In And Out Of The Haze...
Zachary Norton
Issue date: 4/20/05 Section: features
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Versus Magazine Online [Image based format]
Every few nights, several members of McTyeire have a hookah night. We and perhaps a handful or our hallmates will take a break from the tedium of studying to sit down at our patio table and smoke flavored tobacco from the thirty-four inch-tall, three-hosed hookah that we've affectionately dubbed "The Medusa." Though the people sitting around the table may not be best friends, for the hour we smoke together, we are a family. Every person enters the dorm an individual and leaves an individual; but for a splinter of time, each is part of a peripheral community, a cloud of experience that accentuates, but does not define, character. McTyeire, like our beloved smoking apparatus, provides an otherwise impossible chance to get together free of any communal expectations.
Speak to anyone unfamiliar with McTyeire and you will hear a variety of assumptions and rash judgments. The crass call us weirdos. The ignorant assume we are all exchange students butchering the English language at every turn. And even worse, much of the student body does not think of us at all, leaving us choking on the exhaust of Vanderbilt's dynamic social vehicle.
However, in contrast to other living-learning communities, McTyeire cannot be associated with a particular "personality." It is comprised of devout Christians, counter-cultural leftists, Greeks, and the socially apathetic. Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but if we were to speak in generalizations and platitudes, this would essentially be the character of our dorm.
One need only look at the denizens of our dorm, past and current, to grasp the bold individuality that each student brings to our peripheral community. The residents that comprise McTyeire persistently evade conformity and categorization. "The Brazilian" was with us for but a year, but nevertheless embodied the essence of McTyeire's robust individualism. On any given night, he was eager to discuss intricacies of his national politics, fix us some of Brazil's premier intoxicant, play an award-winning Portuguese gangster-film, or rock out to the wailing tunes of the South American heavy metal band Sepultura.