senior thesis
It Will Always Be There
Meals, Movies, and Hanging Out
(From this point forward, it is impossible to keep omitting all names, though I will still leave out who said what.)
Whether from the mix of personalities or individual agency, the ritual of group meals emerged very early on. One person said “growing up in a very cliquish environment which I was not a part of stunted my social growth. So I hid in my room most of the time, except for meals.” On a very basic level, meals coaxed the shyer RHPers out of their rooms and into situations in which they had to socialize:
“People would just gather in the halls during dinnertime. Somehow it was just like, ‘oh, it’s about six o’clock.’ So you walk out in the hall and there’s ten people outside trying to get a group together to go to dinner. It had its own momentum. If one thing was going on, it wasn’t just like, ‘hey, let’s you and I go out.’ It was, ‘hey, you wanna go out?’ ‘Okay, cool, we should get this person and this person and this person and this person and this person and this person... And it always just formed.”
Excursions for dinners were not organized by anyone, they just seemed to happen. They usually lasted an hour or two, giving people ample time to relax, talk, and create a feeling of intimacy with individuals in the larger group setting. Because meals took place every night, RHPers were able to meet face to face with a consistent group on a regular basis. This gave RHPers the opportunity to get to know everyone in the group very quickly.
RHPers already felt a bit out-of-the-ordinary, so did not mind creating a spectacle by pushing ten or fifteen tables together, traveling in a huge group, or trying to split the price of seven pizzas onto twenty meal plans. “We must have been the most obnoxious group [in the dining hall], ever.” It was this spectacle that also kept our group exclusive, for “normal” students, though they found our behavior entertaining, wanted no part of it. There were two exceptions -- Richard and Owen, boyfriends of two RHP girls. Since their romantic relationships began within the first few weeks of the semester, they were adopted into the developing RHP kin network immediately (a very common process cross-culturally). For the rest of the year, they were known as “honorary” RHPers.
Dinners were not the only communal meal. Several RHPers had an eight AM chemistry class. A daily breakfast at 7:00 started on the first day:
“A lot of us had Chem 115... I didn’t know what building it was in, so I asked Katrina, ‘is it okay if I walk with you?’ She was like, ‘Yeah! Yeah! Definitely! We’re going to go to breakfast before, you want to come too?’ ‘Sure, I’ll come to breakfast.’ And so that was my introduction into the social thing of RHP and the next morning we had breakfast and went to class.”
Like the dinners, breakfasts continued throughout the semester:
“I don’t know how in God’s name they ever got me to do that. They used to get me up at 6:30 every morning to go to breakfast at 7:00 with everybody before our eight o’clock chem class, which I would sleep through every single day.”
The breakfasts seemed to be primarily social occasions. However, they also served the more important purpose of encouraging everyone to go to class (even if they slept through it). This group support of individuals in a huge, daunting class proved to be crucial. Two RHPers who did not join the breakfasts failed their eight AM calculus class.
Whether breakfast was directly related to academic performance, or the calculus class was just more difficult, a sense of support and community must have been helpful in some way. The breakfast bunch in Chem 115 were class clowns. It helped to keep things lively in an otherwise stressful, difficult class. “It adds to that whole group mentality, the way we just stuck by each other... And Bob [the professor] couldn’t really hate us, because then he’d have to hate all of us.”
Another often-mentioned ritual event was a series of movie nights. About once a week, dozens of people crowded into Brad’s room (centrally located, with a television and VCR), to watch anything from Monty Python to Star Wars. One favorite was Real Genius, which held the special status of describing life in Deans Halls. Other movies selected were usually cult classics, fantasy, or science fiction, such as The Princess Bride, Hackers, and The Fifth Element. This reflects the “geeky” tastes of RHPers, but also a collective need to escape from their USC reality on a regular basis. Since RHPers were not allowed to have cars, these movie nights provided cheap, local, easily accessed entertainment, as well as conversation topics and more shared experiences.
Probably the most important activity for group bonding was just hanging out: spending time together, studying, procrastinating, talking, listening to music (not necessarily in that order). We hung out so often that its importance often fades into the background of people’s memories. One person remarked, “what the hell else did we do? I don’t know. We just spent a lot of time together.” Without the background of hanging out, other social interactions would not have happened, or would have been much more distant and formal. Since we lived practically on top of each other, “there [was] just no room to hide.” But more than that, RHPers had a willingness to share their lives with each other.
Several people offered an interesting reason for this willingness to bond as a group -- RHPers were more screwed-up than the average college student. One person said:
“We had more problems than everybody else... Everyone seemed to have a problem. Or an issue. And maybe that’s what made us so close, because we needed each other to help get through all of our own issues. I’d never met anybody with issues before. That’s why it took me the longest time to recognize that I had an issue. So it was really nice to have a group that recognized, yes, we all have issues, and that’s okay. Which actually helps with the whole non-judgmental thing.”
Another person phrased it as, “it wasn’t just everyone off in their room having a crisis. It was a very obvious crisis because everyone was very emotional and open about it.” Either way, “it was never any big events. It was always just large groups hanging out for no reason whatsoever. That’s sort of the best part about it. You didn’t need a reason to do anything. And it sort of congealed into one mass.”