Unpublished "Fed" Mockery

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What I’m Trying to Say
By Fermina Daza

There are many different people on my floor. There are kids from California, Montana, New York, Vermont, New Jersey, Dakotas and Carolinas North and South, and even Southern California. We have different interests and backgrounds, hopes, dreams, tastes (even though at night we do most of our tasting at JJ’s, hah), and even plans. Some of us have boyfriends (like me) and some don’t, some of us love reading Woolfe while sitting under a tree in the quad, marveling at her use of stream of consciousness, at her ability to not give so many fucking examples, perhaps even eating an apple (like in Genesis, remember?) and some of us don’t. So maybe what I’m trying to say is not so much that there are many, but that there are a myriad of different people on my floor. It’s kind of like New York. Beyond the lime-roofed, cloistered, ivy walls; beyond the bubble, one that is ready to burst with vigor and energy, one that wakes up to each new morning with a fresh face saying “I’m ready!” in a way that Thucydides might have, is a world far different from that of campus. New York is full of different people. Not a myriad, perhaps, but rather a plethora; indeed, a veritable bevy.

New York is like a handbag. You can open it up and a million different things are inside, and they’re all different. Sometimes they’re unorganized and you have to find what you’re looking for, but once in a while you’ve just got to take a deep breath, close your eyes and take what you get, like in life, or the housing lottery (Oh my!). Sometimes you have a zipper that closes everything up quickly and sometimes you have those little buckles, where you have to do one at a time, and it takes a while. Sometimes it’s small and has the same letter all over it and sometimes it’s larger and has many different letters in it (like Don Quixote!) but you sport it all the same, because, for better or worse, you’re a New Yorker.

Maybe what I’m trying to say is that it feels like only yesterday that we were freshmen, overwhelmed by the sheer size of Low, smelling the smells of campus, meeting other kids who for the first time also liked Mozart, and Brahms, and Paganini, and Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich, and Bach, and even 50 Cent (haha), and knew it took being a Columbia student from some suburban town in New Jersey to truly understand what it is to be a New Yorker.

But you just can’t just live in New York, you have to live New York. In a city full of opportunities it’s almost our obligation to get out of campus, to enter the ironic darkness of the subway tunnels in a city that never sleeps. I almost feel sorry for students who feel the need to stay in their rooms drinking, instead of going out with their boyfriends and absorbing all that New York is. Maybe what I’m trying to say is that Winston Churchill once said: “I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly” (hah! Isn’t that funny?) which is the perfect example of the vices that inebriation, intoxication, and even drunkenness can force people to engage in.

There are opportunities abound at college, rather than engage in harmful, idiotic activities such as doing marijuana, heroin, and cigarettes. In the end, maybe what I’m trying to say in an overly verbose and circuitous manner is that sometimes I start thinking about school, and my friends, and life, and my family and I sit on the floor and start crying.