In Harvard, nobody can hear you scream.

Of all the crazy statistics Harvard manages to post year after year, one of the craziest is it's freshman retention rate. It's up around 98%. And if I'm not mistaken, the number of students who graduate within six years is around 90%.

Have you ever wondered what happens to that 2%, or that 10%? They don't all steal code worth billions of dollars and become successful entrepreneurs overnight. Maybe half do, but that still leaves dozens of kids from every entering class who simply fall off the map.

But I actually know where some of them go, for a while at least.

My mother works with mentally ill people. She doesn't mind telling me that most are fairly young, all are affluent, and at any given time, several of them are Harvard students. She gets people from Brown, too, and once in a while a girl from Columbia. Columbia only sends girls for some reason.

So I'm slowly coming to the full realization that within a few years, if my mother keeps this job, she will end up working with one of my classmates, perhaps even one I'll know.

All three of the people in this triangle will be completely ignorant of the situation. My mother only reveals her first name to her patients, and she is professionally bound not to divulge to anyone any details that might let one of her patients be identified. I'll never find out about it. If my best friend here ends up hanging himself in her presence, I'll be told a lie about what happened. If some girl I sleep with goes crazy because she finds out, too late, that I'm an emotionally corrupt, morally vacuous bucket of human waste, and ends up telling my mother every grotesque detail of our meeting, I will not find out. My mother will just be furious with me and be unable to communicate why.

Imagine if every time your mother was angry at you and wouldn't explain why, you had reason to suspect in the back of your mind it was because she met one of those souls you senselessly crush on a weekly basis. This is my now my life.

Now, you're probably thinking: "Gee-golly-shucks! It sure is egotistical of this guy to think he could single-handedly cause someone to lose her marbles. Huh-yuck!"

Tell me I don't have your internal monologues down pat. It's almost eerie.

If I were so inclined I could tell you more than one story that would cause you to, among other things, stick your own foot in your mouth directly. But I am not so inclined. Suffice it to say that I have reason to feel guilty for the rest of my ridiculous, inescapably Catholic life. And next time you're feeling sentimental, direct a moment of silence towards the all the sweet, gentle girls in this world who will always be ruined by the endlessly cunning evils of childish men.

But this piece isn't about all that any more than everything I ever write will be--which is to say, only subconsciously, maybe sorta--and this sentence isn't really any good. Skip over it.

This piece is about people going crazy at Harvard. I know how supposedly we're all enterprising sons-of-bitches. We've got all our ducks in a row, which is why we're here. We're motivated, intelligent, competent, and assertive with our lives. Or we're legacies. Or we have Asian parents.

But if all of that is true, why is it that we're given a whole team of advisers to look after us and help us pick out what classes we take? All week that's been what we do: meet with this adviser, that adviser, go to this lecture on what level of class to take, hear this guy give us advice on the college experience, and once in a while, sleep and try to not go crazy. But if even we fail that, we're reminded that Harvard University Health Services supplies comprehensive psychiatric care to any student seeking it. So no worries, right? There's always someone to turn to in the unlikely event that you wake up one morning and are completely overwhelmed.

It's like how the government told us to duct tape our windows in case of a biological attack, or hide under our desks when the alarm sounds.

You know, so we feel safe.

I never was bothered by all the bullshit the government fed us. Even after September 11th I never seriously thought I, or anyone I knew, might be killed by terrorists. But all this good-intentioned advice is scaring the shit out of me. I'm actually worried I'll just go nuts, suddenly, without warning, because apparently it's a Harvard epidemic. Maybe I'll brush up against someone at a party or share a glass with the wrong person and that'll be it: I'll have caught the crazy.

It's gotten to the point where I spent my time holed up in my room flipping through the course catalog and choosing which 3468 of the 3500 amazing offered classes I'd least regret not taking. Occasionally I step out to our cathedral of a dining hall and binge on frozen yogurt and Spicy Thai Peanut salad dressing until my stomach turns into a jelly-filled beach ball and my face looks like a slice of Antonio's Red Tortellini pizza. Then I go back to my room, get drunk and belligerent, get written up by the proctor who lives directly above me, and try to figure out how I'll make it through the next four years surrounded by people who actually think they know what they want to do with their lives. And late at night when I can't sleep, partially because Mass Ave is just outside my window and evidently ambulance runs are very popular between 2 and 4 AM, and partially because I can't wrap my head around the way my life just got uprooted completely at a time when its roots were actually beginning to mean something, I'll wander out into the courtyard to chain smoke and throw sticks of deodorant at squirrels, or draw massive arrays of animalistic rituals with sharpies on giant pieces of cardboard and caption them with Latin and lines from early John Keats because those slowly become the only things that seem to make sense.

And then in that absurd time late at night between dialing a number and having the girl on the other end pick up I wonder where it is all the crazy Harvard students end up once my mom can't help them anymore.





This is a work of satire.