Placing the Blame for Tension

SUNDAY night, after studying four hours for my biology exam, after writing several pages of a social studies paper and after outlining three more essays for another take-home final, I noticed something.

I was tense. Not just tense in any ordinary "I have to go to the bathroom now" sense. I mean major-league tense. I mean I printed out at least 24 different title pages to my essay before I was satisfied. I mean I detailed my Monday study plan down to every five minutes. And then, I suddenly felt a driving compulsion to take a bite out of my biology lab manual.

At this point, I noticed I was tense. And I began to wonder: why am I tense? Is it my fault that I'm tense? Am I always this tense?

And I just got tenser. But now, with my biology final over and my social studies paper handed in, I have allotted 25 minutes to ponder this predicament. And I've reached a conclusion: it's not my fault; and if you're tense, it's not your fault either.

It's Derek Bok's fault. Wasn't it Michael Dukakis who said about the Reagan administration's drug policy, "A fish rots from the head down"? Well, if this college is tense, then it must all start in Massachusetts Hall.

Corporation meetings are tense. Faculty meetings are tense. Overseers meetings are tense. Only Undergraduate Council meetings are funny.

When was the last time Derek Bok got up in a local Cambridge restaurant and yelled to cheering college students. "Yale Sucks!"? For that matter, when did he ever go to a local restaurant? (When, outside of hockey games, do Harvard students cheer?)

Benno Schmidt isn't tense. He can pitifully attempt to compensate for his incompetence as an administrator by screaming anti-Harvard slurs in a greasy pizza place renowned for selling alcohol to minors. As a consequence, Yale isn't tense. Just ask my friend David at Yale, who is quite relaxed. (He's also done with finals...)

But as much as some of us would like it to be so, its not all Derek Bok's fault. Some of the blame must lie with the admissions committee, which admitted a group of students commonly known as "grinds."

During the semester, we laugh at grinds, as in "Ha! Ha! We're having a great time throwing snowballs but look at the grinds marching to Lamont to study for their hourlies in three weeks!"

Come reading period, everyone stops laughing. Grinds' outrageous study habits serve to shame the rest of us who have barely cracked open our postmidterm reading. I ran into a friend in Lamont last weekend who had meticulously prepared 20 (count-em, 20) biology review pages in four colors. This did not make me laugh. This made me tense.

I also believe OCS deserves some blame of its own. Just in case our own fear of making a poor grade isn't enough, we are perpetually reminded that graduate schools and personnel departments across the globe are just waiting to scornfully shove our tainted applications into an incinerator.

In fact, it is OCS's fault that I will probably get tense about calling the President of Yale University "incompetent" a few paragraphs ago. My application to Yale Medical School is still pending.

I blame Bobby McFerrin for his stupid song that everyone quotes when telling me to be less tense. I'm worrying; I'm not happy; thank you very much. I blame post-thesis seniors who try to out-do one another explaining how relaxed they are. And I blame my parents, who have given me both the genetic and environmental predisposition to get extremely, extremely tense.

The important thing about tenseness is not to get more tense by blaming yourself. Blame Derek Bok. Blame OCS. Blame the person you have been interested in, but who hasn't called you back for the past three months. Blame your parents. If you don't feel comfortable doing that, blame my parents.

It would be a crime if I didn't mention my favorite tense joke at this point: "A man dreams one night about being a teepee. The next night he dreams he is a wigwam. The next night, he's a a teepee again. The next night, wigwam. Teepee. Wigwam. Teepee. Wigwam. The psychiatrist says 'I know your problem--you're too tense.'"

Get it? Too tense? Two tents? I'd love to tell a few more knee-slappers like that one in order to further reduce the astronomically high levels of tension on this campus, but I can't. My 25 minutes are up.