Prestige and Mobility: Sex in Houghton

This past week we were performing our term-time jobs of caressing Houghton’s rare book collection in search of bindings made of human skin [1]. We made a great discovery, and this time it wasn’t skin. Instead we found the discarded journal entry of [NAME REDACTED FOR EXCESSIVE SECRECY] ’09 which told his pathetic and steamy tales of the heart. Take caution dear reader:

I thought a thick envelope from Harvard senior year would come with some thick biddies, but that April I found myself taking my mother to the prom again. Of course, she ended up leaving in a limo with the Quiz Bowl Team’s buzz-in champion, Eddie “Fast” Fingers. Again.

That summer, I got a job as a pool cleaner, hoping to meet all the stay-at-home moms. It turns out the opening scenes of all those movies are a bit misleading. I got nothing but algae. So much algae. The horror. The horror.

Freshman year, after I became well known for swatting jump shots from sub-five-foot Indian girls in B-league IM basketball, my Facebook profile was still surprisingly un-poked. I couldn’t explain it: I had worked it at all of the study breaks, and was staying in Annenberg late into every night. I was getting nowhere with the girls of the class of 2009 and wasn’t doing much better with Domna. It turned out that Room 13 wasn’t a brothel after all, and the girls coming out of the Wellesley shuttle were never as reckless as I had hoped they’d be.

I decided to put all my eggs in one basket: the Dewey Decimal System basket. I figured the kind of girl I wanted would hang out at Lamont in the 636s: Animal Husbandry. (For all those nerds who are complaining that Lamont doesn’t use the Dewey Decimal System, two words: magical realism.)

Finding no one to saddle up with in the 636s, I moved on and checked out a copy of the “Protestant Ethic” and proceeded to read it as sensuously as possible across from the cutest girl on the third floor. She seemed to be pickin’ up what I was putting down, so I sacked up: I waited until she left and then furiously searched for her on Facebook. Her unprotected profile and explicitly “single” status was a less than subtle hint that she wanted it.

We had only one friend in common: Milosz Cherepanovich, the Albanian kid from my freshman entryway. Since I was very confident that Europeans had more sex than Americans, and somewhat confident that Albania was part of Europe, I sought him out for advice. I mean, let’s be honest here, seeing this kid was like [JOKE REDACTED FOR EXCESSIVE HILARITY].

He showed up late for our meeting, still harried from accordion practice. He smelled strongly of borsch and had to change into a new pair of soccer cleats and too-tight jeans before we headed to the Science Center for our chat.

As we sat down at the Greenhouse Café, another thick biddy caught my eye. Knowing the importance of safety schools, I sent some garlic knots her way. No response. Whatever dude, it’s just Board Plus.

As I asked Milosz about My Angel, he shot back one word responses—as is his people’s custom. Although he kept coming back to “the Famine,” the words “lady,” “yoga,” and “yes” kept popping up as well. I immediately signed up for every house yoga program in a ten-block radius. I didn’t find her; yet somewhere between mastering the Perching Crane and Precocious Monkey, I realized that all I had earned for myself was a hernia and a totally new outlook on shit.

I decided to drown my sorrows in that sweet elixir of forgetfulness: foam. As I entered Mather Lather, shower cap and lufa in hand, I caught a glimpse of her, a fleeting image that soon receded into the misty oblivion. I pursued her in vain, my hopes and dreams forming and bursting like so many iridescent bubbles dancing towards the ceiling. I found myself alone, where I had started. And so I grinded on, my body against the foam, borne back ceaselessly into the past.



[1] Until 1974, and for a brief period in 1988, FM was also printed on human skin.