High-School Math Textbooks Gave Me Unrealistic Ideas About What Diversity Means.

When I got my first college acceptance letter, I tried to picture myself in that standard, propaganda-pamphlet photograph, sitting under some trees in front of a brick building with a black kid, a Latino kid, an Asian kid, a Native-American, and someone in a wheelchair (who still looked normal from the waist up and didn’t make anyone uncomfortable). Amazingly, our school colors would flatter everyone, and we could all be spirited in our sweatshop-free college t-shirts without looking jaundiced. We would discuss Proust, Kierkegaard, or someone of literary importance that I’d never heard of. After expanding ourselves intellectually, a Frisbee would gently land near us, and everyone, including the kid in the wheelchair, would take a well-earned break. In other words, I’d spend four years living in an L.L. Bean catalogue.

 As it turns out, I ended up at NYU, which (as far as I can tell) is a pretty far cry form a normal university. I do sit in under the trees in Washington Square Park on a daily basis, although I’m typically in the company of tourists, Greenpeace activists, and a schizophrenic homeless man named Ricky who wears a Burger King crown and caution tape, none of whom can help me with my Spanish homework. The student body here is definitely diverse, just not in ways that I expected. I think I picked one of the only schools in North America where being a white Protestant makes me a minority. On Yom Kippur, the dining facilities in my building were closed, and now I’m very concerned about Ramadan.

In an attempt to put off a required expository writing class, I signed myself up for “Soviet Jewish Literature” instead, not knowing that I would be the only non-Jew in the class. (I’m also a blonde German major, which doesn’t help.) I’m yet to establish myself as a competent, contributing class participant, especially after making such comments as, “Oh, Shabbat means Sabbath,” or “Talmud… I don’t think that book’s in the Bible. It might be in the Apocrypha.” Likewise, I’m the only Southerner taking Sociolinguistics this semester. Fortunately, it’s not as obvious, since I’m not from Birmingham, Alabama or eastern Tennessee, and I’ve learned some really “useful” skills… like how to diagram exactly what it is about Boston accents that makes me want to hurt myself or someone nearby.

The social scene here is a bit off, too. I’ve been told that college is where I’ll make the friends that I’ll keep forever, but when I imagine some of these people at my wedding, I imagine cake smeared on the walls, or wailing and gnashing of teeth. I have to remind myself that it’s still early.

Anyway, whenever I think I’m surrounded by the some of the world’s strangest characters, I think about my dear twin sister Anna, who currently attends the University of Chicago… and I feel a little bit better.