RDBNPNG 26: Letter From the Editor to Strangers

     I’m a lot like you, so please,

     hello, I’m here, I’m waiting

On a basement floor in New Haven in March 2014 I was sitting up against a washing machine and I was drunk. I was listening to the Rain Brigade play a cover of Weezer’s “El Scorcho” and I was singing along loudly because I had a beer in my hand and I had just become a member of WYBC Yale Radio after singing bad karaoke to Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor” with Chloe, who would stick around the basement for three more years. Weezer’s first two albums had, since my brother George first introduced me to them, soundtracked my mornings and afternoons spent driving to and from school in Miami past the trees of Old Cutler, where it was always warm. Pinkerton in the mornings. The Blue Album home.

I had arrived at Yale just a couple of months before. No one had told me that it would suck for a while. It wasn’t even midnight when I got back to my room and faceplanted on my bed, now feeling a part of an organization that only knew me by name in a MySQL database, but had given me its beer-soaked floor and a place to yell. I didn’t meet that many people that night, but I didn’t care. I found solace instead in the flux of noise and mental blankness that always comforts by surprise in moments spent alone. It was the first night I slept through in weeks.

April 15, 2013. I shifted around in jeans and a red sweater at my desk in Christian Spirituality in the sticky 85-degree low of an April afternoon in Miami. It was my eighteenth birthday. I was leaving school early to get on a plane with my parents to Connecticut, where I would fit seamlessly, my admissions officer insisted, into Yale’s thriving creative community. Amidst visions of the “That’s Why I Chose Yale” video I ignored the knowledge that today I would begin building A Better Life For Us. Qué emoción, we said.

That first night at Yale, it seemed like my parents’ hotel room was the only place I would belong. Besides a top-tier education, Yale would give me a mask to wear of the hija decente made American and successful, thriving for the brochures and the college counselors back home while the paranoiac beneath feared I had exploited my narrative to get here. Where was my admissions officer to tell me I belonged now? I went to Battle of the Bands the next night. It was the first time until the washing machine that WYBC would help me find my place in a room full of strangers.

On April 29th, 2016, I was one of the hundreds of students on Cross Campus gathered in protest of the Yale Corporation’s decision to retain the name of Calhoun College. We, most of us strangers to each other, chanted: We out here. We been here. We ain’t leaving. We are loved. I had no body but the one that bore witness to radical love across institutional barriers. I heard us singing into a past where I had no language for Yale. I heard us over WYBC’s PA system, which my friend Nick asked if Next Yale could borrow for the event, and which in our small yes represented an arc bending for this organization’s resources back to the community—the entire community— that it has pledged to serve.

The Yale of riots, procrastination, shared boredom, and community is the Yale I have come to call family over the last three years. But I loved myself when I sang along to Weezer—music that for me had meant long drives alone and internal quiet. The washing machine that night might as well have been the driver's seat of my Nissan Altima.

WYBC no longer feels like a community of strangers to me—within this organization I have found myself a participant in more meaningful friendships than even “That’s Why I Chose Yale” promised. But there are still so many faces in the basement that I haven’t met. I am as grateful for the strangers there I never met as I am for the ones that became my friends.

This 26th issue of RDBNPNG is one that bravely grapples with degrees of anonymity within an arc of reinvention that this organization and the culture at large must embrace lest it decay to irrelevancy. I am honored to have placed myself by a concentrated chance among writers so radically removed from the immediately audible voices of content, culture, and publication; I thank our editors and artists past and present for making this publication a home for strangers.

The tastemakers always leave after the show ends. What’s left is geography. It’s you, in the basement, with your heart open in protest.

Yrs,

Stefanie