Boys Who Never Grew Up

Thursday, September 11, 2008

We were given today as a free day to work on projects. I made myself wake up in time for breakfast, then ran to St. Giles to get my Milton ticket. From there, I took the Tube to the Great Ormond Street Hospital to see what I could find out about Peter Pan. I don’t necessarily know if we’ll have much more to do there than see it. I think the archives are closed on weekends, so we won’t even be able to take a look at the Peter Pan Gallery.

I spent the afternoon wandering around central London with Leah, Lauren D., and Tristan. We timed and checked our route for the tour. It’s a bit long, but hopefully we can rearrange our stops to maximize time. We started at Barrie’s house on Robert Street, went to the Duke of York’s Theatre on St. Martin’s Lane, then took a long Tube ride to Kensington Gardens, walked past the Elvin Oak, past Barrie’s studio, and down to the Peter Pan statue. Then we took the Tube to the hospital. I think we’re going to cut the Oak. It’s not terribly relevant and it’s too time-consuming.

I think people expect it to be either a silly or uninteresting project. I hope we can prove them wrong.

In the afternoon we came back and ended up watching Finding Neverland on Youtube as part of our “research.” Then Lauren and I went out to dinner at a nice Italian place on Goodge Street. We came back and were hanging out for a while when we heard this banging on our door and Ben’s drunken voice shouting for Dwight, his roommate, to open the door. He thought it was his room. We shouted to him several times that he was on the wrong floor. Finally, we opened the door and told him he was in the wrong place. Rob came down, and we asked him what had happened (by this time Ben was lying on the floor, drenched in sweat). Rob said he’d be fine and would sleep it off. Lauren and I went back in my room and laughed hysterically. A bit later, Liza and Sarah came down looking for Ben, but seemed curiously nonchalant when we told them about his odd behavior. As they walked away, Lauren and I saw Ben run up the stairs in the hall and I said sarcastically, “Oh, well I guess he’s sober enough to run up stairs.” Lauren and I were curious at all this odd behavior, so we followed them up the stairs and heard hearty laughter coming from Liza and Sarah’s room. We got a bit closer and heard that they were mocking what Lauren and I had said. Thoroughly confused, we went back downstairs. Obviously it had all been a prank, but to what end? It was Ben who ended up looking like a fool, not us. Chad came to vent about how stupid everyone was being, and said that they were acting like the “cool kids” picking on the nerds. Maybe that’s true, but even with the tight cliques that have formed, I still never got the impression that there was a true cool kids/nerds dynamic. I would be offended, except that I’m too confused as to what they were trying to prove.