The Bowdoin Orient

So I had this weird dream the other night. I dreamt that Bowdoin was an episode of VH1's "I Love the 90s," and that Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) had decided to distribute those old slap bracelet thingies in a joint effort with the Department of Safety and Security to make students more visible to traffic, and a bunch of washed-up pseudo-celebrities made fun of us for it.

Then I woke up and chided myself for even entertaining the idea that BSG, much less paid constituents of the College's brain trust, would endorse such a peculiar, anachronistic strategy for keeping students safer. I also wondered why I had a dream about a 12-year-old fashion trend with which I had been barely acquainted. Then I wondered why I had a dream involving "I Love the 90s." Needless to say, it was a restless night filled with a great deal of doubt and angst, and very little sleep.

In the morning, I got out of bed, turned toward my roommate, and said, "I had the oddest dream last night."

I was about to give him the details when I realized that it wasn't my roommate at all! It was those two excruciatingly unfunny guys from the "Modern Humorist"!

"Slap bracelets, yeah those were a good idea," deadpanned Michael Colton. "You slap it on and you're like, 'Am I accessorizing or punishing myself?'"

Before I had time to not laugh, the guy from "Joe Millionaire" jumped out of my closet and punched me in the face.

Then I woke up for real and realized that BSG and Security's plan to endorse slap bracelets wasn't a dream at all, and that my bizarre, campy nightmare was actually a bizarre, campy reality. Well, except for Joe Millionaire and the Modern Humorists. So far.

Yes, it would seem that in addition to devoting themselves to making us safe and democratic, respectively, Security and BSG have also devoted themselves to making us fashionably ironic. I mean honestly, snap bracelets? How did they even remember snap bracelets?

My best guess would be that some BSG representative or another was digging through his drawers at home over Spring Break, found a snap bracelet nestled between his old Magic card deck and his old Pog collection, and thought, "Say, these were briefly popular among pre-teens who wore LA Gear and listened to New Kids on the Block over a decade ago...We should market them to 21st Century 18-to-22 year-old quasi-bohemian intellectuals!"

It's entirely possible that the BSG representative was high on crack at the time.

Or perhaps Security is pulling the strings on this one, and everyone, including BSG, is being hoodwinked. I can only imagine the clandestine quorums that may have taken place in smoke-filled rooms in the bowels of Rhodes Hall:

Director of Security Randy Nichols: OK people, listen up. I called this meeting because we've got a problem. There have been too many unregistered parties on campus, and we need a way to figure out where they're happening and when.

Assistant Director of Security Mike Brown: What if we had some way of tracking students' movements, so we could see where they're clustering on weekends?

Bond Villain Ernst Blofeld: (stroking cat) Vhat you need is some sort of tracking device for students to vear vithout zem knowing about it.

Nichols: You mean like a tracking collar?

Blofeld: Nie, too obvious. Somezing zat zey vill vear voluntarily. Vhat about a fashionable kolpak or a snazzy szotztokor?

(Nichols and Brown stare at him blankly.)

Brown: What about snap bracelets?

Nichols: Genius! But how do we justify it?

Brown: Make 'em glow in the dark. Keeps kids from getting hit by cars.

Nichols: Perfect. I'll put in a call to BSG first thing in the morning. All right, we're done early tonight...Anyone want to trip the Tower's fire alarm again?

Brown and Blofeld: I do!

OK, so maybe that's a little unrealistic. But still, one wonders who exhumed this fashion trend and how Bowdoin came to be the site of its glorious resurrection.

Maybe it's an investment ploy. With mounting pressure from students, alumni, and peer schools to divest from socially irresponsible companies, the folks over at the Treasurer's Office decided that in order to maintain the steady growth of the College's endowment, they would need to buy some inexpensive stock somewhere and then make it appreciate it a hurry.

So they invested in snap bracelets on the cheap, and then called in favors from BSG and Security to start the crusade to get snap bracelets back in vogue. This theory makes sense, Maine being the fashion epicenter of the universe, and the members of BSG being the ones everybody looks to for fashion cues.

All the more reason for the College to make its investment strategies more transparent, I say.

Whatever the cause for this snap bracelet revival, it seems that we're in pretty deep now: Last week, money was allocated for the purchase of 3,000 new snap bracelets in new, exciting colors. These "rad" new fashion articles will be included in mailings to accepted students as part of Bowdoin's plan to alienate the Class of 2010 just enough to dissuade them from living on campus, thereby solving the incipient housing crunch.

I realize that I'm giving the generators of the snap bracelet initiative a hard time here. I actually do respect their concern for the safety of Bowdoin students. I also respect the fact that readjusting to civic life after having been cryogenically frozen/comatose/absconding in the Himalayas for the past decade and a half must be difficult, and the fact that they have been able to function in offices of high responsibility with the College is a huge credit to their character.

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