This description may seem concerning, implying a complete disregard for my liberal arts education or a Biblical scale of gluttony. But it is difficult to exaggerate how intensely enamored I am with that slab of soft, crusty bread. 

Every weekday, waiting in queue at the Rostir station, I watch as the chef lathers the toast with syrupy, brown chutney, presses succulent strips of beef into its soft, porous innards and smears the plate with splatters of silky Toum. It is a smorgasbord of delight. By the time the clock strikes 12:30 p.m., thoughts of taxation, inflation and amortization that were being foisted upon me in a faraway classroom have been violently suffocated by a burgeoning lust. I am sucked into a gustatory reverie. 

I am a hunter, wandering in a sweltering desert, oppressed by visions of the salty blood that will soon run down my lips, caress my neck and quench my thirst; I am a Homeric sailor, beckoned by a siren who promises me the carnal pleasures I crave. But recently, whispers have spread to every corner of campus, intimating the most disparate factions about the existence of this Ambrosia in leavened form. The cat is out of the bag. And its prolonged confinement has made it rabid.

Things were already bad enough at Commons. Starting in the fall, what was once a steady lunchtime trickle into the rotunda had slowly become a deluge. It became impossible to make your way through the milling lunchtime crowds without kicking, elbowing and biting, without trampling over friends and loved ones. Stuck in the crushing mass for minutes at a time, one could not avoid prolonged, awkward eye contact with jilted loves, vindictive professors, and surly rivals. Commons had acquired a distinctive stench, perennially bathed in the miasma of desperation, rage and contempt emerging from the pores of every Yale student facing the 12:50 p.m. lunch rush. In December, a friend said offhand to me, “Everybody and their mother ate at Commons this semester.” I’d be lying if I said the thought of mass matricide did not flicker through my mind. 

There were few sights that filled me with more disgust. But when this was limited to Lotus and Pasta e Basta, this was something I could, at least, condone. On the days that academic obligations, or propriety, prevented me from bursting out of class at 12:48 p.m., shoving scrawny children onto the sidewalk, throwing babies out of their strollers, evading bikes, scooters and cars in my mad dash to Commons, I knew that I could still stroll to the front of the line for that tangy Chimichurri Chicken. Even if the lines for Bolognese, the dumplings, and the pork were backed up more than the world’s most fibreless rectum, I would flow unimpeded to the front of the Rostir line. The golden few weeks after they introduced the beef, before its renown had spread Yale-wide, were by far the best of my life. 

Those days are gone. The entrance to Rostir is now thronged by rivals, detractors and foes who block its entrance with their ungainly bulk. The serpentine queues in front of Rostir have begun to engulf their own tail in a frenzied ouroboros. By 12:55 p.m., Rostir is often busier than Lotus and Pasta e Basta combined.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that this is because of you. Wicked, grimy you with your grubby, unwashed hands, your Canada Goose and your eyes that narrow as you paw at my precious. I hate you. No, I loathe you. If roast beef is the stuff of my dreams, you are the stuff of my nightmares. No corner of my mental universe is safe from you, and for your desire for the thing I love most in the world. Because of you, the taste of beef on my tongue and lips is indefinitely delayed. I can countenance lingering on the verge of satisfaction, but even my patience has its limits.

When demand exceeds available supply, the weakest members of the market get priced out. When the world’s resources get depleted, it is the unfit that die first and en masse. I was made to eat Roast Beef toast every day. Can you say the same? 

To those who frequent Rostir, consider this a warning that this be the last week of your bovine pursuits. If that doesn’t suffice, perhaps a word of caution will. Go back to Berkeley, Franklin or whatever swamp you crawled out of. Go back to your sewers, to your latrines, to your cesspools or to your drain pipes. Return to Tartarus, to Hades, to the frozen lake of Cocytus. I don’t really care where you go. Just get out of my way. Before I make you.

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I’m convinced that some students lie in wait on Prospect and Wall Street, deliberately contorting their faces into expressions of defeat to solicit such unwitting questions as “How are you?” from a simple-minded passerby. They need little more than the twitch of an eyebrow to release the low, guttural moan they’ve been holding in, one whose length, they avow, is proportional to their prolonged academic suffering. Next, they launch into vivid descriptions of their laundry list of academic and non-academic obligations. By this point, the passerby is nowhere to be found, having jumped into a bush and hidden beneath a canopy of leaves or slipped away after the third repetition of the phrase “the grind.”   

My penchant for satire aside, much campus discourse at Yale is saturated with the language of busyness. Students perennially complain about being spread too thin and are as burdened by their readings as they are by their rehearsals, by pieces of poetry they hope to publish, by deliberations for sorority rush, by lab research and by their weekly radio shows.   

Admittedly, there is much truth to this complaint of “busyness.” I would be remiss not to admit that Yale students are both fastidious and widely talented, and they take their academic and extracurricular obligations equally seriously. It is one of the things that inspires me most about my classmates. It is also true that a constant striving for excellence in all realms can be exhausting.  

But behind self-descriptions of running from meeting to meeting, the language of obligation and overcommitment and the corporate sense of your life being “overscheduled,” lurk the connotation that the things we do here are a burden, and the pursuit of knowledge and the self-edification of extracurriculars is cumbersome, a daily chore.   

As a second-semester senior, I often dwell on what I will miss about this school when I graduate — the abundance of friendships, Tuesday-night horror movies, weekend retreats, the morning we spent sitting by the lake talking about climbing trees, drunken Wenzels, cocktail discourse, all the dancing, roast beef toast and the sheer strangeness of it all. Not much has changed since my first day on campus. I have always been a creature of nostalgia. Only recently have I begun to reflect on the joys of being a student. Never again will it be my responsibility to sit and bask in dazzling ideas, to think about corporal politics and zombification, peroxidases in the abstract, mimesis and Alyosha Karamazov and Proust.  

A majority of us will enter desk jobs as soon as we graduate. I will leave invectives about consulting to the idealists and those with fewer conflicts of interest. But whether you want to be a scribe, a journalist, a paralegal or a banker, the marketing director of an NGO or a PhD student, you will spend much of your day sitting at the same desk in the same office building, endlessly typing away at a laptop. Even if you find the most existentially fulfilling job in the world and are paid to contemplate scintillating, stirring ideas, your daily life will never be as varied as it is today. You will never again be an economist and a historian, a biologist and a literary critic over the course of a single day; your daily routine will never again span four buildings and 14 dining halls. We move from campus to cubicle. It is the way of life. 

Even the luxury of being “stressed” by a cappella elections, the need to socially engineer your improv group’s retreat activities, hours of writing and editing and writing for your college newspaper, three-hour-long presentations detailing the story of your life to people you’ve come to love and who love you back — all these stressors shall diminish in time, variety and in the joy they provide. If one of these activities remains in your life after college, it will probably do so at the expense of the rest. 

This is not to proclaim that life after college is dystopian or that graduation marks your entry into the unending drudgery of late-stage capitalism, with the only respite being the dwindling possibility of love — assuming it, too, does not become commodified by the time we are in our mid-twenties. In some ways, life after college might be freer, easier. We might have our weekends to ourselves. The work day might end when the work day ends. And yet, it will never again be college. It is not my hope to invalidate the experience of busyness, but simply to reframe it. 

Like Tomáš in Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” we must grapple with the absence of any Nietzschean eternal recurrence or recurrence at all. Once our time at Yale is up, it is up forever. There is no way to get back these years or hope they will persist ad infinitum; thus the “lightness” of being that Kundera describes. Without the “heaviness” of our choices reverberating through time for all eternity, we are forced to appreciate how ephemeral our Yale years are, and we are compelled to find new ways to imbue our choices with gravity and meaning. It is an unwavering commitment to the things we do, in spite of their impermanence, that can serve this function. 

Let us revel in the lightness of being, even in the lightness of being busy. Bask in the chaos, the abundance, the diversity of things you do here. Find joy in the long, guttural moans and the cosmic burden of the 300-word reading responses. You will miss them someday.  

PRADZ SAPRE is a senior in Benjamin Franklin College majoring in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and the Humanities. His fortnightly column “Growing pains” encapsulates the difficulties of a metaphorical “growing up” within the course of a lifetime at Yale. He can be reached at pradz.sapre@yale.edu. 

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As someone whose final season has often been split between these two modes, I’ve been grateful for the respite this gives me. Instead of having to write 10 pages a day during reading week like many history majors I know, or studying for three physics exams at the same time, I’ve been lucky to toggle between studying and writing. And even so, as I look back upon my Yale education as a senior, I wish that more of my classes had final exams. 

As a Humanities major, a little more than half my classes relied only on final term papers to comprehensively test my learning throughout the semester. This is ostensibly because humanities classes are less about “what” you know than how you’ve come to know it. They’re more about learning to think than about equipping you with a set of facts to think about. To those pedagogical arguments, I say “you are not worth the dust the rude wind blows in your face.” 

That’s a joke. It is also a line from King Lear. I am confident that most English majors who have taken a Shakespeare class would still be unable to identify it.

As someone whose school operated under a curriculum wherein every class had a final exam — the International General Certificate of Secondary Education and the International Baccalaureate — I can personally corroborate the research that revising for a final exam is an invaluable tool for long-term retrieval. I can still quote lines from Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” I can still speak intelligently about the role of the HMS Dreadnought in the Anglo-German naval arms race.

During my first year of college, I took a class on “Tragedy in European Literature.” I probably can’t name half the authors on that syllabus. That is allegedly no cause for concern; I am supposed to be satisfied with the paltry consolation that the class made me a “better thinker,” that it sharpened my tools of critical analysis. What use are tools if you have nothing to build with them? It is far more rewarding to remember the sweep of a literary tradition than to vaguely recall that my final paper had something to do with heroism, decolonization and flies. 

To say you have read “The Brothers Karamazov” but forget Smerdyakov is a travesty. To say you have studied modern philosophy yet remain unable to articulate Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason two months after the class ends is an unmitigated disaster.

When I advocate for all Humanities classes to have final exams, I do not mean these should replace final papers — or even that they should be more important than them. As college students, our academic mettle should be tested more by the quality of our original scholarship than the length of our TA-pandering regurgitations. Even so, having a basic comprehension exam at the end of the semester, one that simply requires students to revisit major readings or major passages from the semester and answer short questions about them will only buttress these analytical skills with fodder for the memory. There’s a reason that Directed Studies has both final exams and final papers.

To the critics who say that exams will only add to a Yale student’s untenable workload, I suggest the following: make these exams elementary in difficulty and make them account for less than 20 percent of the grade. Design them such that failing the exam does not mean failing the class. Rather, it would only preclude one from getting a top grade. Ask questions as simple as “Discuss how any three of the authors we have read this semester offer differing accounts of the mundane and prosaic,” or even “Where did the Indian revolution of 1857 begin, and how did it spread?” Lavish students with generous partial credit. I am not asking for final exams that burden and encumber, but ones that remind students just how much they have read and learned.

Let this logic be extended to weekly quizzes too. Too many students are comfortable sauntering into class without having so much as glanced at the reading, with the confidence that their “piggybacks rides,” their attempts to “complicate and problematize” and their insistence that the first page of the introduction was “interesting” will earn them a participation grade. Begin each seminar with a 10 minute quiz, asking only three basic questions about the reading’s broadest, most obvious arguments. Which temple does Ray take as the subject of his ecocritical analysis in “Ether?” Or “Which country’s oil production does Luka single out for its rapid increase in the past 25 years?” Use multiple choice questions, but create an incentive structure for students to have some passing familiarity with the reading material nonetheless.

To those who claim I am trying to turn Yale into Oxbridge, you have just given me another idea. Yalies should have comprehensive exams during their senior year. Not as measures of distinction but as measures of basic proficiency in their chosen major. But given that my interest in going to Myrtle Beach my senior spring will probably exceed my interest in revising organic chemistry from first-year, I am willing to relax that requirement. 

In the rest of my propositions, though, I remain steadfast. To the obdurate skeptic, I say “Sweet are the uses of adversity which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head.” That is poetry. It is also a line from “As You Like It.” We would all do well to remember that. Exams will help in that endeavor. 

PRADZ SAPRE is a senior in Benjamin Franklin College majoring in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and the Humanities. His fortnightly column “Growing pains” encapsulates the difficulties of a metaphorical “growing up” within the course of a lifetime at Yale. He can be reached at pradz.sapre@yale.edu.

The post SAPRE: The case for final exams appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Keegan’s point is simple: “We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness.” But that is what Yale feels like, what we fear losing when we grow up and enter the world of long commutes, promotions and grown-ups. Don’t let my use of the word “grown-ups” deceive you. I am extremely comfortable teetering on the precipice of adulthood. I just tend not to look down. 

It seems self-evident to declare that I’m scared of being lonely. Who isn’t? We were made to be social creatures, to join mock trial and improv. groups and student bands just to find a family, to fall in love so we have a warm body to sleep next to on a cold New Haven night. But what I’m concerned with isn’t solitude. 

I have grown to enjoy silence, the spaces between conversations, a Saturday night spent in bed reading “War & Peace,” solo bike rides up East Rock. What I fear is the sense that I can no longer countenance loneliness. I have become so accustomed to the opposite of loneliness that its resurgence will be debilitating. 

I worry Yale has made me worse at experiencing loneliness, not that it hasn’t taught me to appreciate solitude or rest, or even that I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m lonely. Rather, it has made me unaccustomed to the eventual presence of a profound loneliness in my life. The moments when the world breaks and you have to put it back together all by yourself. 

I fear the nights like the Monday before fall break. I hated how vulnerable it made me feel, how much I missed my friends and family. I went through a number of people in my life and listed the reasons as to why all of them were inaccessible: traveling, indisposed, having a wonderful time that I did not want to interrupt. I hated how difficult it was for me to sit mired in those feelings, telling myself I should be better than this, I shouldn’t have to need anyone.

More than anything, I was afraid Yale had bred a co-dependency that I would never be able to break. Loneliness should be nothing to me. I should be comfortable having no one to go to. 

I hesitate to bring up dialectics, but perhaps what I am gesturing at is the opposite of the opposite of loneliness, the negation of a negation, a synthesis. In experiencing loneliness and its opposite in equal measure, or at least in some dialectical conjunction, we ascend to a degree of comfort with our subjectivity and our need for intersubjectivity. Consciousness as a glass prism with an open face: in other words, an aspiration to emotional independence.

We evolve through this dialectic, becoming the type of people who are both adept at solving our own problems and at reaching out when we are drowning, the people who are neither oppressed by loneliness, nor connoisseurs of it — just the type of people for whom loneliness is a moot point.

Maybe people like that don’t exist. Perhaps I thought too much about Nietzsche and then too much about human perfectibility and found another reason to think about my inadequacies. But I fear Yale has led me further away from emotional perfection than I’ve ever been. 

There are few places in the world where I feel so remarkably, unbelievably safe. It is the assurance that if I fell, there’d be a community of people to catch me. I wonder if I’d feel the same as a graduate student.

I know it must seem ill-conceived to take one of the best things about Yale and distort it into a personal failing. Who said any of my projects have been well-conceived? If my logic were consistent, would it be better to surround ourselves with silence, space and rest, and immerse ourselves in sensory deprivation tanks? Why bother with the distractions of human noise and sensory experience? Better to get accustomed to the sensations of death while we are alive. Till we are “Roll’d Round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees.” 

I don’t mean to preach some kind of self-imposed solitude as a lifestyle choice. Or to make it seem like I’m not grateful for the communities I’ve found here. I just don’t know how I won’t depend on them anymore. 

Last week, a friend told me that you retire on your memories. I’d never thought about it like that before. To retire is to become comfortable with nostalgia, to give up on the illusion that you can recreate the past. Or the only things that matter are the recurring or persistent things, a form of radical gratitude that makes no claims to past experience except as past experience, the notion that our memories can protect us from a fear of loneliness in the moments we choose to immerse ourselves in them. 

It was the middle of my sophomore spring semester. In the midst of the treacherous cold, I walked to the top floor of the old Edon house and stepped into a room full of all my favorite people from The Good Show, my sketch comedy group. We talked for what felt like three hours about our recent show, about the seniors’ post-graduation plans, about how much we’d miss each other. I came up with the idea for Lynn K Din, a human parody of LinkedIn in that room. Then somebody handed Kyle Mazer a microphone and said, “Karaoke.” An hour later, Will Gonzalez and I were dueting to Adele’s “To be loved.” 

I was grateful then. I’m still grateful now. To be loved. 

PRADZ SAPRE is a senior in Benjamin Franklin College majoring in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and the Humanities. His fortnightly column “Growing pains” encapsulates the difficulties of a metaphorical “growing up” within the course of a lifetime at Yale. He can be reached at pradz.sapre@yale.edu.

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The club was hotter than we’d hoped. Why had I agreed to pay a $15 cover? 15 dollars? What kind of establishment charges 15 dollars for the service of being bathed in sweat, heat and the miasma of loneliness?

We left soon after, stumbling onto the G train, drunk with exhaustion: him, thinking about how much later than his bedtime it was already, me, intoxicated by the memories of my last summer living in Clinton Hill. I assumed that was the end of the night, both of us too tired to make small talk. 

I didn’t want to go home in silence, so I asked him about twinhood. I don’t care much about twinhood. But it got him talking anyway. 

We somehow got to the topic of life after college. He brought it up. Adulthood. Senior year. What to make of the last of the best years of your life? He told me he was scared of how easy it is to lose people. 

We talked for three hours after that. We got to my friends’ apartment at 3 a.m., caked with sweat and the grime of the post 6 train. I desperately needed to shower. Instead, we sat on the floor of the apartment and turned on the AC.

Exhausted, I blurted out a dormant thought.  

“What is my biggest flaw?”

He laughed.

“Do you actually want me to answer that question? I don’t really think you have any —”

“Well then is there anything about me that ever frustrates you?”

“Sometimes you interrupt me when I’m talking.”

I laughed.

“I interrupt you?”

“Yeah. You’re an amazing friend and a very good listener. Actually, I’m not sure why we’re discussing this but sometimes when we’re talking one-on-one you interrupt me, almost like you’re trying to finish my sentences. Which, you know, you are likely to know what I’m about to say most of the time. But sometimes we’re having very emotional conversations and you put thoughts that I’m experiencing in words that are so emotionally charged yet just slightly imprecise and I don’t know how to —

“Bring them back to the abstract level of thought with which they existed in your brain?”

“Exactly.”

“I just did it again.”

How had I never noticed that before? I let him finish the rest of his thought, aware for the first time of the number of instances in which I had to restrain myself from interjecting. 

A small part of it was impatience, bred by years of too-long conversation with people who had never been schooled in the wonders of brevity. 

Most of it was well-intentioned though. Enthusiasm, empathy — even love. A sign of my complete engagement in conversation. The moment when you finish a friend’s thought and they exclaim, “yes,” validating not only that you have understood their account but exactly what they felt in the moment they are describing. 

And some of it was hereditary. My mum does the same thing all the time. She is far more egregious than I am. 

How had I never noticed it before? My tiny but ubiquitous social tic. It was so believable. We continued talking for another hour or so, about party buddies and our responsibility to the world, until we were forced to admit that talking any longer would ruin any semblance of Sunday plans.

I went to bed happier than I had been in months. 

When people ask me what my love language is, I tend to equivocate. Actually, I tend to lecture the questioner about the modalities of love and the proliferation of self-help buzzwords in the public sphere. The answer is definitely quality time. 

It’s one of the things I love most about Yale. Even amidst its demands and the expectations it expects you to have of yourself, amidst its impossibilities of seeing that friend who is taking five classes and running three clubs, it offers four years of quality time with your favorite people — if you seek it out. 

I am rarely free for lunches. They are always blocked off on my calendar, reserved for weekly meals with my closest friends. These are the assurance that even at my busiest, I will be abreast of the going-ons in their lives. These meals breathe air into college life, pushing back against the asphyxiating hold of a college schedule. 

And then sometimes, I meet my friends at the beginning of a Saturday night or we walk down Hillhouse at 10 p.m. or bike to East Rock. These are the special occasions when we carve out chunks of time with an unspecified start and end and gift them to each other. That’s when I realize what we’re missing.

We delude ourselves into thinking that we can schedule profundity, that an hour-long block of time will be enough to feel like part of a life that does not stop when you aren’t thinking about it anymore. It’s the best we can do. You might not hear about the song that reminded them of how scared they were to grow older last Monday, but at least you’ll hear about their break-up. 

So many of my best memories at college have been spontaneous. The night after the horror movie. When we talked about evil and capitalism and Hannah Arendt, about criminal justice and corporate responsibility. The night on the rooftop of the AEPi house. Christening a therapy hammock. The day at the bookstore. The night we spent in New York City. 

I’m a senior now. It sucks but I’ve known it was coming for three years. And if you’re a first-year reading this, you’ll be here so much quicker than you think is possible.  

Every senior I’ve spoken to has said their one piece of advice is to make time for the people you love. I might amend that to say make availability for them. 

Of course we are available for the people we love. My friends know that they can wake me up in the middle of the night if they’re hurting. 

But what I mean by availability is something more generous. Not just time in the calendared sense. Time for the sake of time. The possibility of possibility. Enough time to allow for late-night conversations unfettered by the fear of a 9 a.m. Saturday wake-up for that fifth club that you just joined because you thought you needed something else on your resume.

Serendipity operates through the channels of time. Make these channels as broad as they can be. I’m torn between the impulse to do everything I can before I see Yale disappear in front of me and the impossibility of knowing what “doing everything” even means. There are so many lasts to experience. There is so much to be done. It is terrifying to imagine — and even more terrifying to admit — that we’ll graduate from this place not having done everything we ever wanted to. That we’ve disappointed ourselves. Of course, we have. It’s our biggest flaw. 

On our worst days, human connection feels like a paltry consolation for the tangible trophies of achievement. To love is to lose. Friends move to the Midwest. The ones who don’t move to London. Still, achievements are not the pillars on which you build your castle of memories. They are not the things you ramble to your kids about when you are old. 

There is such little time. Let us fill it up with serendipity. Let us occupy ourselves with joy. 

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You suggest tentative plans for a Thursday dinner in Branford. They nod so enthusiastically that you are worried they’ll sprain their sternocleidomastoid. They tell you they must go but are so excited to catch up soon. They even shout a throwaway “I love you” across the dining hall. They don’t love you. They only love their cold, ungiving soul.

That Thursday morning, you text them to confirm plans. Radio silence. You show up in Branford at 6 p.m. anyway, in the hopes that their phone just died, that they just had a busy day but are still on the way. Twenty-five minutes later, you have given up hope. You eat Thursday dinner alone, less annoyed by eating a solitary meal than the fact that you found yourself encircled by a 15-person freshman friend group at your table, talking about their sophomore Svedka plug and their thrilling plans to go to Edon on the weekend. 

The next morning, they send you a text saying, “So sorry. Been really swamped with a paper this week.” Swamped? Really? I thought all Yale students’ lives were as arid as the plains of Dasht-E-Lut. They, on the other hand, would have you believe even the Atchafalaya Wildlife Refuge pales in comparison to their waterlogged existence. 

We all have friends like this. If you don’t, it’s probably because you are the friend who acts like this. The friend who is impossible to make plans with because of an estimated three-week buffer between texts. The friend who will invite you off-hand to Friday dinner with his parents but conveniently forget to respond to your text inquiring about the time. And of course, the friend whose lab report has regularly left them in such a vulnerable state, that the thought of responding to your WhatsApp always seems traumatic.

In startlingly few cases, such behavior can be chalked up to an aversion to technology. These friends cannot be blamed. They would probably be better off in Nottingham in 1811, railing against the automation of textile manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution. Instead, they probably held off on downloading Instagram till their sophomore fall. 

But in most cases, the word self-absorption is not that far from the truth. Or perhaps I mean self-aggrandizement — the sense that your extracurriculars and Canvas discussion posts are so uniquely important and unduly burdensome that their existence justifies poor behavior towards your friends. 

“I’m sorry. I just needed to protect my peace this week.” Oh, I’m so sorry. I had no idea that I was your Napoleon, grandstanding at the gates of Moscow, threatening to ravage your city and plunge you into wartime with my singular iMessage.  

“I’m so sorry. I just needed to set boundaries for myself this week.” Oh, I’m so sorry. I had no idea I was an ameboid, pathogenic microorganism, stuck to your skin and clogging your oily pores — leaving you without a second of respite from my asphyxiating proximity. 

“I’m so sorry. I just needed to be with myself” Oh, I’m so sorry. I had no idea that I was a black hole, threatening to suck you into my gravitational orbit with such ferocity that I tear you away from your very limbs. 

“I’m so sorry. My pet turtle recently died.” Okay, I can let that one slide. That makes me very sad. 

Do not take my facetiousness to mean I expect friends to drop everything to fulfill their social obligations or even that such a minor thing as dinner plans in a dining hall cannot be flexible at the last-minute. Scatter-brained as I am, I am regularly guilty of changing plans, but I would never do so without notification.

What I bemoan is a culture of non-responsiveness. In how many cases does your unresponsive friend genuinely miss seeing your time-sensitive text? And in how many cases do they see it and not think it important to respond until they deign it convenient for them?

It seems unnecessary to caveat that there are valid emergencies and overwhelming stretches of time that deprioritize responding to your friend’s text about bottomless brunch. But then there are some people whose life is in such a perennial state of emergency that you can’t help but begin to suspect they are living through the emergency of narcissism. Moreover, there is a difference in timelines between an offhand summer text saying “what’s up” and a text that actually affects your friend’s ability to schedule their life. 

It’s not that hard. If you get a text when you’re busy, say, “Hey! Really busy so will respond  later in the week.” If that’s too hard, drop the vowels: “Hy! Rlly bsy wll rspnd ltr ths wk.” If you forget, at least they’ll feel comfortable bumping you. And if you’re truly not feeling up to meeting up, I can’t think of a friend who wouldn’t be understanding if you just said that — and offer some remote support. If you’re feeling proactive, let your friends know when not to expect too much — “next week will be very stressful with tech week for my show so I have no idea if I’m going to be able to plan much.” Just don’t leave your friends hanging, like a sad, lonely high five that will never find its soulmate. 

Some of you might call this entitled. Some of you might yell and stomp your feet and shriek that nobody is entitled to your time or mental energy, especially when you need to focus on your deeply important pursuits like reading Derrida. That some of you need to get off TikTok. 

Etiquette is not entitlement. You do not have a selective claim to courtesy. Otherwise, what kind of society are we to live in? If we are truly not entitled to etiquette, then let us fulfill Rousseau’s vision of a utopian state of nature. Let us wander about as atomized individuals with no social interactions, having casual, unprotected coitus that may result in the birth of children without the pressure of long-term relationships between parents. Even if we miss out on the joys of human connection, at least you can read “Specters of Marx” or “The New Yorker” without being disturbed by a friend.

Just don’t take your friends’ interest in your lives and their invitations for granted. Because if they’re anything like me, the fourth time you do, they’ll just stop inviting. 

PRADZ SAPRE is a senior in Benjamin Franklin College majoring in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and the Humanities. He is the News’ current Editorial Column Editor. His fortnightly column “Growing pains” encapsulates the difficulties of a metaphorical “growing up” within the course of a lifetime at Yale. He can be reached at pradz.sapre@yale.edu. 

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Perhaps, I successfully pre-empted my grief. Maybe the anxiety about graduation that I carried for so long in my heart sufficiently strengthened my myocardial tissue. Perhaps you really can diffuse sorrow, spread it out over enough sentimental lucubrations and op-eds. Or maybe, I wrote the word “graduation” so many times over the past three years that it finally lost its meaning. It became an abstraction, a phonetic construct, transrational sound poetry. Cubo-futurism. Zaum. 

I started my first week of senior year at Yale being disappointed in myself. Some days, it just felt like the fear seeping into the crevices of my gut was laced with something else. Other days, I’d open the folder titled “affirmations” on my desktop, and open screenshots of the kindest things professors, readers and friends have told me about my work, my writing and myself. Those days, I allowed myself to feel a modicum of pride. Until I reminded myself of all the things I could have done. 

I read Joan Didion’s memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking”, earlier this summer. I’ve always been moved by Didion’s writing, so when people told me it was about the year in her life after her husband’s death, I was ready to tear up, to have my dreams haunted by images of true love torn apart by capricious fate. I didn’t expect Didion’s psychological hypotheses, her notion of “magical thinking”, to haunt me as much as they did. 

It turns out that I’ve spent the last year of my life hiding in my imagination. Just as Didion refused to give away her late husband’s shoes, nourishing the hope that he would need it when he came back, I, too, have nourished the notion that the last three years of my life at Yale are subject to change. I stared in the face of time and denied its direction. I tried to make the river run upstream. 

I first noticed it at the end of my junior year. It was the first time I’d ever asked myself what my time at Yale amounts to and came up short. For the first time, learning, growth, friendship, joy were insufficient answers. Hollow abstractions that point to a lack of something tangible. 

It started as a series of “whats?” but snowballed into “what if’s?” What if I’d auditioned for “Natasha, Pierre and The Great Comet of 1812?” What if I’d turned the pipe dream of being in a college production into a reason to work on my pipes. Well, I’m not a very good singer. What if I’d joined the children’s choir in Bombay. My mum took me for singing lessons when I was eight. What if I’d stuck to them? Then I’d be like all the fictional people I’m comparing myself to in my head. I had the musical talent to be a classical pianist. I just didn’t have the drive to be anything more. 

What if I hadn’t taken that class on Romanticism? There was nothing that wrong with it, but because of it, I might never be able to take an art history class with Tim Barringer. And even if I do, it won’t be taught at the Yale Center for British Art. What kind of person claims to like the humanities and leaves without taking a class that is taught at the YCBA? Perhaps the most magical thing about magical thinking is that nothing else has ever managed to demolish the palace of your self-illusions with the ease of a flicking wrist. 

There’s a reason they call it a spiral. It doesn’t just start to unravel the Yale years of your life-onion. It unravels the 18 years that came before. 

Though I have never managed to tame my self-critical tendencies, I cannot also help but think this is an inevitable reaction towards such an overwhelming entity as Yale. I wrote in my freshman year that we are always trying to live all the Yales, that joy at this school will remain asymptotic if we never stop striving. I admire my own foresight. It didn’t stop me from striving anyway. 

I’ve described walking through Yale as strolling through paradise. Arcadia. Alternatively, as the process of observing Yale’s infinite paths collapse into the choices you make at each juncture in the road. I’d like to modify that. Yale’s possibilities never collapsed. Mine did. 

Regret is a wasted emotion. I’ve known that since I was 11. The first essay I ever wrote was about regret. The regret of not picking up the calls of an aunt who loved me. I was drowning in self-doubt then. I started this year still drowning. Just in a different ocean. 

How long have I been adrift at Yale, falsely convincing myself that I made all the right choices? Did I do enough? Did I love enough? Should I have confessed my feelings earlier? Was practicality an excuse for abject cowardice?  

We will always be questioning ourselves. Over again, and then once more for good measure. It is a product of our conscience, a moral mechanism. Sometimes it is a bulwark against arrogance. It is often debilitating. 

I know I am being impractical. I know that my time here has been worth something; in fact, that it will perhaps be the most valuable time of my life. But the intellectual tasting of life does not supersede its muscular activity. Emerson said that. I expect we’re supposed to believe him. 

It helps me to know that I am not alone. In fact, it seems impossible not to question the way you’ve lived your college life on the cusp of its expiration. Is this how I’ll feel on my deathbed? Maybe this is how we choose to respond to the ineluctable grief of leaving this place. By reminding ourselves that there was so much more to be done. Others drown their sorrows in gin. A few don’t think about graduation at all. And then, there are those few people who bring up the various things they’ve done so much in conversation that you know there’s no hope for humility there. 

I don’t expect if I will ever descend into the self-interrogation that I did this summer ever again. It was a novel experience for me. Perhaps the only way to resist the blight of self-annihilation is to accept that my college life could have been completely different. I could have been an economics major in Berkeley who played club spikeball. I could have been a psychology major in Trumbull who did club gymnastics. The existence of alternate lives does not necessarily etiolate the one you’ve chosen. Only you have that power. But life, too, finds a way of reminding you of the things that matter.

Last Sunday night, I stumbled out of a friend’s backyard at 8:30 pm — smiling, slightly drunk, starting to envision what my year would look like as a senior. I was headed home from a society meeting that ended earlier than I expected it to. As I walked past Harkness Tower, shrouded in darkness, I suddenly felt myself well up with a hope I had last felt as a freshman— the thrill of meeting new people, the excitement of academia, of being dazzled by ideas, the sense that as long as I was in this place, surrounded by these people, I could never be unhappy again. 

Inspired by this ebullition, I called a friend I had just parted with and asked if she wanted to get drinks at Chacra. I headed home two hours later, the lingering taste of a Pisco Sour and the buzz of stimulating, meaningful conversation interlaced with brewing excitement for the suite horror movie tradition I was walking towards. I paused for a moment and sat on a bench at the New Haven Green. Without thinking too much about it, I opened my email address and turned down an on-campus job offer that I didn’t need. Then, I opened up Yale Course Search and dropped a fifth course. I hadn’t felt that happy in months. I walked the rest of the way home with a smile on my face — and with the assurance that everything would be okay.  

PRADZ SAPRE is a senior in Benjamin Franklin College. His fortnightly column “Growing pains” encapsulates the difficulties of a metaphorical “growing up” within the course of a lifetime at Yale. He can be reached at pradz.sapre@yale.edu

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You are no longer a Yale student. You are a tourist in Northern England, talking to Hadrian’s wall.  Or you are the Greek Titan Atlas. Except you are not carrying the sky. Instead, you are encumbered by the crushing weight of single-handedly moving this inane conversation along. Suddenly, your eyes settle on a friend who walks in. Now is your chance. How do you make a graceful exit? Do you:

(a) Obnoxiously yell your friend’s name across the room with the ferocity of a Miss Universe contestant, then run across the room and throw your arms around them. Anything to get away from the man with the alleged personality of a data entry aficionado. 

(b) Use your childhood experience with magic tricks to point them at the bathroom and disappear while they’re not looking. It’s a misdirection.

(c) Politely explain that you just saw a friend and want to greet them and thank them for their time. 

My writing is not known for its subtlety. And while I wish people would always choose the last option, there is a surprisingly large population of Yalies who choose the first two.

There are few things I value more than good conversations with a stranger. The exhilaration of realizing someone else likes the second season of White Lotus more than the first, the thrill of a rapidly budding friendship. But we hold this truth to be self-evident not all conversations are created equal. Some are hampered by blaring music. Most by exhaustion. Another few by severe incompatibility. As someone who appreciates emotional awareness, I am sympathetic to the need to leave a conversation — to assess that the situation is terminal and to amputate the gangrenous limb before it consumes your entire night. But I am heavily critical of people whose approach to ending conversations contains either the adroitness of a rhinoceros, or the transparency of a midnight burglar. 

To be fair, it is not as though the people I am referring to are a monolith. Some of them are your average Yalie — emotionally intelligent, well-intended, and just having an uncharacteristically thoughtless night. Others are thoughtful enough to signal — “I’ll get a drink and be back.” They won’t be back. They have strayed further than Nemo. But at least you knew it was coming. 

Others yet try to end the conversation but succeed only to utter a few “so’s” and “uhh’s” before pulling the half-hearted “need to head out and do something” card. I have been them too. I, too, have been foiled by bouts of awkwardness. 

And then there are the people with whom your ill-fated conversation is doomed from the start. The guy who is looking over your shoulder to see who else is at the party as you are introducing yourself. The sophomore at a rush event who is clearly reading everyone’s name tags to scan for current upperclassmen members to schmooze. The girl who looks like she brought a piece of her private high school with her to Yale. Don’t blame yourself. You never stood a chance. You don’t look like you know the token billionaire in their friend group. 

These are the 10 percent of the Yale population who still measure popularity by the concentration of people you can smile at inside a High Street frat. How much better their life would be when they realized how interesting the majority of Yalies are, and how open to connection they are willing to be. In Marathi, we have a term for this archetype — jagmitra, friend of the world. If you’ve met someone who cannot be at a party for more than 23 minutes, or someone who makes so many rounds you’d think they’re the magnetic field outside a wire, you know one of these. But while these folk are certainly the objects of my writerly contempt, they are not the intended audience of my advice.

The reason I write this, then, is for the rest. The emotionally adept, authentic majority who have probably never thought about what a small difference ending a conversation well can make. It can leave someone feeling slightly less abandoned in an already unfamiliar space. Or slightly less anxious about why you decided to slip away without a trace. I don’t expect people to introduce the stranger you were just talking to, to the friend you just saw and host an inclusive conversation. That is not a standard I can consistently meet. Nor do I expect people to muster the honesty to say “it was nice meeting you but I am going to talk to the stranger standing in that corner over there.” I am not forthright enough for that. 

But politely excusing yourself — under the guise of getting a drink, going to the bathroom or simply moving on — is a small change that can make a large difference in someone’s night. Disappearing acts are better left for George Washington’s fake teeth. 

PRADZ SAPRE is a junior in Benjamin Franklin College. His fortnightly column “Growing pains” encapsulates the difficulties of a metaphorical “growing up” within the course of a lifetime at Yale. He can be reached at pradz.sapre@yale.edu.

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This year, on my fourteen-hour flight back to the United States after spring break, I was seated next to an elderly woman who did not speak a word of English. She was clad in a baggy white sweater and a tight bandana that could not conceal the strands of gray hair that fell in front of her ears. On her right was seated a younger woman. I presumed this to be her daughter. She spent the first much of the flight dutifully translating the flight attendant’s instructions from English to Punjabi. 

The elderly woman was visibly unhappy for most of the grueling journey. Defeated by the touchscreen her on-screen entertainment, she tried to sleep immediately after take-off. But her body was stuck at an unnatural angle between the reclining seat in front of her and the purse at her feet. She would wake up every half hour or so and contort her torso in vain, unable to find a sufficiently comfortable position. Each time, she would let out an exasperated cry, progressively more pained. Eventually, I moved up the armrests between the three of us. She lay down flat on two of the three seats. Her daughter compressed herself into the remainder of the middle seat and some of mine. She slept soundly with her arms clutching her face, shielding her eyes from the world outside her. 

As an international student, I‘ve sat next to countless strangers on flights to the US and seen many of them struggle to sleep in coach. And yet, the sight of this woman was particularly harrowing. Why was this woman flying from Delhi to New York? If she was visiting her family, why had they left her behind? Was the pain on her face purely physical? 

I spent days after I disembarked trying to decipher her story. What I deciphered instead was my impulse to storytell. For days after we met, I speculated about the trajectory of her life. As a Muslim woman from Punjab — a group disproportionately victimized by India’s partition — some of her family must have been displaced to the US. Maybe she was a widow — forced to pay for the middle seat on a budget aircraft without a spouse’s support. 

It seems obvious to state that my speculations about her life are not her story at all. At best, I did what I could with my limited impressions of our interaction and my intuitive sense of her face. More likely, I have just appropriated her for tragic value. I evacuated her real life of meaning and refilled it with invented suffering. I made her my Andromache. Perhaps she would hate to be pitied. My only consolation is that she will never read this. 

Though the woman on the plane may be an extreme case, I engage with the politics of storytelling every day, each time I tell stories that lie outside my lived experiences. These stories are invariably incomplete, lacking in detail, and my rich inner life stretches itself to complete them. My inner life draws on my memories of my grand-aunt’s face, of Bapsi Sidhwa’s account of Punjab during Partition and the self-impression I am trying to cultivate. I toggle between assertion and fact, impression and truth with ease, often unaware that I am converting the former into the latter with my choice inflections and the thrust of my sentences. I soften comedy and augment tragedy, painfully aware of my audience’s reaction to the story I am telling with each sentence I write. 

I rarely question my storytelling tactics because they are most often about people I love, about people who trust me. Most people I am close to have heard innumerable stories about my parents’ or grandparents’ lives, just as my parents know much about my friends. In these cases, admittedly, my stories involve far less speculation and much more faithful relay. Even if rarely apocryphal, these tales are invariably coloured by my relationships with their subjects — a fact that is obscured by the authority with which I narrate them. 

We engage in the same process when we offer our friends sound bytes — particularly inflammatory quotes by professors in seminar rooms or love interests at a bar, creating an array of colorful characters that we can draw in dull moments. And though this is not storytelling, we run the same risk of obscuring our biases with humor. Oliver Sacks — the author of “Man who mistook his wife for a hat” — was dubbed “The Man who mistook his patients for a literary career” by his most vocal critics. What would the same critics say about the strangers I meet and my op-eds? 

In a majority of cases, I am reassured by the nature of my relationships. People trust me to tell their stories faithfully and I strive to tell them authentically — or at least to highlight my own limitations. My friends will lampoon me for turning their musings about Yale into the headlines of my future pieces but I do my best to be faithful, and to forewarn them.  

My point is not to catastrophize this ubiquitous impulse. Each one of us reveals a little bit about ourselves in the way we tell stories. Nor do I intend to denigrate the act of storytelling. But as someone who revels in the expanses of my imagination, in the relaying of my experiences, it is instructive to reconsider the parts of myself I project onto others. 

In the case of the people I am close to, I can be a better storyteller by asking. By asking for more details, for more context, even for permission to share these stories. In the case of this woman, strangers we meet — on planes, in sweaty frat parties, through mutual friends — we do not have their privilege. When we relay these stories to friends the next day, we are often inventing more than retelling, turning people into punchlines or social commentary. Such is human nature. But perhaps acknowledging human nature is the first, and most necessary, step to cultivating the intellectual humility that defines any honest storyteller. 

PRADZ SAPRE is a junior in Benjamin Franklin College. His fortnightly column “Growing pains” encapsulates the difficulties of a metaphorical “growing up” within the course of a lifetime at Yale. He can be reached at pradz.sapre@yale.edu.

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Most days, this strategy serves me well. The first time I wore the mustard yellow woolen sweater my mum bought me last December, I was told that I dress like a Humanities major. Given that my first ignorant winter in America involved pairing shirts, t-shirts and collared t-shirts with a rotating collection of dark gray sweatpants, the compliment was a validation of sartorial progress.

Last week, a close friend asked if I was a Political Science major, because I seem to care about “what’s going on with the world.” Though I disagreed with his generously short yardstick, I took that as a compliment as well. And then, there was the racist old lady who saw me bedecked in a Yale sweatshirt in an art gallery in Florida and asked, “do-you-go-to-Yale-and-also-do-you-study-computer-science,” in the same runaway breath. I’m only grateful she didn’t ask to meet my 78 cousins, my pet cow or the fictive helicopter parents who have been planning my arranged marriage since I was six. 

My aversion to talking about my major makes for more than a litmus test of my academic aesthetic, or even the first impressions I unknowingly cultivate. It is also the reason that a close friend didn’t realize I was double majoring in MB&B, along with the Humanities. It seems that my loud, constant praises of Walter Benjamin and my penchant for unnecessarily using the word “Kantian” concealed my appreciation for cell papers describing how mutations of the xDFG motif for CDK11B affect OTS964 sensitivity. Even so, I would be lying if I said his innocence did not make me happy. It felt like the validation of what I can only describe as an unconsciously concerted project to conceal my STEMness. 

Before I am flooded by a deluge of messages from indignant friends majoring in Physics, I will clarify that I have loved my STEM education at Yale. MB&B Biochemistry core requirements have been some of my best taught and most collaborative classes. Critically reading scientific literature is one of the most useful skills I will graduate with. And I’ve forged countless close friendships in the heat of Organic Chemistry II.

And yet, I rarely talk about my STEM classes. In fact, many of my conversations about science classes are better described as weekly diatribes about the length of yet another problem set. Humanities classes, on the other hand, generate endless conversation topics. Close friends are more likely to know the weekly reading list of my seminar on iconic consciousness and material culture than they are to know that I’m taking a physics lab class this semester. 

Accessibility certainly plays a role in this discrepancy. Explaining the significance of a paper about a newly discovered Cas protein to a friend who does not know the difference between DNA and RNA is far more cumbersome than discussing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s individualism with a friend who has never read an Emerson essay. But I’d be remiss if I did not admit that such dissimulation is largely driven by self-perception.

There is a dearth of Indian men in the humanities, caused largely by an education system that overvalues STEM, relegating what is termed the “arts” to a gendered, underappreciated sphere. This culture percolated even into my high school’s IBDP program — an ostensibly “holistic” approach to education — in which numerous friends equated their mathematical prowess and their antipathy for literature with their vaunted intellectual superiority. Perhaps that is why I wear my predilection for the humanities on my sleeve. It is a badge of honor, an affirmation that I do not conform to the stereotypes others like to traffick in. 

Most importantly, though, I have always feared being victimized by the analytical/creative binary with which so many Yalies like to conceive of the world. To admit I am also a STEM student is to invite comments from poetry professors about how I will be well-suited to analyze the meter of a Miltonian verse. Scansion is well and good, but I would much rather focus on imagery. 

In an academic environment in which buzzwords like “interdisciplinarity” and “different perspectives” populate every new paper on pedagogy and every class’s Canvas page, such a minor criticism can feel like a quibble. But to think that a STEM student is only a valuable addition to a humanities class because they will appreciate the metaphor of a “laboratory” that one uses to explain Zola’s construction of Therese Raquin, or to think that a humanities student can only be a good physicist because they will be most appreciative of the elegance of a proof, is to prove my point entirely.

It seems ludicrous to have to affirm that applied math majors can debate Hegel with the best of them and that there are English majors who are much better at retrosynthesis than I ever was. And shockingly, STEM and humanities double majors want to do more than write a thesis on Karl Popper. Some of them want to write two distinct theses — one on Russian realism and another on RNA biology. 

When the language and anecdotes we use to extoll the virtues of interdisciplinarity is rife with subtext about the way people think, we reveal how easy it is to categorize people’s intellectual interests purely by major. Ironically, in a school whose disinclination to minors was meant to produce a graduating class of polymaths, the existence of single majors has lent itself especially well to intellectual stereotyping. 

So let the English majors try to prove Fermat’s last theorem. Let the mathematicians debate Wilson’s analysis of Queer Harlem, Queer Tashkent: Langston Hughes’s “Boy Dancers of Uzbekistan”. And the Political Science, Economics and Global Affairs majors who I have not even considered? Let them eat cake. 

PRADZ SAPRE is a junior in Benjamin Franklin College. His fortnightly column “Growing pains” encapsulates the difficulties of a metaphorical “growing up” within the course of a lifetime at Yale. He can be reached at pradz.sapre@yale.edu.

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