'I got shot:' Even the most barbarian students honor unwritten social code

We are heathens. When looked at from the perspective of an 18th-century musketeer or a valiant prince, or even through the eyes of Genghis Khan and his Mongols, we as college students are a rude, crude, lazy culture. We sleep late (past sunrise) and walk short distances just so we can sit down for extended periods of time. We participate in cults called eating clubs and the gauntlet of "initiations," and when the Domino's guy arrives at the door, he immediately becomes our prey. Our language seems like we are speaking in tongues (sketchy? 'Wa? PUID?). We all descend upon the campus in swarms, wearing our khaki or black pant tribal dress, and on Thursday and Saturday nights, we view the opposite sex as meat.

Hey, if you connect the paths between McCosh, Firestone, the U-Store, Dillon, Nassau, and the 'Street' (and don't even fool yourself into thinking you go anywhere else during the school year, unless you count PMC), then you get a pentagram (light a candle and chant Dei Sub Numine Viget and see what you conjure). For all purposes, we are a society of SAT-scorin', J. Crew-wearin' barbarians.

Yet I see a kind of honor coming through, a sense of loyalty to our generation that surfaces in unspoken rules and conduct. Take shotgun, for instance. We all may know different variations of the rule (wait until you see the car, it counts for the ride there and back, and all the related deviations), but the one tie that binds them all together is that we obey them, no matter who wins. No matter how many frat boys, engineers, preceptors, or 'Prince' columnists you get together, the first one to call it wins, with no dispute. If Peter Singer called shottie, even Not Dead Yet would dutifully ride in the trunk.

Similarly, if you leave your seat for a minute in a room of friends (or enemies), you claim the right to call "dibs", "fives", or even "nobody take my seat" if you have the extra time. The best part is, not only will no one sit in your spot, everyone will just stare at your open seat, comfortable and empty as it is, never thinking of touching it. This is power. By staking your claim to a location merely by sitting in it first, you automatically command a sort of reverence for your catlike sitting reflexes and almost instinctual outcry of "dibs." Some world leaders don't even garner that kind of respect.

The laundry room provides us with a modern-day parallel to a battleground. It certainly looks like it has seen war, but for anyone who has ever done laundry on a Sunday afternoon, it is filled with a tension greater than any Holy War. The armor here is universal in that it consists of the most ridiculous outfit in your wardrobe, as all other proper pieces of clothing are in the process of being washed. Specific codes of honor are followed, regardless of whether they are posted in laminated signs on the wall. No one will stop a washer before it is done, no one will leave wet clothes on the floor, and in case of premature removal from the dryer, clothes will be separated into an ever-so-slightly different pile than the next one. However, this system has gray areas. There is no promise that your Bounce sheets will be safe from the staticky hands of others, or that your clothes will be moved from a washer to a dryer, or they won't be set on "Nuke" and therefore shrink, or if your allotted dryer time is deemed too long, then your clothes may be removed. Even honor has its limits.

And somehow, it is silent agreements and rules such as these that hold our environment together. Who is to say how many floors I would have had to sit on, wet socks I would have found on the floor, or seatbelt-less journeys I would have had to make were it not for the uncanny sense of duty to our peers, despite our "savage" behavior. But whoever took my Tide from the laundry room last week, I will hunt you down like the animal you are. Jen Adams is a psychology major from Ogdensburg, N.Y. She can be reached at jladams@princeton.edu.