Overinvolved Sophomore Finally Busy Enough To Forget Crippling Loneliness
FeaturedOld ArticlesStudent Life September 12, 2016 The New England Classic
OFFICE OF STUDENT INVOLVEMENT — After an especially fruitful outing at this year’s Student Involvement Fair, local sophomore Andrea Deplana (LSOE ‘19) has successfully joined her fourth and fifth student organizations on campus. As a result of her tenacious desire to “put herself out there” and “get the most out of her college experience,” she is now officially too busy to grapple with her deepest and darkest insecurities. Having already spent most of freshman year establishing herself as a proud and active member of Appalachia, Mock Trial, and RHA, all while maintaining a 3.8 GPA, Deplana joined both The Heights and the club field hockey team this week, all but ensuring that she will never have the time to reflect on how alone and unsatisfied she truly feels.
“It’s kind of a wonderful feeling, because now I’m only sad right before I go to bed, and that’s only if I’m not too exhausted to fall asleep before I have time to reflect on how unhappy I am!” said Deplana on reaching this impressive milestone. “If you think about it, this involvement-induced numbness is what every member of the BC community has been socially conditioned to strive for since day one. In middle school, back-to-back piano lessons and softball practice kept me distracted from my parents’ emotional neglect toward each other. And, in high school, I was so singularly focused on extracurriculars that would help me get into somewhere like Boston College that I barely had the time to realize I didn’t care about anything I was doing! Now that I’m in college, I’m easily able to desensitize myself to the sadness of not making as good of friends as I have back home and force myself to believe that a casual hookup here and a more consistent hookup there are just as satisfying as going on a real date.”
Deplana is not the first student to have achieved mindless contentment by purging all human emotions from one’s weekly planner. “The precarious balancing act of managing excessive extracurriculars and academics will be sure to quell anyone’s fear of not having any authentic friendships or romantic relationships, simply because they just won’t have enough time in a day to realize that they’re missing out on one of the most quintessential and necessary experiences one can have as a human being,” explained UCS psychiatrist William Pils. “Students only feel sad when they have nothing to do and no one to hang out with, so when you have four club meetings a day in addition to a challenging academic schedule and the biological need for food now and then, every waking moment should be directed at being productive and accomplishing something. That way, no one has to deal with and all that difficult socializing stuff that makes me scared and think everyone hates me. Um, the students I mean. I was talking about college students. Don’t report that part, please. I love my job. I am happy.”
At press time, Deplana had just allotted herself 10 seconds (“just long enough to feel like I tried, just short enough to not feel anything at all”) to get in touch with herself emotionally between her noon Mock Trial meeting and 1:30 p.m. study group. 
