in britannia

This is hardly an uncommon refrain among graduate students, that they hate the undergraduates. As I have often reminisced, as an undergraduate at Princeton, I held a lasting distrust of two different groups of people: foreign students, and graduate students. The xenophobia of Princeton is certain: foreign students are strange, they have strange habits, they wear clothing with too many pockets and stuff them full of fresh fruit before leaving the dining hall, they smoke more than Americans on average, they bathe less frequently. These are the stereotypes. The graduate students were just weird: they wore all black, they talked about angst without irony, and they treated us, the undergraduates, the cream of the crop of America, the best and the brightest, as nothings.

Now, I know why they did. Because undergraduates are a stupid and intolerant lot who don't often know what to say or how to say it. Case in point, last night. I was standing at the kebab van on the High Street when two extremely drunk undergrads came up behind me, started spouting drivel, and then berated me for conversing with the kebab van guy. They also plowed into me, causing me to bump into the people in front of me, who gave me a sympathetic look as I tried to explain quietly why I was sorry but was not at fault for body-checking them.

And then tonight, I was asked to row tomorrow morning. Now, I'm not opposed to being asked to row in the morning. In fact, I take it as a given that I will, being as I row at all. But I told the captain of boats this past week that I did not feel comfortable rowing on Sunday morning during church time. I was so desperate to keep my space on the 1st boat last term that I would actually skip church if I had a conflicting rowing outing. Not so this term: God comes before crew, and I think that it's important to know that. But now, I've got a rowing engagement on Sunday. I fired off an email to our captain, who seemed incredulous that anyone would, for any reason, decline a crew outing.