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My troubled relationship with Paris

I’ve finally figured out why I want to go back to Paris: I’m a masochist.

Nowhere else I’ve been to in my life has offered the constant ego-beating, frustration, incompetence, awkwardness, and failure that Paris has. I guess Boston is too comfortable, where I am surrounded by friends and where I’ve learned how to carve out a little piece of happiness. Oh, yeah—it’s also where I can work and socialize in my native language.

In some ways, this is my version of “slumming it.” Obviously, it’s in a mythical city, where the exchange rate makes me cry a little inside, but I am nonetheless purposefully placing myself in a situation where I am disadvantaged…just for the experience. Or something like that.

What other explanation is there, besides masochism? “Learning.” “Escaping the Harvard bubble.” “Taking exciting risks.” “Thesis research.”

…aka masochism.

At least I’m being honest with myself about it?

Am I socially awkward?

Am I socially awkward?

Somebody, please clear this up for me, once and for all. I’ve been obsessed with evaluating my social skills lately, because I have a sneaking suspicion that I am not an exception to the “All Harvard students are socially awkward” rule after all.

It was a sad, sad realization. I thought I was pretty well-adjusted, a generally friendly person. Sure, I read social theory for fun, but I like to think that only makes me more interested in people. But I show up at work in City Hall and face awkward moment after awkward moment. Laughing off comments I don’t know how to respond to, forcing coworkers to make small talk with me…it leaves me wondering, Is it me?

According to a recent American Scholar article by William Deresiewicz, this awkwardness comes with an Ivy League education. But the article exaggerates the elitism of the Ivy League, without pointing out the flaws that it so aptly demonstrates: self-righteousness, generalizations based on iffy facts, the inability to accept ineptitude, and the tendency to make a personal realization into a pressing, general issue.

The last point is particularly interesting: Deresiewicz clearly held a number of elitist views: one should feel sorry for people who don’t go to prestigious schools, state school students are “trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system,” SAT scores define intelligence, and Ivy League graduates are generally rich. (It’s their responsibility to make gazillions, duh.) Somehow, those all get blamed on the Ivy League. Really? Really, you just listed a number of problematic beliefs claiming that ‘my school taught me so’?

It is no question that elite institutions can be, well, elitist. But, at least in my experience, it has been nowhere near the extent to which Deresiewicz describes. Nobody likes to bash elite schools more than the students who attend them, and if he has taught at one for 10 years, maybe he’s just sick of it. If he went to teach at another school for 10 years, could he say that it were better? They may be just as ‘conformist’; the excessive college preparations are a generational problem, not an Ivy League problem.

At the end of the day, this author didn’t explain more than 10% of my social awkwardness. And he didn’t explain away his elitism—you don’t enter college realizing that the SATs are a decent way to nationally compare knowledge of certain subjects, and come out looking down on anyone scoring less than 700 per section. (Ivy Leaguers don’t even ask about SAT scores after freshman year, we pull out our transcripts to compare at our 2am study break. If you didn’t know that, you clearly didn’t go to one of the better Ivies.)

So why do I have awkward moments? Partly, because I’m human. Partly, because living on a college campus can quickly become a bubble, Ivy League or not, and getting out takes readjustment. And really, because I am overanalyzing, which is ironically what will create socially awkward moments in the first place.