Kalen Lister. Prettiest smile. Lucy Gallun. Well, it's just a side view-profile shot, but she looks really attractive. Okay, I've seen her in real life: she is. Maura Amentas. Yeah, she's my number one.
I just can't help myself. I am sitting around doing nothing, and there it is. I have a real problem.
This isn't so much a column for 34th Street as it is a personal intervention. Four years later, and I am still addicted to the Freshman Facebook.
During freshman orientation week, while all of you were meeting, drinking, partying, hooking up and laying the groundwork for future awkwardness (or, I guess, friendships), I sat in my room listening to Belle & Sebastian and perusing the photo-book. Who needs to go outside and actually interact with these people when you already have their pictures in your possession? God, that was awesome. God, my life was sad.
Do I really need to speak in the past tense, however? While my art books, The Cat in the Hat and too many issues of Flaunt have long ended their respective tenures atop my coffee table, the one sustained presence next to my cup of mint tea has been this monument to happier times. I yelled at my roommate the other day for momentarily misplacing the book. Sorry, Scott.
Chances are, if you have met me, then I have looked you up in the facebook. Chances are, even if you have not met me, I still know what you look like. (I am feeling sinister, right now.) Because it is not like I actually await the meeting of new acquaintances before opening up the book; rather, it is a great pleasure every few weeks (when short-term memory has wonderfully escaped me) to scan every name and picture from Zahra Abdulali to Nicholas Zwang. You will always be surprised to find someone you never before noticed. (Oh yeah, I never submitted a photo of myself for the facebook. Suckers.)
Should I really be ashamed of confessing this habit of mine? As a second-semester senior, we should still be able to date ... wait, wait, that's another article. As a second-semester senior, I am suddenly struck with an immense nostalgia for freshman year and a newly developed sense of school pride (or at least my fears of entering the real world have been refracted into Penn pride).
Smokes, a cappella shows, Feb Club, the facebook forage -- sometimes difficult to undergo but, still, they fill me with a satisfying reminder about being a part of something greater than myself.
Okay, fuck that.
I may not be completely lying, but this school pride stuff doesn't tell the complete truth. I am lame, I am sad, and I just like looking at hot girls. Let the chauvinism rain down.
In other news, I didn't learn how to use a zipper correctly until high school -- my all-boys Catholic high school. (Go Bells!) For the first decade of my life, my mom would zip up my jackets before I left for school, and whenever I needed to take off said jacket, I would open the jacket halfway before pulling it off as I would a t-shirt. (I still apply the same method to neckties.)
So there I was, with the wide-eyed excitement of a child who just learned how to tie a shoelace or the satisfaction of a precocious fourteen year old who just zipped up his first jacket, I zipped a lot. Zip, zip, zip, zip. Zip.
You would be surprised how one thing most take for granted could hold such awe-inspiring discovery for another. Go Bells! (Hi Lucy.)
Timothy Gunatilaka is a senior English Major from Los Gatos, CA. He enjoys hockey and puppies. His collumn, Lying to Pixly, appears sporadically throughout the semester. His e-mail address is tcgsas.upenn.edu.
