Wednesday, January 16, 2019 // The Statement
7B
Wednesday, February 26, 2020 // The Statement
7B
I
n the universe of college student
organizations
and
meetings,
icebreakers are a necessary evil
— universally hated, yet they persist in
a futile attempt to personalize meet-
ings beyond the generic name/year/
pronouns/major
introductions.
At
their best, icebreakers provide a tiny,
mostly insignificant insight into the
tastes and preferences of the people
around you. At their worst, they tend
to feel like a forced game with no real
objective — a bunch of young adults
sitting around naming obscure colors,
their favorite ice cream flavor or the
direction they face while they shower
(I particularly despise this one). Who
wins this game? Don’t we all lose, in
our inevitably-doomed efforts
to sum up the complexity of
existence with a few careful-
ly-chosen words?
Of all the icebreakers I feel
strongly about, the one I hate
the least is: What’s the cool-
est thing you’ve done in the
shoes you’re wearing? It has
several
redeeming
factors.
You can’t answer in a single
word, there’s no default vanil-
la ice cream answer and, most
importantly, you ideally learn
something about what the per-
son answering deems “cool.”
Plus, there’s the added ben-
efit that I’m usually wearing
my brown Blundstone boots
whenever
this
question
is
asked. This allows me to tell
the story of the time I went
to a “very cool” drag bar in
an underground warehouse
in Berlin with a friend I’d just
met while wearing said boots,
and
casually
established
myself as a worldly, cosmopol-
itan individual.
I’ve told the Berlin story many times,
each time adding in a new detail: the
jungle-themed karaoke room, the spon-
taneous game of limbo with a feather
boa, the saxophone player I befriended
on the 5 a.m. metro back to the hostel.
The story’s become an animal of its own,
an opus to a free-spirited, Europe-roam-
ing character.
Which is why it pains me now to admit
that the Berlin warehouse drag bar story
might be just a wee bit disingenuous,
in terms of how it represents me as an
individual. It is a “very cool” story, this
is true. It did also really happen. But it
makes up a small percentage of the time
my feet have spent in these boots.
Truth be told, since I got the boots as
a Hanukkah present two years ago, the
vast majority of their showtime has been
not in Berlin drag bars, but on the side-
walks of Ann Arbor. They have trudged
the blocks from my junior year apart-
ment to Mason Hall. They have pounded
out the path between my senior year
home and Espresso Royale, my yoga stu-
dio and friends’ houses.
I’ve gotten to know the particular
quirks of the Ann Arbor sidewalks — the
tufts of grass poking up between the
cracks, dips in the concrete that tend to
flood when the snow melts, the spot on
State Street near Huron where you have
to tread carefully as it’s usually littered
with broken glass shards.
The Ann Arbor sidewalks have gotten
to know me as well. They’ve heard the
conversations between my roommate
and me as we walk to class, loudly airing
our complaints about the world for every
square of pavement to hear. The side-
walks have witnessed my panicked fast-
walking when I’m running late to work,
swearing out loud and promising myself
I’ll never make the mistake of starting
the grilled-cheese-making process so
close to my clock-in time again. They’ve
generously said nothing when I plug in
my earbuds and listen to the same Bright
Eyes album for the third time in one day,
only looked on in stoic, concerned, con-
crete silence.
I usually call my parents when I’m
walking somewhere. The 10 or 15-min-
ute walk provides the perfect opportu-
nity to catch up and the perfect excuse
to promptly hang up: “Can’t talk about
my post-grad plans right now, I’m at
class, have to go, talk later, yes, love you
too, bye now!” But the walk also proves
the ideal place to talk freely and honest-
ly — the sidewalks offer a certain type of
privacy difficult to come by on a college
campus.
Freshman year, sharing a tiny South
Quad Residence Hall dorm room, the
sidewalk was often the only place I
could truly be by myself, in ten-minute
gaps in a calendar crammed with class-
es and extracurriculars. Even later on
in college, when I finally moved to my
own room, there’s still more often than
not housemates lingering in common
spaces and familiar faces to run into at
the library and coffee shops. They are
people I love dearly and value immense-
ly, but the overall effect can be suffocat-
ing. Time to just exist in college, without
controlling the image you present to the
community, is elusive.
On the pavement of the sidewalks,
I’m in full view of the world, yet in
a private enough space I can tell my
mom about the particularly rough day
I’ve had, maybe even shed a tear if I
need to. I’ll pass by others, of course,
but they’re all concerned with their
own conversations, podcasts or playl-
ists. The sidewalk is comforting in its
impassiveness, its utilitarianism, its
anonymity.
Occasionally, instead of calling up my
mom or plugging in a podcast, I’ll make
the daring decision to brave the walk to
class distraction-free — no earbuds, no
walking partner. As I trod the sidewalks,
I’ll muse over a problem or distraction,
bouncing my thoughts and theories off
the concrete. “No,” the sidewalks will
say, “you shouldn’t text that person.
You should find validation through
yourself.” Or “yes,” the sidewalks will
say, “you should apply for that job,” and
I’ll realize I’m self-sabotaging yet again.
You should just go for the thing, damn it,
Meghann.
The sidewalks are pretty much the
only space in Ann Arbor where I can
have these conversations with myself,
where nothing pressing pulls at my
attention — I’m not going to be doing
my reading for class while walking, or
applying to job positions on LinkedIn.
The freedom from these distractions
and obligations is desperately
needed — a space where I have
no obligation to be productive
or sociable for the world.
Due to the University of
Michigan’s size, I’ve spent a
fair amount of time with the
sidewalks as my companion.
On an average day, I’ll spend at
minimum an hour in transit on
the city sidewalks. I must have
walked hundreds of miles by
now on their paved surfaces,
chronicling joy and heartbreak
and love on the trek to the
UGLi, No Thai or the CCRB.
The sidewalks of Ann Arbor
witnessed me at my worst and
loneliest, walking home late at
night from the library, brim-
ming with self-pity during the
winter months of sophomore
year when it felt that everyone
around me had found their for-
ever people except for me. Two
years later, I tread those same
squares of pavement on my way
to brunch with friends that had
been there since freshman year
— it just took some more hours walking
these sidewalks to come to this conclu-
sion.
So here’s to the sidewalks of Ann
Arbor, in all their salt-scored, crowd-
trodden glory. These sidewalks certain-
ly do not make for as good of a story as
a Berlin nightclub, this is true — and I
will, therefore, most definitely continue
to tell my Berlin nightclub story when-
ever said icebreaker is proposed. But,
when it comes down to it, I’ve left more
of me on the pavement of these streets
than I have in any club. So this is an ode
to the concrete squares that have been
my loyal companions — or, perhaps more
aptly, to the person that’s walked and
cried and laughed and grown on these
sidewalks of Ann Arbor these past four
years.
Step by step
BY MEGHANN NORDEN-BRIGHT, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
ILLUSTRATION BY DORY TUNG
It’s hard
to spend
years and
money trying
to make your
body the best,
only to
realize that
you’re only
ever going to
get better.