Born this way

A first-year student recently told me that she did not want to join the student corps because she felt too much pressure to assimilate. That day, I was reporting on the fashion choices of first-year students and was standing with a photographer on the lawn in front of the society in Kralingen.

There were many women wearing polka dots on skirts, tops and bags. The dots, the size of a chocolate coin, were mostly black on white, sometimes white on black. The polka dot began as a trend in the second half of the nineteenth century and, with the help of Minnie Mouse, has never left western clothing. In recent years, the specific black-and-white polka dot trend has made a comeback via the usual route of couture and Pinterest girls with long hair. I had anticipated its arrival on campus, but the RVSV ladies were, contrary to my expectations, the first to don them.

I must admit that I have always kept my distance from student society life and therefore do not know that culture well. A week after the party, I went to a birthday celebration in ‘s-Gravenland. A friend of mine turned fifty, and his twin sister had invited her year club friends. I spoke to one of them next to the inflatable disco in the garden. She told me she was happy with her ‘friends for life’ and how lovely it was to grow older together. On the dance floor, her friends were standing still to the rhythm of Born this way by Lady Gaga.

I wonder what it would be like if, at the age of forty, you decided that you had had enough of that year club and that you no longer really wanted to see those women and their husbands. Is it all or nothing? Can you gradually take a step back and just join in occasionally, or is it completely over? Are you lost to them forever and must you start anew in building social connections? In that garden, the year club friends sang a Hazes song with lyrics they had written about the birthday celebrant. For the occasion, they had all put on purple boas and seemed to be having a lovely time.