No. 8: THE BELL LAP: We Have Each Other

The first night of our Harvard lives, we didn’t drink any beers. We didn’t go to any sweet parties. We didn’t hook up with any hot chicks, nor did we see any.

Worse, we weren’t yet registered on the FAS Network, so we couldn’t even look at any pornography.

Instead, we jostled with hordes of eager beavers for some melted ice cream and then sat around an unfurnished Canaday common room with 20 of the nation’s “best and brightest.” Needless to say, they turned out to be the nation’s lamest and most boring.

“Guys!” exclaimed one kid who may or may not have been Catizone. “We’re at Harvard! Just think about that. Everyone here has something different to offer. Everyone brings something different to the table. Imagine the unreal things that are going to happen when we put all of that together.”

These star-struck, amateur ramblings guaranteed that he would never juice any of the girls present in the room that night, but c’est la vie. Meanwhile, Schonberger squirmed uncomfortably in the corner, dreaming of keg stands while wondering if he could reach the road from the fourth floor window.

Little did either of us know that our dreams would soon reveal themselves to be merely a deceptively hot bosom beneath a corset, like the one Lil’ Kim wore in the “Lady Marmalade” video. Beneath the idealistic veneer were the fat, naked breasts of truth, ready to bust out and stifle anyone foolish enough to be tricked by the façade. Thus, we quickly realized that these proverbial breasts couldn’t possibly live up to real boobs on the Internet.

Harvard, it turned out, was not what either of us thought it would be. It wasn’t the place where you could grapple with the maxims of ancient philosophy in a room where the Magna Carta was signed (Catizone’s dream breast). And it wasn’t the place where people skipped school for three weeks at a time to play Madden and ingest horse tranquilizers (Schonberger’s dream breast).

But as these extremes of optimism gradually faded into the dull grind of Harvard life, they—and we—began to fade into each other. It was as if we had switched breasts. Catizone started drinking Busch Lights. Schonberger started spending most of his waking hours in Lamont, blogging and watching music videos in the Language Resource Center. Like “Joey from ‘Friends’” [1] and that chimp in the movie “Ed” (perhaps one of the greatest sports films of all time), we began to merge into one another.

We realized that Harvard is not that fun, and it is not that intellectually stimulating, but amidst these broken dreams lay the shattered remains of a test tube, and out of this test tube there sprung forth a Humanzee [2] who knew how to have a sick time in a variety of ostensibly depressing situations.

And that’s Harvard. It breaks you down, it depresses you, it takes without giving back. If you asked Harvard for a Christmas present, it would probably pull the move of taking a shit in a box, which, though powerful, is not very nice.

But it’s a Christmas present nonetheless. Through the melding of all of our individual broken dreams, we become each others’ very fulfillments. That’s just the point: amidst the rubble of our lives, we find friends to merge into and build ourselves back up. To quote legendary Crimson columnist Martin S. Bell ’03 quoting legendary Harvard baseball coach Joe Walsh, “Some time when your schooling’s over, when your education’s over, you’ll look back and you’ll say, ‘Hey, I did this with these guys.’”

So to all our Humanzees out there, it’s love, peace, and nappiness.

The rest of you are sick d-bags.

Peace up your asses!

[1] We’re pretty sure this is his actual name.

[2] A Humanzee is a genetically mutated hybrid between a human and chimp. The most widely acknowledged Humanzee sighting was of a side-show freak named “Oliver” whose Humanzee credentials were confirmed by the fact that he was mad angry and hated all of the other chimps. He was then sent to a lab where they poured pepper juice in his eyes and jabbed him with dirty needles and stuff. That poor Humanzee!