D. Pierson: The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

All the newspapers and TV pundits are calling this fall’s freshman college class the “Symnitol Generation,” but if the activity up and down my dorm hallway is any indication, this fall’s freshman college class is the “Stand Around Each Other’s Laptops and Play The First Thirty Seconds Of Every Song On The Hard Drive Generation.” The noise makes it hard to sit and write this but not impossible.

This dorm is called Allerton and it’s old and it used to be something else but nobody can agree exactly what. A Catholic girls’ school dormitory or a Catholic girls’ school school-building or a clothing mill where lots of Catholic girls worked. I am not used to old buildings, and the things that are commonplace to you if you’re from the East Coast or anywhere people have inhabited for a while, like radiators or old brass doorknobs covered in several layers of drippy white paint or windows that creak when you open them by turning a knob, are sort of exciting. Everything where I grew up grew up with me. I think the first time I stepped inside a building that was built before 1950, we were out of state on vacation.

Orientation Week they encourage you to keep your doors open to foster a friendly and open atmosphere. A girl whose name I heard several times in a getting-to-know-you name game last night but whose name I still of course cannot remember is draped across the open doorway of the room across the hall from us, shouting over the first thirty seconds of whatever song someone in there is playing on a laptop.

“I mean, it’s just stupid. Like, what example does it set where the first book we’re assigned to read in college, BEFORE college, even, we’re not even tested on? Not that I WANT to take a test, right? But it’s, like—”

We got a letter from the school about a month ago saying all incoming freshmen had to read this book The Silk-Maker’s Assistant , as an “introduction to our life in the Liberal Arts.” I read it and I guess a lot of other people did too. Anyway, it hasn’t been mentioned in any of our orientation seminars and there probably will never be a grade given. A lot of people are furious about their time being wasted and I think they are starting to realize that college may not be a hallowed academic proving ground where their finely honed MLA-citation skills will place them at the head of the pack. People are already pissed at the school, but I’m not. I am just happy they accepted a transcript that’s a Frankenstein’s monster of grades from different high schools. I’m just happy to be away.

My roommate is down in the laundry room but on his desk he has this book someone clearly gave him as a going-away-to-college present. It’s this graphic-novel-style thing called I Got In, Now What?: Getting the Most out of the Best Years of Your Life . I was leafing through it while I was putting off sitting down to write this, and in it, an amiable slacker guy whose beard is indicated by six black lines jutting out from his chin advises the reader to “just make mistakes!” I took his advice, without ever actually hearing his advice and a full two years before college, and made definitely the biggest mistake of my life. Probably a bigger mistake than most people’s biggest mistake of their lives. My brother started college two years before me, and he told me that the kids you’re friends with that first week of college you will not end up being friends with in the long run, for whatever reason. In a month, when we’re not friends anymore, I’m going to call or e-mail the kids I’ve been hanging out with this week (Elon, Roger, Kelsey) and tell them they dodged a bullet.

A big debate in the newspapers and among the TV pundits is whether kids with the money to afford over-the-counter Symnitol will have an advantage over kids who can’t afford it, or if schools should just go ahead and administer it to everybody. I think I’m sort of a unique case, and I also think who can and can’t afford it is the least of their worries, but they don’t know that yet. Before I leafed through my roommate’s book and before I sat down to write this I pulled a hundred bucks out of the ATM in the laundry room and I took that down to the pharmacy and got fourteen Symnitol, enough to keep me up consequence-free for two weeks. To tell you the truth I can kind of already not-sleep without it, and by getting this down I guess I’m hoping to end that.

Anyway, two weeks seems like a long time. I bet you all I really need is tonight.

I’ve got a system to keep people from seeing what I’m drawing.

A thousand cartoons and TV shows and teen movies would lead you to believe that when you’re drawing something at your desk in school, a pretty girl is going to say “What are you drawing?” and you’ll tell her and she’ll go “That’s neat” and your artistry will reveal to her the secret sensitivity in your soul and she’ll leave her football-player boyfriend for you. These cartoons and TV shows and teen movies are wrong.

In my experience, a pretty girl never sees you drawing and goes “You’re an amazing artist.” In my experience a pretty girl sees you drawing and, if she says anything at all, she goes, “Wow, you’re a really good drawer.” Not drawer like where you put socks, but draw-er . Guys who are good at basketball are not described as excellent throwers, and dudes who are good at guitar are not called really good strummers, but somehow I’m a really good draw-er.

And the experience does not change based on what it is she catches you drawing in the margins of your math notebook or whatever. No matter how well you’re drawing it, there’s nothing good you can be drawing. You can’t win. If you’re drawing superheroes, that looks nerdy. If you’re drawing landscapes or things girls might actually like, like animals, that looks girly. If you’re drawing the female figure, you’re a pervert. If you’re drawing the male figure, you’re gay. If you’re drawing superheroes and you haven’t gotten around to drawing the masks or capes or whatever yet, you’re gay. Do yourself a favor: Don’t start with the muscles. Start with the rocketpack and work your way out. You’ll still be nerdy, but everybody knew that about you already. I mean, come on: you’re DRAWING.

And those “how-to-draw-comics” books? Fuck those books. Everybody saw those in their Scholastic book orders in second grade and now they assume I just ordered enough of those books, and that anyone could draw this well if they’d done the same. Well, they’re a little right. I did order like two of those books. And the first thing they teach you is this system of lines and shapes, to sketch out the bodies first before you fill in the details. Basically what you have before you start having anything that looks like anything is a page full of what looks like basketballs and potato sacks. The basketball-looking things are eventually gonna be heads and the potato sacks are eventually gonna be torsos, but when I was drawing based on those books, the guidelines would never really erase right and it always looked like all my characters’ limbs were built around a sack of potatoes with a superhero insignia printed on it, or like they’d just been nailed in the face with a superheated basketball. Anyway, the point is, fuck those books.