Laundry Politics

been done for two seconds or two hours.

We were a friend group divided.

But we hadn’t yet considered the political environment of the laundry room. Those who remove others’ laundry are high-volume “polluters.” They dirty the laundry room by discarding wet piles of fabric and forgotten single socks onto its questionable surfaces.

remove the gray fuzz from the lint catcher like a good citizen, or do you abandon it? These “political” questions determine our laundry affinities—our place on the laundry political spectrum.

Soul Mates? Marriage Pact Is Back!

With Valentine’s Day having come and gone, students were scared the infamous Boston College Marriage Pact may have become a thing of the past. Their fears were eased, however, when the Pact returned with full force over the last weekend. With questions ranging from eating habits to possible wedding scenarios, the algorithm does its best to find your perfect BC match. Love is in the air on the Heights, as over 1,700 Eagles have submitted responses. Who knows? Your soul mate could be just around the corner. So, head over to bc.marriagepact.com and put your name in the hat before it’s too late!

Rihanna

After her incredible Super Bowl performance last weekend, Rihanna is living in our hearts and stuck in our heads. Iconic as ever, her songs have been infiltrating BC’s dorm rooms for the last week. From Super Smash Bros. memes to students’ AirPods blasting “Famous” as they walk to class, Eagles can’t seem to get her off their minds. And there’s nothing wrong with this at all—if nothing else, we could all use the reminder to “shine bright like a diamond” every once in a while.

On a weekend night that should’ve featured chaotic decisions, my friends and I instead gathered for a debate. Under the fluorescent lights of Gonzaga Hall, we discussed a critical subject: the politics of the laundry room.

“The person whose laundry it is should be there before or as soon as the timer runs out,” I argued.

“Well, what if they’ve had a tough day and laundry slips their mind? We should give them the benefit of the doubt,” my friend passively replied, using a guise of generosity.

Now I look like the a—hole.

A third friend responded, “No, I’m with Elise on this one. If I respect their time, they need to respect mine.”

Others stood silently, nodding along or scrunching their foreheads as they thought through their laundry room stances. One tried to offer a happy medium, saying you should wait about 10 minutes before taking out someone’s clothes.

This logic, however, is flawed. It is possible that you arrive at the laundry room long after a stranger’s laundry has finished washing— there is no telling whether the laundry has

I hate to admit it, but I am guilty of adding to this corner of overlooked items. Once, I removed a whole comforter from the dryer. That blanket sat in the corner for the entire fall semester. I dumped it out, expecting someone to reclaim it the same day. Instead, I contaminated the room’s atmosphere. The gathering of sopping, wrinkled clothes continues to head toward the point of no return.

The liberals of the laundry room want to give time and charity to their fellow laundry-doers. They seek to keep the room clean and don’t remove others’ clothes even when all the washers or dryers are full. They are patient progressives. The conservatives, on the other hand, feel their time is wasted by the laziness of others and quickly dump any waiting laundry. They are self-concerned individualists.

Which faction do you subscribe to?

Did you do your own laundry at home, or is college your first experience with doing laundry? Do you use Tide Pods, or do you know how laundry detergent works? Do you separate your whites and darks, or roll the dice? Do you believe that $3.50 is too much for two separate loads? Do you take a chance on the scorching dryers from hell, or use a drying rack and risk a lake formation in your cramped double? If you use the dryers, do you

Laundry divides us. My group and I did not lose any friendships in the Great Laundry Debate of Gonzaga’s second floor, but we formed new alliances. The hall’s backdrop of flickering lights, unfulfilled work orders, and an anonymous stench all perfectly complemented our childish curiosity about laundry politics. By using a simple debate about laundry, we prepared ourselves for harder, more mature disagreements.

If we could agree upon an answer to laundry’s greatest mysteries, find common ground within its politics, or discern for ourselves what we believed on this futile topic—maybe, just maybe, politicking about laundry could prepare us for the complexities of adulthood.

The Great Laundry Debate ended with an understanding from all of us, whether a liberal, conservative, or laundry moderate, that you cannot please all. There is no one set of laundry etiquette truths. Although we could not find definitive common ground, my friends and I went to bed satisfied with our debate.

We were united in our separation. Our divulgence of laundry-related revelations provided a deeper bond for our friendship. It offered a look into our future adult selves, and it provided us a glimpse of maturity—beyond just washed clothes.

Midterms Week, Part One of 100

At BC, a 15-week semester features about 10 weeks of so-called “midterms.” If they haven’t started for you yet, these next two weeks are sure to bring a surge of papers, exams, projects, and presentations. And while many professors kindly try to give us a “chill” Spring Break, March 3 has become a dumping ground for about a million of these stressful tests. No matter how overwhelming it can be, remember that you have done it before and you can do it again! So, let’s take a deep breath and know we are doing the best we can.

Presidents Day

Despite Presidents Day being a national holiday, Massachusetts is one of few states that still holds class. Federal offices, courts, and post offices are closed, but schools across the state are open for business. Unlike some of our friends at college in other states, BC students have to pull themselves out of bed for their 9 a.m. classes on this holiday. An occasional three-day weekend works wonders for the sleep schedules and to-do lists of college students. So yes, we are a bit grumpy about the lack of a day off school.

My alarm goes off. I shower, pull on my Tims, walk to class, and sit down in the chair I have designated as mine since the first week of classes. I look over to see my friend Aidan sitting next to me, nose-deep in his phone. And it is in this image that I finally realize the antagonist to my goal of branching out more this semester.

Lights. Camera. Action. Let’s talk about the “BC Script.”

See, I could ask Aidan how his weekend went or how he’s doing, but I don’t. I know that I will just get the quick and simple “good.” With that, he will reciprocate the question and I’ll mimic his response with a “yeah … good” of my own. How creative, right?

The truth is, I’m not good. A million thoughts are swirling around in my head, and it’s driving me crazy. Why? Well, I’ll answer my question with another: What happens when you take the smartest and privileged kids from around the world and put them under one roof? World peace? No, actually it’s almost exactly the opposite—you get competition.

I could be feeling the worst I have ever felt in my entire life, and I will still tell Aidan, “I’m good.” He said he was good, so therefore I have to be good, right? Otherwise, I would look like I don’t have my act together, like I let my guard down. I would reveal that I can’t find the perfect internship. That I can’t find the perfect off-campus house with the perfect set of roommates. That I don’t have the perfect life.

And even if Aidan were to ask me how I was doing first, my answer would not change.

I am always going to turn toward the “Script,” toward the words “I’m good.” This way, I will appear like I have my act together—a quality I see in Aidan simply because he is a student at the prestigious institution that is Boston College.

As we all know, BC is a reputable school, so what sets BC apart from other schools of the same caliber? Well, to be honest, at the end of the day we all have a very similar college experience. Northeastern, Boston University, Harvard, BC, no difference—we are all just students trying to get a sense of the world. We all want to have the sole gold star.

So I return to my original question and once again ask: What happens when you take the smartest and most privileged kids from around the world with similar backgrounds and put them under one roof?

In my perception of ancient Greece, only one thing distinguished an aristocrat from a commoner. An aristocrat had the mindset that he was the best—he thought he was born to govern. Aristocrat literally means “rule of the best.” When he encountered other aristocrats, he was likely challenged for the title of “best” and had to prove himself as such. I imagine him talking about politics, finance, international policy—whatever he could think of—until he finally shut the other guy up. He probably didn’t even care about what the oth- er aristocrat had to say. As long as he got his point across and appeared more put together than anybody else, he was fine. Oh, the joys of competition.

At its core, BC is a collection of the biggest, most creative brains and the seemingly most put-together people all competing under one roof.

And BC students have the tendency to seem fine. It is taboo for us to talk about housing issues, but it isn’t taboo for us to talk about how much all of our roommates get along. It feels wrong for us to talk about the fact that we didn’t get an internship this summer, yet it is totally acceptable for us to talk about the one we did get. It is almost like we are the ancient Greek aristocrats, constantly trying to prove to others that we are worthy of their attention and thriving off competing against each other. We do this by telling people what they want to hear instead of what we want to say. And I have decided to coin the phenomenon the “BC Script.” So, how can we solve this?

The answer is simple: We can stop pretending like we are on top of the world. Perhaps we are some of the best students, but that doesn’t mean that we are perfect. No one is. We still have a long path ahead of us—a lot left to learn and a lot left to prove.

Our competitive nature is a great tool for us as we choose our next steps in life, but it also hinders our ability to be honest with each other. We hide behind facades to seem better than everybody else. I think that by simply acknowledging this double-edged sword, we can start to make BC’s campus feel less stressful.

Next time I speak to Aidan, maybe, just maybe, I will tell him what’s going on in my life without feeling the urge to follow the “Script.”