A New Kind of Nunsense

For the record, I am not a nun.

I am not a nun now, nor am I a Davis Scholar* who was formerly a nun, nor do I have plans to enter a sisterhood any time in the future. I am not, for that matter, Roman Catholic.

I am, however, a student at Wellesley College, which is the modern day equivalent of a convent.

Wellesley is that school you may have heard about if you read the New York Times enough. Check the Secretaries of State roster; check out a few Julia Roberts movies; watch any diehard woman anchor on any news channel and chances are, she's an alumna. Wellesley is one of those schools, elite and proud of it, but we are also a women's school, so we get to feel like outsiders.

The best of both worlds, in fact, because some of us still like Miley Cyrus.

And on this blog, as in real life, I find the best way to explain Wellesley as a convent. We are not defined by the absence of men but the curious eccentricities of all-female community.

In a post-Enlightenment twist, we don't serve an omnipotent, all-loving Christian God; we serve the omnipotent, all-hating Success. In a post-Foucault twist, Success allows us to define Her whatever way we want to define Her.

For most of us at Wellesley, Success defines herself in Fortune 500 and non-wedding mentions in the New York Times. You don't make the Times, you don't make the cut. Get on your knees and start repenting for your waste of the $200,000 education and the best profs on the planet. The Hail Marys are heard in the Science Center between the hours of 2AM and 5AM.

Most people think nuns in the medieval era were chaste. They were supposed to be, of course, celibacy vows and all that. Yet Boccaccio, the delightful spinner of the Decameron, delighted in scandalous tales of nuns gone wild. The theme continues to present day, when one cannot search for "free nun pictures" on Google Images without going bug-eyed and losing any innocence one's Disney gave one. Wellesley girls... well, everybody thinks they have the Wellesley love life pretty well figured out.

Life at Wellesley, in sum, is crazy and complicated. We try to create paradigms for our experience -- it's like living in the army, it's like living in a boarding school, it's like living in the White House when Geena Davis is president-- but I'm sticking to mine. Stick around with me and see what kind of nunsense this really is.

* Davis Scholars: moms and grandmothers who give up interesting careers like wedding photography to study brain surgery and keep the rest of our brains intact by placing hands on shoulders and baking cookies. The cookies are for those who mourn the AVI Fresh refusal to bake anything resembling a North American Cookie cookicus. Davis Scholars are also the only students who believe in Normal Life.