Graduate School Diary

Second Year jottings on what daily life was like for a grad student in 1981

On Friday I went to the veritable Varsity Inn, the coffee place for this grande University. It is not only the coffee place, but the only place for a grad student without a car who does not want to walk a half mile to a supermarket.

I saw Ann sitting there at a table alone. Anne is a graduate student in another apartment, a little older than me, maybe about 23. I can't say I really enjoy Anne's company very much, not because of anything she has necessarily done, but because my perception is she dislikes me.  Anyway, when I first met her--there was a cold attitude. She lived down the hallway in the graduate dorm, a desolate place for those without better choices, and seemed, literally, to lift her nose in the air when she encountered me. Most of the folks are quite nice on the hallway. Nowadays, when I see her, she gives me a cold look that is quickly averted, or not acknowledging of me at all. However,  I have to say she has made some effort recently to be more pleasant--offering me a lift when seeing me in the sleet and cold trudging along, and then returning to my mailbox some mail that I had lost.  There is a strange mixture of hostility and breakouts of perfunctorily polite friendliness. But except for the car conversation that ensued and a few polite formalities, I can't remember speaking more than three consecutive sentences to her over the year we have lived in that graduate dorm, although I probably was within eyeshot of her at least twice a day. 

Well, I thought, here goes and put my textbooks and notebooks on the empty chair across from Ann, trying to form a quick smile to assure her that yes, I was trying to continue the truce. At the counter I bought yogurt, milk, and fruit. When I returned to the table, an engineering student seemed to be trying to chat her up, and she looked at him with as much disdain as she usually looks at me.  So at least I am not alone in her distaste.

Anyway, I was surprised that Ann then said that she liked my haircut, though I no longer "looked at a Brown student."It was a variation on a theme, these statements referring to Brown started arising after Spring Break when she visited a close friend at Brown Med School. So, it is an acknowledgment that she knew where I had gone, and respected that, but also that she had a friend who attended this moderately selective school. And now she was included in its moderately exclusive orbit.

 Her friend Rita, I should mention, also lives in the dorm and seems to dislike me even more markedly than Ann does. In fact, dislike is probably the wrong word. Loathe is more like it. And they seem to have an intimate relationship--when together they look at no one else. Rita always wears the letter of her alma mater--a kind of identification I find absurd. In her room, she has Stanford dolls, Stanford cups, a Stanford deck chair. She might as well have it tattooed on her forehead. Hopefully, the rest of her life will not be an anticlimax from her years at Stanford. And the one conversation I had with her was telling her of a friend of mine who was not just a student at Stanford, but a teaching assistant, and I am not sure she liked this.

I suppose Ann was brave, speaking to me the Rita-despised. The conversation drifted onto traveling, such as going over Canada, through the border. Anne depicts her childhood as a tough, bruising street wise existence. Now she began describing her childhood hassles at the border when she used to cross from Buffalo with her father. Her tales of search, detainment and smuggling seemed exaggerated, and I regarded her comments as show-casing, and at the same time, as a comment about my, in her eyes, comparatively easy youth. At the same time, I wondered if talking about her father was some obeseince to male companionship. Was she being friendly? Hard to tell. For the sake of dorm harmony, I ought to make it successful, I thought.

I remarked that my dislike of car travel over borders is related to being bothered at a border in  small country a few years ago. In fact, I was detained for not having the right paperwork. The whole thing probably took an hour to clear up but was extremely unpleasant. This was not a good thing to say--it only reinforced, I think, for Anne that I had parents who had enough money to send me on a summer jaunt abroad, no matter if on the cheap. I mentioned that I did plan to travel up North into Canada in a few months, and Anne assured me that at no way would I have any problems. The implication I caught was that border problems were for tough and disadvantaged people like her.

As we talked, a graduate student named Eric walked past our table. He is a mutual acquaintance. Ann watched him walk away and remarked on the affected scarf and tweed cap Eric now wears, despite the warm weather. I was friendly with Eric, quite an innocuous person. But our friendship had somehow lessened over time, probably due to his competitive nature. In any case, it surprised me though that Ann disliked him so. My tendency is to assume that all the people I dislike, like each other. 

Ann offered, before getting up to go to the counter, to get me some of the gooey pastry she was eating. I declined to explain that I already had several sweet things that morning. She remarked, "oh, watching your waistline.?" an odd remark to make to a congenital starveling like me. Soon afterward I said I had to, and had to get to a class, then veered out an exit. I thought I liked Ann a little bit more--maybe the tough and distant attitude was some armor she had to habitually wear and wanted to discard it, at least a little. In any case, we have to co-exist in this little microcosmic dorm, and hopefully, things will improve, and I would try to be a little nicer to her and Rita.