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. 

