I never would have predicted this freshman year, but when I graduate, I'm really going to miss plans. I took little interest in them for most of college. I associated plans with computer nerds-the very skinny or very fat people who sit inside on glorious spring days, absorbing into their pale faces the green glow of an old PC monitor, pecking away little commands, wearing glasses that resemble goggles, scrunching their noses, thinking perverted thoughts about comic book characters as well as real people. It's a doomed community that speaks in abbreviations and smiles in colons-a kind of hell, really.

But some of my friends started to get into plans by sophomore year. They would talk to each other about their plans. ("Oh, I read your plan." "Your plan was funny." "I saw that on your plan.") It got out of control. It was hard for me to sustain my arrogance toward the computer iso-zone when it was creeping into the dining hall, the mail room, the sunny walks to the Campus Center.

So when most of my friends went abroad junior year, I decided to start reading plans. (No way was I going to create one-that would require learning far too many abbreviations.) But because people could update their plans from London, Florence and even China, it was a great way to keep up with their lives. Some were more talented planwriters than others. Josh, for example, demonstrated an incredible gift for being funny on his plan. Who knew he could be such an entertaining observer of the British? Brianne's plans were delightfully weird. Right now, hers says "There's no basement in the Alamo!"

I started to realize that plans were not necessarily a retreat from social life: instead, they engendered a very special kind of social life, with room for a level of discourse unparalleled by any conversation one might have in person-even via email. I finally learned how to make my own plan, and during that semester I used it mainly to reference fellow planwriters.

I gradually grew more experimental. My plan became less like a message board and more like a diary. As many others did, I complained about how much work I had. But I also made up a poem about my roommates. And I conducted a poll: "does kissing on the dance floor count as hooking up?" and found the single word "yes" on the plan of a boy I should not have kissed on the dance floor. I recorded an interaction between two men waiting for the PVTA. One was standing and one was crouching on a backpack. They seemed not to know each other, and then out of the blue, the standing one yelled to the crouching one, "I praise you, and all you give me is rage." I kept at it, and this year I settled, for several weeks, on the simple but provocative statement, "It was I who let the dogs out."

There are some really great planwriters out there. Andy is one such master. Right now on Andy's plan is the following scene:

(Alissa puts a goldfish cracker in Andy's hair.)

Andy: What are you doing?

Alissa: It's swimming.

Andy: In my hair.

Alissa: It has waves.

Andy: ... I hate you.

This is a dialogue of sorts, but it's not the kind you would tell someone about. It's not like you would say, "Listen to this crazy conversation Alissa and I had the other day...." The interaction between Andy and Alissa would just go by, unnoticed, perhaps appreciated momentarily by the two participants. But after a while even they would forget about it.

I think plans have actually changed the way my friends talk and listen to each other in person. One evening, Josh and I were having a conversation at dinner. I was upset because graduation was looming, and in that particular moment it was making me feel as if I didn't have a self. "Do you ever feel like you won't have a self without Amherst?" I asked him. We talked for a while, and he made me feel better by attributing my paranoia to the postmodern condition. Later that evening I checked his plan, on which he displayed my melancholy quip: "Would that it were postmodernity; I would kiss the ground." For better or worse, I wonder if Josh would have remembered or even absorbed my sound bite if plans didn't exist.

Yes, our ears have changed. Since plans have entered our lives, we listen better. It is not uncommon for someone to make a weird or dumb comment and for a listener to say "that's going on my plan." I have even had to physically hold people back from dashing to their computers, for fear that they would cross the line. The other day I was complaining to Alissa and Laura about not knowing how to calculate a budget for the summer, never having lived on my own before. As usual, they were laughing at my unabashed naivete. ("What about frozen yogurt? Does frozen yogurt fall under "food" or "miscellaneous?") As I was getting up to leave, I saw their cunning little smiles-guarantees that their next conversation would be lovingly catty. So I had to step in: "I don't want any part of this conversation going on your plans, by the way."

When you're reading someone's plan, you are actually interested in why their workload sucks, how they have no summer job, how their parents are ridiculous. People read plans mainly to procrastinate, so they welcome any diversion. It's a strange world in which self-indulgence, self-pity, and general rambling are rewarded. As long as you're wasting your own time and others', you're in the clear. You can adore your friends as much as you ridicule them. You can post smart things they say as well as the more traditionally "plan-worthy" blunders. You can even admit how much you like your paper topic, if you do.

As I near the end of college, updating my plan several times a day, I face my dorkiness in full. Where is the place for this public/private, written/spoken, meaningful/trivial communication in the real world? Probably nowhere. Perhaps my friends and I will talk for longer in person when we no longer have our plans to communicate the bizarre details of our thoughts and our days. But maybe we will take the plan mentality with us beyond Amherst. Maybe if we had never used plans, we would never have learned to listen to each other so very carefully.

Suzanne Feigelson '01 is the former publisher of <i>The Amherst Student.</i>