I'm about to divulge you all in some discussion about teenage poserhood, let me take a second to reflect. Whoa, final Mitchell blog post! It's been a good run dudes. As a man who has had the fortune of 4 straight Mitchell semesters, the books and discussion are always top notch, guaranteed. I mean, I'm pretty sure all the juniors here have already signed up for classes, but for those with the Mitch in their futures, expect greatness.
Now interrupting this Mitchell ad for some Blog Content! So this Friday, I was reminded of a Sag Harbor dynamic from my activities in real life. Namely, Senior Skip Day brought back the feelings of teen-identity-lameness so beautifully evoked in sections of Sag.
One theme of Benji's coming-of-age story is exploring the very mockable teenage transition years, where these pre-adults try to pick up older-seeming qualities in an effort to seem cool, and in general take themselves a bit too seriously in the process. Whitehead is constantly undermining his former self and buddies, whether it be their fretting over black vs. white sections of the beach, embarrassing hijinks with BB guns, or an ambiguously harmful hair touching incident from a racially-ambiguous man. Adolescence has plenty of Catch-22's, and these all encapsulate one of them. While trying to structure one's self before prior to adult life, there will be many lame moments of cluelessness and poserhood that only get worse to remember the older you get.
In Benji's lame encounters, they often hinge on adolescence's patented ambiguities. Is this division of the beach a palpable racial phenomenon or am I making such a mountain of a mole hill that my ancestors roll in their graves? Is playing with BB guns actually cool activity/grim foreshadowing, or just a pathetic accident? Was that hair-touching incident something I should be mad about, or just plain weirdness? Essentially, as your identity solidifies, there are unavoidable moments of utter triviality that you have to endure along the way.
Though this isn't a perfect analogy, Uni's latest Senior Skip Day is a pretty good example of teenage triviality. Us cool Seniors band together to SLACK and DEFY the UNI ADMINISTRATION in a BOLD MOVE where we SKIP ALL OF OUR CLASSES! Take that suckers! Pay no mind to the fact that we'll be OUT OF SCHOOL IN 4 MORE DAYS ANYWAY, and are JUST MAKING IT DIFFICULT on some of our TEACHERS on the HOME STRETCH so that we can SAY THAT WE DID IT, while HALF OF THE CLASS actually has to BE THERE ANYWAY!
But if you don't do it, you miss out on quality time with your buds, while all the teachers probably think you're a loser with no friends! That's certainly what skippers told me! Even complaining about it feels grimy, like uselessly skipping a few periods of school suddenly gives me a crucial moral dilemma. Obviously, the consequences of my misdeeds have jeopardized my chances at the Student of the-Kolodziej-Wilhelm-ScienceMatics Tobin Director's Q. Chicken Award! What have I done!
Anyway you look at it, its all pretty lame.
I hope those two separate examples of teenage lameness made sense next to each other. They definitely gave me a similar feeling. I felt like a Benji trying to decide what to do on Senior Skip Day. He'd fit pretty well as a Uni kid honestly.
