on being thirty-five and blurry in a group of sharply-defined twenty-nothings okay, so, like, the first thing to note's the weather sucks for this. why the hell'd they decide to have this outside in january? were the ballrooms taken? is it 'cause of the big dumb stupid wood and metal greek letters with their dull and tacky colors? are these losers just better at yapping than thinking ahead? the second thing to note's pretty much everyone's wearing some dreadful solid-color sweater with like nothing on it but their letters. it looks like, fuckin', wild and crazy kids out here. except instead of a swimming pool everyone's just standing on the grass which i guess is okay to stand on here. you'd think if the grass is such a big deal they would put little signs up telling you which lawns you can and can't walk across. whatever. there's also some people in their own less-gruesome clothing but they're outnumbered like ten to one. i assume they're here to get shanghai'd into one cult or another but maybe they just "forgot" their goofy sweatshirts. good on 'em. there's also some college staff who seem to just be kids with badges in charge of awkwardly mixing whatever vaguely danceable tracks or like sitting under one of those tents doing nothing really. and of course there's me looking cute and unplaceable as ever. i'm just here to gawk but as always, the eyes are a two-way street. so while i'm looking at some random group of proto-adults or a clump of green bursting through the parched st. augustine or the clouds hanging dead in the sky as if to smother us all in a chilly blanket, people here look at me too. appreciatively, mostly. my outfit's decent and jothly today – black cap black sleeveless t black jeans black sneakers. rainbow dragon-patterned binder coordinated with the pink-blue dragon on the front of my shirt. nobody says much about that though instead they're like, wow, your flowers are so beautiful. the lilies on my arm, they mean. thanks, i grew them myself. ok not really. some guy put them there. ran four hundred bucks back when four hundred bucks was toilet paper to me. damn fine investment too as i get like three compliments a day, which is a thousand plus every year, which, y'know, appreciative words are worth their weight in whatever commodity comes to mind. but also there's like some guy who is all "hey my friend wants to talk to you" and he gestures to his friend who may not be his friend and this maybe-friend looks at him and me like he'd have us both killed if he had the dosh or pull. but he doesn't so he just walks away with his camera. marking that one down as "queerphobic microaggression, possibly". as if i care. i have a much more pleasant interaction with a young woman from d phi e who i guess asks me what i'm doing or something. the notebook obviously stands out. i tell her i'm just taking notes about this gathering for a poem (or three). i'd never been much involved with this greek life stuff since i was either too isolated or too gender-deviant to seek it out much. i don't dislike it despite my earlier snarkiness but at times it looks really damn corny. and you know the type of shit frat boys get up to. a thought burrows into my skull which is that some amount of the boys in this crowd may become rapists by years end. or the girls since it's 2026 and those in the know know that girls can do that shit too. i'm "those in the know" by the way. i've moved past it. mostly. depending on the nature of that sort of thing you end up asking yourself if you were complicit or even participant (can a person rape the self?) and the upside is that can blunt it and the downside is you might spend a really really really long time figuring out what the hell even happened and why you feel so fucking bad about going through the shit that everyone insists would be so damn awesome and if you were to tell them you know you'd just hear that gut-twisting niiiiiice. obviously i don't say any of this to her. instead i tell her i knew the woman who founded her chapter and she was remarkable and (again unsaid) if someone can get me to sit through scott pilgrim and firefly you know she could get me to commit murder with only the promise of a kiss. she was that and i was an idiot. really i just say "you should meet her" as if that's likely and we talk for a bit about what motivated her to rush and why i didn't and the fact that stephenville is actually a pretty nice city despite its traffic woes and spiking restaurant prices and tragic distance from DFW. we wish each other well. and i have almost two pages of notes by this point so i just turn and look at the phi beta sigmas and zeta phi betas who yes are chatting like all the white folk but they're also dancing in groups and it's like, wow, y'all're putting actual effort into your peacocking unlike everyone else who is just standing around talking about the beer they drank or the beer they're going to drink or perhaps the beer they're drinking right now shh don't tell anyone. this maybe sounds like i'm unduly ennobling another group of kids who are simply doing what they do, but what i'm thinking is it feels like an example of how white people broadly speaking do not have to work as hard to achieve the same results. not that i do or don't know firsthand. i don't know. what i'm actually thinking is that i always deemed this crap pointless not because it looks like such a hassle or the endemic drinking and hazing problems or that i resent social aristocracies but because it was something i never thought i could or would want to be part of. i never felt manly enough to fraternize nor womanly enough to sororitize, which isn't a word and that seems sexist, and i never felt interesting or personable enough to socialize, which, lol, and i always assumed it was just a lot of partying and horseplay, and maybe it is, but god damn, these days i could go for some partying and horseplay, and maybe i always could have. i don't think i would have felt at all comfortable in a fraternity but a sorority sounds kinda sick, ngl. not because of all the fantasized pillow fights and drunk makeouts and swapping fingers and et cetera though if those things happen they happen i certainly wouldn't put a stop to it but rather because i do genuinely long for the sort of heartfelt camaraderie that sisters seem to have and yes you can find in other student organizations but i want something a little more cultlike and, surprisingly, gendered, which i never would have pegged myself as desiring. but it's like, a boy's life is isolating and even more so when you figure out you're not a boy and i guess one possible cure for that isolation is doing weird-ass rituals and taking oaths and letting two or three letters brand your heart for so long as it holds up. and even if i'd prefer one group over the other i suppose any kind of friendship would have filled a void i refused to consciously acknowledge existed. i guess at least i wasn't raped by some classless frat boy.