The Annoying Ordeal of Being Known

By: HELP!

It’s a beautiful time of year at good ol’ Susquehanna University as spring finally rears its lovely head after a long, harsh winter. Sunshine and rising temperatures mean spending more time outside of your dorm, which in turn means one thing and one thing only: being forced to see all your campus enemies on a day-to-day basis. When you sign up to go to a school with a smaller class size you’re like, this’ll be fine! I’ll make friends and all my friends will be friends and it’ll be so much fun! No admissions tour guide ever warns you about the dangers of having a limited number of people in a very limited amount of space. This campus is way too fucking small, and every one of us suffers for it every single day. 

You can’t take two steps in this place without seeing an ex friend, an ex partner, that person from that one class you had that kept raising their hand and going “to play devil’s advocate,” that guy that once catcalled you from his car, the girl who you know way too much about through departmental gossip—the list is literally endless. 

Tell me why I once went on a date with a man and then while we were hanging out in his dorm and he was telling me in a very panicked tone how much he loved Joe Biden (this followed him learning I am bisexual, despite me having made that very clear from the get-go) his roommate walked in and I, like a fool, thought maybe the disruption would offer some reprieve from this cartoonish fumbling, only to turn around and discover his roommate was a man who lived in my building the year prior and had slid into my dm’s to offer me the driest, most boring conversation I’ve ever had in my life. I cannot emphasize enough how badly we need more students at this hellish nightmare of a school (and build more housing for them please for the love of god). We also maybe need to kill all men, but I guess that’s a separate issue.

Every trip to the dining hall here feels like entering a battlefield with active mines under your feet, set and ready to detonate if you take a single wrong step. And ‘wrong’ doesn’t even really have to mean that you did something bad, sometimes it just means you turned your head and all the sudden were faced with the view of that old roommate of yours that, if given the chance, you would happily punch in the face. 

If we’re being honest, some people here are way too bold considering how small of a community this is. I know things about people who I’ve never spoken to that you could not torture out of me, purely because someone I know heard it from someone they know because literally everyone knows each other. 

Anyway, all this to say: if you’re one of my enemies on campus, can we all agree on a location and time and just meet up to finally settle this? Last one alive gets the gorgeous prize of finally walking around campus feeling safe from sneak attacks…Until probably like one week later when they’ve made a new enemy and have to see them every goddamn day.