We are obsessed. We are completely consumed. There is a force within and around us which is unconsciously propelling everything we do. We cannot stop naming.
What's in a name? A person, a place, a characterization of something at once familiar and also alien. Grounds. First years. Fifth years. The Corner. 14th. Rugby. Bars. Library. "Doing work." "I have a lot of work." "Going to crush this work." "Going out." "Preeg, then bars." "Totally blackout." "We hooked up." "Gonna pass out."
Sound familiar? And at once also alien. I don't know what "preeg" means. That's because we (well, a lot of us) cannot escape the allure of broad generalizations, surface explanations, names upon names upon names. What is in a name? Why say "I'm doing work" as opposed to "I'm studying for my history exam and then outlining my religion paper"? Why go to "bars" instead of "The Virginian"? Why, if we're being honest with ourselves, are we "hooking up" instead of supplying more accurate/ lurid details?
There are a lot of reasons to give something a name. I'm Mary Scott because I am not Mary and I am not my sister and please note I am also not Mary Queen of Scots. You are you because your name encompasses all it is that makes one person distinct from any other person. Pretty simple. A name establishes a person, a place, a thing. It is up to whatever is being named to figure out who or what it is they want to be. A name is an indicator. So what exactly are we indicating?
I understand the tradition of Grounds, of being a "first year" instead of a "freshman." The Corner has been around a while and it may be tedious to enumerate all the restaurants/stores/trolley stops in place of this all-encompassing name. But I'm not so sure I understand our other traditions.
We usually assign names to things for reasons of specificity; a Lexus is a car but is a different car than a Volvo. But in the kind of naming we're doing, specificity is the opposite of what we are accomplishing. We are sweeping over all the key details of our daily lives. Some may argue that the devil is in the details. But, I would like to think, fear to think, that maybe the devil has chosen a new place to reside.
No one wants to lay out all the mundane details of their days. We do not want to be associated with boredom, stress, hunger or fatigue. We want to be the chipper, storied, inexhaustible creatures who have to crush some work before they leave the nameless library to hit up a house party on 14th before heading to bars and maybe late-nighting. We want to be enigmas. We want, we need more than anything, to maintain the appearance of someone who hasn't a care in the world.
The paradox in trying to be an enigma is that "trying." If everyone is in agreement that "bars" probably means going to whatever bar is having a DJ that night or whatever bar you usually go to or whichever bar your "hook-up" is going to, then the whole mystery thing kind of goes out the window. Why are we so afraid to spell things out? Why do we feel compelled to create phrases that, taken out of the context of U.Va., mean absolutely nothing? Who in the real world says they're "going out" in response to a friend's text "what are you doing tonight?" Where exactly are they going?
No one, myself included, wants to think that his life could be littered with normalities. "Rugby" is so much more intriguing than "Ruffner Hall." We give non-descript names to everything around us because probably everything we are doing is not thrilling, storied, "cool." Sometimes I eat a crumbling pita sandwich on my way to class because I don't really have any groceries and my sleeping habits don't allow for a sit-down lunch before my 2 o'clock. What kind of name do I give to that?
So why does it matter? What's so wrong with having a catchy, albeit entirely vague, name for the things and places we encounter as we move through our college years? Nothing! I will continue to do work and go out and stay up. There is something wrong, though, with forgetting. If we give weight to all of the things we've named, and nothing else, then we forget the mundane normalities which litter our daily lives. When we try so desperately to be carefree (but still super successful!) enigmas, we start to forget to be people.
There's something robotic and entirely the same in every student who uses every one of the same phrases. And yet the unifying vagueness we all bask in distinguishes us from every other community. How do we reconcile this mass generalization with a distinguishably "U.Va." identity? Maybe we'll learn when we graduate. Maybe one day "doing work" will no longer suffice for the actual work done in a real office, a real cubicle, a real world. Maybe we'll start naming all the details of our lives so that we begin to see that "walking to class" defines us just as much as "going to bars." Maybe we'll stop trying to be enigmas and bask in the naming of the mundane.
Mary Scott's column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at m.hardaway@cavalierdaily.com.
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