Lauren Agresti | Going beyond the Band-Aid

Boys are stupid. Girls are also stupid. Maybe in another column we can explore the relative stupidity exhibited by members of each sex in hetero-normative relationships, but for now, let’s just take one of these empirically observable facts and run with it.

Boys are stupid, and this has many important implications for my life. Allow me to present a few examples:

A. My phone is currently housed in an extraordinarily durable case that can best be described as an omni-directional bumper. My screen has not one, but two of those sticky protector thingies on it. The idea here is twofold:

1. In the likely event that my phone finds itself soaked, dunked or otherwise immersed in beer by neighboring boys, it will survive.

2. When boys use their phones to transmit stupidity to me via text message, my phone will withstand the impact of being slammed on the table, hurled at the wall and/or dropped on the floor.

B. I cannot go anywhere without being assaulted by ads for coconut water which, interestingly enough, tastes exactly like human sweat. Whose idea was it to start guerilla marketing mango-tinged sweat juice on college campuses throughout the United States? Boys, obviously.

C. Every few months — when I am a little too tired and have had a bit too much to drink — I have a completely unnecessary meltdown that is typically provoked by a boy or boys being stupid. Some people might recognize this phenomenon as a “basic bitch cryfest.”

I know — it’s embarrassing. But I can’t help it.

My friends have developed several ways to deal with this type of crisis. So far, the most heroic effort involved piggybacking me to Fresh Grocer, buying break-and-bake cookie dough, dragging me home, baking cookies and shoving them into my mouth too quickly for me to continue sobbing.

Last Saturday, I had an especially irrational breakdown and a few awesome friends were patient enough to sit with me, talk it out and put me to bed. I woke up on Sunday with a massive headache thanks to the doubly dehydrating punch of crying and drinking. Otherwise, I went on with my life and forgot about the whole thing.

On Tuesday, I was surprised to receive a package from Amazon. I hadn’t ordered anything, but opened it anyway. Inside was “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar,” a book full of absolutely exquisite advice columns that I had been eyeing in Penn Book Center for quite some time. The packing slip said simply, “a gift from Erin.” Then I remembered: Erin was there with me on Saturday night.

It goes almost without saying that this gift made my day. Although everything I had been upset about over the weekend was relatively pointless and insignificant, Erin knew I could probably use some love anyway. I found myself in a good mood as quickly as I had fallen into a bad one. This, oddly, made her simple and thoughtful gesture even more meaningful.

Here’s the thing. We are all pretty good at responding to emergencies. When someone is hurt or upset, we try to fix it. When our grades are slipping, we email our professors. When a hurricane is barreling down the East Coast, we buy enough Twizzlers for several months and eat them all in one day because we are bored.

We’re not as good at seeing normal situations and trying to make them great. We tend not to do random things to make someone’s ordinary day special. We are somewhat disinclined to go to office hours just to chat. Our cupboards are rarely stocked with treats on an everyday basis.

We’re programmed to respond to problematic or unusual situations. We intervene to re-establish or maintain normalcy. But once the Band-Aid has been applied, it’s back to business. It’s similar to how we donate to disaster relief organizations immediately after earthquakes and forest fires then kind of stop caring.

A good day, for most of us, is one in which nothing is totally falling apart. There’s nothing wrong with this, but we can do better. We can all be more like Erin.

But don’t wait for your friend to get a C on her midterm or your parents to be caught in a tropical snow thunder hurriquake. And definitely don’t wait for boys to be stupid. Some bad things are going to happen no matter what, but if we all did a little more for each other today, we could save on cookie dough later.

Lauren Agresti is a College senior from Fulton, Md. Her email address is laurenagresti@gmail.com. Follow her @lagresti. “Piece of Mind” appears every Thursday.

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