had never met before in the middle of a shoe store. No one in the store so much as batted an eyelash in astonishment. In New Orleans, there’s nothing to be awkward about because no one has any reason to be defensive. We’re all family.
NU seems to take its social cues from Chicago. The City of Broad Shoulders is rooted in neighborhood fealty, but it has a cold, gritty exterior that it’s reluctant to shed. People here simply can’t afford to let their guard down. Everyone keeps their heads down and their mouths shut. Cities of Chi-town’s largess just aren’t conducive to typical human interaction. In megacities like these, people’s time is a commodity, and if you can’t pay up then you’re simply not worth their time.
Blaming NU’s social awkwardness entirely on Chicago, though, is completely unfair. Most people who attend this University were probably a lot like me in high school, all work and no play. We kept our noses to the grindstone, shirking all the typical high school shenanigans that groom us for a healthy social life when we turn that corner into young adulthood. The result is a school filled with Type-A personalities who don’t know how to get over themselves.
No matter what our transcripts say, we can’t be perfect all the time. We will make dumb – often inebriated – decisions that seemed like good ideas at the time, and we will lose touch with people as we fall further into ourselves. That’s the way life is supposed to work when you’re young, and we need to enjoy it while we still have the luxury of recovering from it in the morning.
Please, NU, stop being ashamed of acting your age.
Medill junior Carlton Barzon can be reached at [email protected].
