It's Tuesday afternoon. You're walking across the quad. You see a familiar face, but not that familiar ... oh, wait! It's that friend of a friend (of a friend?) you met last weekend during a rousing game of drinking-Spoons. It's that girl from your freshman year Creative Writing class. It's someone's boyfriend/roommate/secret crush/wilderness freshman for whom you have a secret nickname that has replaced his real name in your brain. Do you say hi? If you go to Tufts, then the answer is probably no.
The politics of the casual greeting here at Tufts are ridiculous. Should I say hello? Will she say it first? Does this person even remember me? No, she definitely does. But will she pretend like she doesn't? Or maybe she actually doesn't. Is that even the same girl? Was she too drunk to remember? Was I? Did I just detect a flash of recognition in her eyes? And the worst: OMG, did I just become that person I hate for not saying hi when she clearly knows me by not saying hi when I clearly knew her?
On rare occasions, this phenomenon is due to actual memory failure. There is this one guy (I'm sure you don't know who you are) that I have met and talked to a total of six times. For the longest time I thought I had fallen victim to the old Tufts socially awkward blow-off, but upon meeting him time number six, I realized that even after a solid total of 20 minutes of face time, he really and truly does not remember me. While that was certainly a blow to my self-esteem, I was also a little heartened that one less person than I had previously thought was pulling this B.S. Sadly, most people that don't say hello when a hello is at least 95 percent warranted do remember each other, but somehow let the moment slip away.
Perhaps this is a function of the ever salient, "Were we the same level of drunk? I think I may have been less drunk but don't want to seem creepy so I will just feign the opposite extreme, which entails faking a blackout" issue. (Don't lie, you have, at one time or another, had that exact thought.) Maybe everyone here was scarred by the college admissions experience to the point of pathological fear of rejection. It's possible that everyone here just hates everyone else, but it's more likely that we all just need to grow a pair. Whatever it is, people continue, day after day, to pretend to text, call their empty voicemail, or actually talk to a disconnected phone when they see a would-be acquaintance approaching.
Jumbo himself discovered Newton's Fourth Law of Motion: If it is (or will potentially be) in any way awkward when you run into someone, you will inevitably do so 41 times more than you would simply by chance. So let's stop making it awkward, because I cannot take it anymore. Listen up, Tufts: We have got to start saying hi to each other! I don't even care if you know the person, smile at him or her and say hello. It takes zero energy and makes everyone involved feel good. At other schools, this is the norm, and it is too late for me to transfer, so I am making this plea: no more over-analyzing -- save it for your IR midterm. If you know someone, think you know someone, think someone knows you or detect any signs of life whatsoever in a passing student, then just bite the bullet and say hello like you really mean it. I swear it will get easier, enjoyable even -- trust me, I'm from the Midwest. We love that stuff out there.
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Jessie Borkan is a junior majoring in clinical psychology. She can be reached at Jessie.Borkan@tufts.edu.
