I went to my friend’s 21st birthday party last weekend at his off-campus apartment. I reached the place and went inside, but was spotted before I had a chance to wipe the clumps of 
snow and ice off my shoes.
“Hey, Mike Snyder’s here!” my friend announced.
That was a horrible and evil thing for him to say, because it meant I would be spending the next two hours shaking hands with students I had never met before, desperately trying to prove that I was not some asshole who wanted to bring back prohibition and imprison anybody with a blood alcohol level greater than 0.0001.
For better or worse, “Mike Snyder” is a buzz phrase; only somebody who has read “Undergraduate, and Under the Influence” refers to me by my full name. I hear it and immediately recoil, looking to see how many drunks are standing between me and the door.
It’s ironic that my name has, in a sense, been stolen from me. The one, unique combination of words created to represent me no longer does so; instead it has come to signify dozens of other meanings—freshman naiveté, an original writing style, unabashed boldness, or the Observer as a whole. It’s what Roland Barthes referred to as an empty signifier, like the Eiffel Tower. It stands for whatever the viewer wants it to. (Hence the name of this blog. It has no meaning other than what you give it).
The party played out in the usual way. I shake someone’s hand and see in their eyes—over the chorus of “Nice to meet you” and “No, no, the pleasure is mine”—that they have already made up their mind about “Mike Snyder.” Most everybody is nice, but they judge me through their teeth. Usually someone in the back of the room yells, “Hey, do you really believe the stuff you said in that article?” But this is a smaller crowd, and nobody bothers to ask. Instead, someone approaches me with less incredulity, pleasantly curious about my motivations for writing. Soon an attractive junior comes over with a bottle of lager and places it seductively in my hand. “Just one sip!” she says. (Sometimes they’re not attractive…)
After some poor attempts at flirting with this girl (but not real flirting because I know she knows I know the whole thing is just an act to get my lips around that bottle), some guy with a deep, politico-sounding voice interjects, “Hey man/buddy/chief, don’t ever let anyone tell you you have to drink.” That was nice of him, of course, but there must be some Freudian explanation for why this jolly character is always the one downing the most booze.
It’s a relief when I finally escape the cold, crowd of strangers. Is it weird that I enjoy the long snowy walk back to my dorm?
Payback, isn’t it? I get judged and stereotyped because I did the same thing to each of them last year—not once, but every week. Now I’m forced to live out the rest of my collegiate days dealing with the same bullshit. At least the freshmen I meet don’t know about “Mike Snyder.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say to them. “Nice to meet you, too,” they reply.
Comments (29)
Ah Mike, don't be sad. You seemed to have fun in general that night.
Posted by: Mike Skocay at February 26, 2007 6:40 PM
Some of that is particularly astute - I'm about 90% sure that I've been the guy who says "Hey man/buddy/dude/chief" at least once before. I've never had the chance to perform a Freudian self-psychoanalysis on my jolly self though, haha.
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