Facebook.
Right now everyone is thinking about the Web site which most of us use more than we would like to admit. But that isn’t the “facebook” I’m talking about. I’m talking about the actual facebook from which the creators of Facebook took the name.
Remember the summer you graduated from high school and were preparing to come to Fairfield for the first time? When you were bombarded with mail from Fairfield regarding course selection, orientation and finally, the freshman facebook. You were asked to send a photo of yourself to a third party company that compiled the pictures with student’s names, possible major, interests, hometown and high school. Then when you moved into your dorm as a freshman, you were given what the orientation leaders called “The Field,” or a sort of yearbook containing the pictures and information for all the students who cared enough to submit their information.
Somehow, at lunch, conversation with my roommate turned to “The Field”. For whatever reason, my copy has been stashed away with old papers and books among all my things, and I was able to quickly retrieve it for us to investigate. I took a look at a couple of pages between bites before passing it down the table.
As a freshman, “The Field” is kind of intimidating. With all of the students listed, it is difficult to know where to look. It’s just pages of faces of people you may hope to one day meet, but in reality, you don’t know any of them or if you may ever really encounter them. If anything, “The Field” is most notable for males in our class to admire who they consider the hotties of the class and who they’ve got their eye on.
The sad part is, after freshman year, everyone somehow loses their copy of “The Field,” which makes the copies still existant very valuable. Once sophomore year begins, finding a copy of “The Field” can account for hours of fun, sitting and flipping through the book and looking at high school photos of all your friends. At that point, you know to look for the people who are close to you, but you still don’t know enough people that you’re confused by all the unknown faces.
By the time you reach your senior year, you’ve met so many people in your time at Fairfield, that you expect to know a majority of people in the book. The shocking thing is that in reality, you don’t know most of the people in the book. For the class of 2010, looking through the book it seems as if most of the people in the book have actually transferred or failed out of Fairfield.
It’s disappointing that reading through “The Field” has to remind us so much of the people who left us, but this should make us more excited for the yearbook, which hopefully will be able to provide us with a concrete reminder of our years at Fairfield and all the great memories we had here.
In the meantime, “The Field” provided my apartment with solid laughs at how young/skinny/chubby some of us looked in high school. Or we looked the same. Either way, thanks for the memories!
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