Ally, one of Dance Marathon’s Project Kindle ambassadors. Photo courtesy of http://www.nudm.org/projectkindle

Last Sunday afternoon, I went to the Louis Room in Norris to check out the first Project Kindle Adventure, a day of games, over-eating and bonding with the Project Kindle ambassadors (the kids our Dance Marathon money will directly benefit). When I got there, I immediately joined one of the two groups of 15 or so people and began playing camp-style games that allowed us DMers to get to know each other and the ambassadors. After the games, we convened and listened to the stories of the kids whose lives have been affected by HIV/AIDS. As I sat cross-legged listening to ten year-old Ally explain her experiences with the virus, I thought about what I was doing at her age and remembered my Helmet-Boy for the first time in years.

Ally learned that her mother was infected with the HIV virus a little over a year ago, and since then has been an active member in Project Kindle’s SPEAK OUT program. As she told her story, Ally reminded me forcefully of myself at her age. Like 4th-grade me, Ally wants to be both an actress and President. Like me, she takes hip hop classes, is on the Student Council at school and absolutely loves to be the center of attention. But unlike me, Ally’s biggest problem won’t disappear if she moves to a new town.

Ally, like many of her friends from Camp Kindle and fellow ambassadors, lives a double life. She does all of the things a normal 10 year old does, but she also travels with her mom into Chicago for health check-ups every three months. She goes to Camp Kindle during the summer, and she tours the Midwest with Project Kindle doing SPEAK OUT presentations at schools. She keeps her mother’s HIV status a secret from her friends at home, even her best friend. Many of the ambassadors keep their experiences with HIV/AIDS a secret from their friends outside of Camp Kindle in an attempt to live as normally as possible and avoid being ostracized if their peers knew the truth.

Part of me was expecting this event to be forced or awkward, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. YoYo kept us laughing throughout the day with her witty jokes, Tyler ate so much candy he was rolling on the floor in a giggling fit and Dominique shared a beautiful poem he’d written himself. I was shown over and over again how important Project Kindle is in their lives and how grateful they are that we have chosen to partner with their organization.

Naturally, I admire these kids for their courage and their unflinching hope. But at the same time, I wish I could admire them just for being smart and engaging youngsters. I wish Ally could live a completely normal life, without the secrets or the constant worry for her mother’s health. I wish the other ambassadors, many of whom are HIV positive themselves, could live peacefully without worrying how their friends might react to the truth. While I am inspired by their strength, I wish, in an earnest and indignant way, that these amazing people could be told with certainty that HIV/AIDS will be cured and they will live completely normal lives — replete with wonderfully silly problems like my Helmet-Boy.

After all the games, eating and sharing were over, we all put our arms around each other and sang along to “Seasons of Love” (a Camp Kindle tradition). While tunelessly belting “525,600 minutes,” I finally understood why so many of us are going to spend the next four months canning in the frozen streets of Evanston, shamelessly squeezing our friends and relatives for donations and then stuffing ourselves like sweaty sardines into the Louis Room for thirty hours. Somewhere between untying a massive human knot and playing charades with a walking stick, I rediscovered my dedication to Dance Marathon, which is something I’d sort of buried under work, papers, class registration and everything else that tends to occupy space in my mind.

I fell in love with Dance Marathon last year because I saw that it was a way for college students to have a part in making the world a better place. What I learned this weekend was that Dance Marathon’s significance doesn’t just come from its ability to do good or to help in an abstract way. It’s also an opportunity to improve the lives of absolutely incredible kids whom we can actually meet in tangible ways. It’s to make sure that kids like Ally, YoYo, Tyler and Dominique can be as normal as any other kid without feeling ashamed of themselves in any capacity, and to provide hope that one day their biggest childhood problem will be a distant and fuzzy memory.

Sometime during fall quarter of my freshman year, I was at a party with a group of upperclassmen. I politely refused any drink offers, claiming that I was partied-out from the weekend before, and the weekend before that and the weekend before that, too. At this, a senior put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a piece of advice: It’s not alcoholism until graduation. Everybody within earshot laughed, cheered and raised their shiny red Solo cups in salute to collegiate debauchery. I laughed along, mildly surprised that Northwestern students placed so much value on the capacity to drink, especially because I’d been forewarned of Northwestern’s deficient social scene.

A month or so after that, the same senior was berated for not knowing what he was doing after graduation, and was called immature for putting his partying before his schoolwork. This was more in line with my preconceived notions of Northwesternian attitudes, but I was confused by the complete turn of opinion. How is it that a person can be both admired and condemned for the exact same thing? To be considered socially successful at Northwestern, is it necessary to be brilliant, accomplished, and drunk all at the same time?

Darryl Liu, a McCormick junior, believes that “some people, a significant amount, use college as an excuse to drink. At NU there is pressure to drink some, but not pressure to drink like crazy and black out.” Unsurprisingly, these experiences seem to fall in line with the majority of those in the Northwestern social life.

After all, we are still college kids. Just like the students at huge party schools, we want to have the best and most memorable college experience possible. We’re going to be working for the rest of our lives, so there’s no time like the present to make hilariously irresponsible mistakes. Of course, being reckless and careless by no means necessitates drinking, but alcohol is a time-honored social lubricant that allows us to pretend that we aren’t awkward nerds who love politics, science, literature, or any of the things that labeled us as geeks in high school.

But for a university with an unabashedly thirsty social life, there’s an element of partiers’s remorse that seems to hound Northwestern students when they’re outside a party setting, a sentiment I’ve never seen from my friends at more stereotypical party schools. Those of us who might have been grooving away at the Keg last night talk about it with amused shame the next day, or are reluctant to talk about it at all. Nearly every person I spoke to was visibly uncomfortable with discussing the party scene at Northwestern, while the same people spoke with ease about the rigors of Northwestern academics.

Weinberg senior Sarah McMillan believes that Northwestern students are too focused on what happens after graduation. “When I talk to friends at different schools, there’s not as much pressure on them to know what they’re doing after graduation, and that comes from Northwestern and starts as a freshman,” she said. I think we can all relate.

Because when it comes down to it, we chose Northwestern because we’re nerds, because we’re good at school and enjoy school. This doesn’t mean that we don’t love to have a good time. But it does tend to change our outlook on partying like we just don’t care, particularly when we stumble into our third midterm of the week with a temple-bursting hangover. Personally, I love to go out and I have the sense of humor of a ten-year-old boy, but I’m constantly sitting on ever-growing piles of reading, papers and pamphlets for LSAT prep classes. At any given moment, whether I’m drinking cheap beer or laughing at some vague reference to penises, part of my mind is always focused on everything I should be getting done in order to keep afloat.

So, after a year of being over-worked, over-partied, and completely lost, I think I’ve figured out something that should be totally obvious. The key to being cool at this particular college is an unavoidable double standard: Be carefree and reckless, but make sure to maintain that stellar GPA. Keep an eye on the future while fully enjoying the freedoms of the present. To me, it’s an insane social paradox, but is one of the unique things I love most about Northwestern. No, we are not a party school, and no, we are not focused solely on academics. We are simply caught in a never-ending balancing act between our desire to be dumb college kids and our understanding that no matter what, our nerdy proclivities will always get the better of us.