Disclosing the Dirty Details of Occidental’s “Hi” Society

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Author: Lisa Kraege

Why is saying “hi” at Occidental so awkward? As a senior at a school of barely 2,000 students, I recognize most faces and actually know even more, yet at times I barely remember how to appropriately say hello to my closest friends. During my first months of college as a chipper young first-year, I was eager to impress and actively (possibly aggressively?) friendly. But a few months in, people stopped saying hi. Three long years later, I think I get it: We know too much.

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have made it impossible to be ignorant of each other, and yet in person, we are. We collectively pretend that we haven’t seen the online photo albums and the constant stream of status updates detailing the sordid events of the weekend. We pretend that we haven’t heard the life story of that person we never say hi to, even though we pass by her or him four times a day and know their entire Oxy hook-up history in graphic detail. It becomes easier to feign aloofness than to risk revealing the true vault of information stored within each of us.

One could argue that our lack of social acknowledgment is self-preservation. Saying hello and conversing with every acquaintance would be exhausting and fake. But shouldn’t there be a decorum? If you sit near but not next to someone that you know in the library are you only supposed to say hi once, or every time you get up? How close is close enough to say hi? If you see someone across the quad are you supposed to yell or pretend you didn’t see them? What if you’re in a group? Or, most dreaded of all, what if you say hi to someone but they don’t see you? That’s very nearly social suicide. The culture of saying hi is seemingly impossible to correctly navigate, especially in the self-contained bubble that is Occidental.

The multiplicity of questions about proper etiquette makes it clear that there are certain problematic truths in attending Occidental that do not have easy solutions. The small size of our campus ensures that you will see the exact person you do not want to see, not once a year as you would like, but on a daily, if not hourly, basis. You will be forced to recall the various times you have made a fool of yourself in front of that one person who always seems to catch you at your worst. And while avoiding questions that you already know the answer to may seem like an appealing alternative to forced, fake conversations about how much fun you had in Vegas this weekend, perhaps it’s time for us to suck it up.

Like my mother always told me, it won’t be awkward if you don’t make it awkward. I know that I for one have yet to take that aphorism to heart. I am especially guilty of the digging in the bag trick, and my extensive experience with attempting to avoid uncomfortable encounters now allows me to recognize the avoidance techniques of others. Stop pretending like you got a text message, that your eyesight has suddenly gotten much worse or that you are deeply engrossed in the genius of your own mind. Is it too idealistic to envision a campus where we stopped taking ourselves so seriously and just … said hi?

Lisa Kraege is a senior ECLS major. She can be reached at lkraege@oxy.edu.

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