The sophomore schism

Everything changed the moment my roommates were hosed.

As the sounds of foreign voices in the other half of my quad woke me at 7:30 a.m. last Friday, bicker ceased to be an abstraction. It was "shock and awe" made real, dread and surprise and a little bit of outrage rolled into one and made frighteningly genuine. And I hadn't even experienced being respectfully denied; secondhand exclusion was all I had to go on.

I think that it's easier to think of theory and idealized cleanliness than to accept the reality of random rejections based on silly reasons or nonexistent. While we'd all like to think that there is no fate but what we make, the real world doesn't work that way. No matter what efforts or tasks we undertake, ultimate control over central facets of our existence is unfortunately beyond our grasp. We can do what's possible to set favorable conditions, but whether it is eating club membership or university admissions, the daunting reality is that mysterious others are in command of our lives.

Sadly, there must always be undeserving losers in a system that has more "qualified" candidates than available spots. I have friends who "deserved" admittance to certain clubs but did not gain it, and it is difficult to explain or rationalize that unforeseen pain. But if I say to one friend that he or she "should" have gotten in, what can I then say to my friend who did get into the same club? Isn't my previous statement an implicit suggestion that the people who did get in "shouldn't" have? In fact, I do not see either person as somehow less worthy, but one is certainly somehow more fortunate.

The English language does not possess the requisite vocabulary for describing last Friday's emotions. What word captures the concurrent joy and sadness of a student celebrating his or her own acceptance while mourning a best friend's rejection? How can one describe the conflict in the eyes of one friend who, upon returning from a day and night of revelry at his new club, found his room a somber hangout for depressed "hosees." Even describing the dichotomy as one between acceptance and rejection is a massive oversimplification, leading to mistaken assumptions and unnecessary anguish.

One friend said this was the first time he really understood the administration's objections to bicker, and I have to agree. I'd always thought of hosing as just another setback in a life full of misfortune. That's not correct. There is something different about losing out in bicker, and there is something transformational about the bicker process that converts agnostics to zealots and turns some into apostates. Whatever one's opinion of bicker, that feeling is guaranteed to be deeply held and deeply personal, because bicker is perceived as an intensely personal judgment and not the social crapshoot it is.

That perceived personal judgment devastated some and broke their hearts. Everyone hated the system. And then, as if by a miracle, things fixed themselves. After venting and crying and feeling miserable, people picked themselves up and moved on. Within 24 hours, one close friend went from nursing his many sorrows over a bottle of SoCo to champagne-soaked jubilation in our new, mutually shared club. Being hosed had sucked, but he was too strong to let an unlucky break ruin his time at Princeton: so he changed gears, bounced back and was much better off for it.

One thing that did not change in the aftermath of Bicker was the number of people I know who are planning on entering a residential college — still zero. Considering that objections to the bicker process are one of the main selling points used in promoting the colleges, the strong resistance to the new system even after hosings seems very strange. Maybe it's a fluke of who I know, but alarm bells keep going off over the viability and desirability of the system as an integrated and integral part of the Princeton experience.

Bicker is an imperfect system in an imperfect world. It left many of my peers crushed but uplifted others, though most of my hurt friends did eventually rise from the ashes and recover. If pressed, I'd say the system is the best we can hope for — a feasible way to reconcile infinite desires with limited resources somewhat fairly. Proper judgment can only occur in context, and in this case, the proper context is the eventual happiness that followed Friday in many cases. In the end, the system pretty much worked. Barry Caro is a sophomore from White Plains, N.Y. He can be reached at bcaro@princeton.edu.