whatever happened to beer pong?
Posted on April 2, 2007
Filed Under kids, parenting, snark |
If you’re a parent of teenagers then you’ve already entered the distinct, hyper competitive hell that surrounds your child’s college placement. If you are parenting younger children, then you are just beginning to get a faint whiff of the anxiety coming for you on this topic. To brush up on the complete insanity I’ve experienced over my childrens’ educational prospects thus far (and we’re just beginning elementary school) please revisit Is There No Justice and A Silly Putty Injunction.
The other day, I had the misfortune of listening to a mother’s earnest lament - a blow by blow account of her daughter’s rejection from Yale. Clearly this mother was exorcising her own disappointment. Prevailing upon her captive audience, she regaled us with tales of her older daughter’s excellence while we all sat in the window of the indoor tennis club watching our five year olds spin and twirl and miss hit the ball over and over again. I know more about her eighteen year old than I know about my best friends; her grade point average, her SAT scores, the fact that she was captain of her Lacrosse and Field Hockey teams, her position on the award winning debate team…her mother reeled off one superlative after the other. The litany of accomplishments she mentioned in reference to her daughter made me feel more than a little hostile. I sat there stewing, barely able to contain the urge to highlight the fact that her five year old daughter was surely going to be rejected from Yale as well if she didn’t hurry up and improve those tennis skills. At the time her daughter was aimlessly wandering around the baseline rolling loose balls towards the net, gleefully enjoying an hour away from her mother’s reproachful, expectant eye. I excused myself. “I’ll be right back, I just need to go rinse my mouth. I sort of get this throat tightening, salivating, nauseas feeling when I’m fighting the urge to to be bitterly sarcastic.”
And just when I’d recovered from this incident, I stumbled across last weeks NYT article For Girls, It’s be Yourself, Be Perfect . The article only confirms what I already knew - there is absolutely no way that I would get into my alma mater if I were to apply again today. Apparently extracurricular activities such as bong hits and beer pong just aren’t getting kids into school anymore.
I was a good student. I was an AP student. I played varsity sports. I also perfected the art of having a really good time, bong hits and beer pong aside, there was also good undirected fun to be had in the boys’ dorms after hours. (I attended boarding school but don’t hold that against me). The art of “fucking off” (rolling a good, tight joint in a dark field beyond the searchlight of the night watchman all without spilling the Kind-bud, masking the powerful smell of bourbon on the breath with a few spoonfuls of peanut butter, dropping acid and riding out an eight hour trip while attending a full day’s classes), seems lost on the youth featured in the NYT article. Instead, they are all consumed by the exhaustive pursuit of academic excellence. 
So much has changed since I was sixteen.
The NYT article chronicles the admissions dance of Esther Mobley, a bright and accomplished senior at Newton North High School. (Newton is a tony suburb of Boston.) Esther, like tennis Mom’s accomplished daughter, is a remarkable student; AP Latin, Philosophy and Literature, a near perfect score on the SAT’s. She’s president of her church youth group. She’s a budding actress who appears in many of the school’s dramatic performances. The problem is, all of Esther’s friends AND their parents are equally accomplished and driven and single-minded about the importance of college admissions. Harvard, Yale, Brown and Stanford are talked about in hushed tones in corridors of Newton’s Whole Foods Market. The final edition of the high school newspaper devotes two pages to senior graduates’ college plans.
So the whole town will soon know that poor Esther has been rejected from her top pick, Williams. She also been turned down at Middlebury and Amherst. She has been accepted at Smith (legacy) and still waits with bated breath to hear from Davidson. I have a few words of advice for Esther and just a whisper of a thank you… I feel slightly better now about my own rejection letters. Don’t worry Esther, I too was rejected from Williams, I was also passed over by UVA and Princeton and Georgetown. I meant nothing in the end. I’m an Emory grad and enjoyed four years with other bright students passed over by the Ivies and forced to enroll at their safety school. You’ll settle into mediocrity in time and your parents will forgive you the disappointment you’ve caused them, that is until you decide to apply to graduate school. Until then, do yourself a favor, relax, learn how to roll a joint. Believe me, someday your Smith diploma will be somewhere in your parents’ attic being gnawed on by mice and you’ll be forcing another soiled diaper into the overfull Diaper Genie, numb with fatigue and sore from a savage episiotomy, and you’ll be glad for those joint rolling skills.
For anybody who just must have the beer pong poster, order here.
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