But what is it about Amherst that is awkward, exactly? Is it the fact that most of Amherst's students are kids who worked too hard in high school to fully develop social skills, or is it something in the Pioneer Valley air? A lot of my friends have claimed that it's Amherst that has made them awkward-especially those from warmer climates, like California or Hawaii-even though awkwardness is a problem that extends to all schools. A friend from Yale recently complained about a guy who abruptly left her suite after her friend walked in on them making out. She thought he was just awkward. In actuality, he had a girlfriend. Oops. Still awkward? Yes.
However, there's certainly something to be said about how Amherst's size contributes to this shared sense of awkwardness. At Yale, where the undergraduate population is easily three times the size of Amherst's, and where students can choose from 12 dining halls, it's much easier to avoid people you don't want to see. At such a small school, almost everyone knows too much about everyone else's personal life, even if they've never met. And of course, there are just too many people that you sort-of-kind-of know, that you may have had a class with once, or met drunkenly once, whom you just don't know whether to say hi to or not. It's the people who fall in between the cracks of acquaintance and friend that make the most awkward situations arise-or the people you know of, but don't actually know. One of my friends, an '07, told me about a time she worked in the library and typed in someone's name immediately when he told her he'd forgotten his ID card. He then asked her how she'd known his name when he hadn't even told her yet. At Amherst, you can't help but know the names of some people you may never have met, simply through the grapevine or through association. Still, we feel compelled to pretend that this small-school dynamic doesn't actually exist.
So is all this awkwardness created by people who imagine it? When I was talking to my friend who goes to WashU about whether or not she should e-mail the guy she has a crush on, she said that when she was in Spain she had a hard time translating the concept of "awkward" into Spanish-apparently, the Spanish don't have an exact word for it. "It's not awkward until you actually say it is," she concluded. She implied that she didn't think awkwardness actually existed, but that it occurred only when people said it did. I disagreed. I told her I could palpably feel an uncomfortable tension around certain people in certain situations-but now I'm starting to think that she has a real point. If we took these interactions in stride instead of giving them too much thought, we wouldn't feel the awkwardness we say exists. A lot of it stems from insecurity rather than anything else; when people feel uncomfortable greeting someone they only barely know, it's usually because they're not sure if the other person remembers them as well. Maybe banishing awkwardness from our social scene comes with growing out of our own insecurities.
Sadly, we all know that that may never happen. I've personally been working on banishing those insecurities for the past eight years or so and haven't come to any sort of solution. I suppose the best solution would be to hop on the next flight to Spain-which, given the sudden drop in temperature that I know is going to come much too soon, is sounding more and more like a really, really good idea.