As far as I can tell, getting through four years at Yale is a marathon of incompletions. I can’t count the papers I’ve written that got kicked out the door ten minutes before a deadline, in working order but well short of fine-tuned or pride-worthy. Who can chew on Plato or Ulysses long enough to do their depth and flavor justice? My poor housemate Eric spends every free minute he’s got trying to read 400 pages of War and Peace every week, but he also has to go to squash practice and eat a couple meals every day, so he’s screwed. The same goes for conversations, lazy mornings under the comforter, great dates—all of them have to get cut short if we hope to keep pace with life in the Ivy League. We’re under the gun from the moment we set foot on campus, and to linger too long on any one thing means getting hopelessly behind on everything else. So we bang it out, wrap it up, send it in, and keep moving.

The only good medicine I’ve found is the solid, calming satisfaction that comes from making things. With a really basic set of skills, all of which are thoroughly learnable if you set your mind to picking them up, you can bring a side-table or a salad bowl to soul-feeding completion in a way that’s impossible for ideas and relationships. The only things I’ve ever finished to a fare-thee-well at Yale are things I made with my hands, and they’ve gone a long way towards keeping me sane.

Of course a good bit of what makes the whole Yale experience worthwhile is that it asks so much of us. We’re lucky as hell to go to a school that’s willing to absorb as much ambition and energy as we have to offer. This is what we signed up for, and no doubt we’ll be better off for having learned how to manage it once we’re handed diplomas and hurled out into the Rest of the World. But it’s also exhausting and anxiety-inducing to endure so many premature paper-births and early conversation-deaths.

My roommate Evan and I spent most of last spring and a bunch of this fall building a dining room table. Some of the joints are crooked, and it wobbles a little bit so sometimes we have to stick a sugar packet or a beer cap under one of the legs, but by the time we carried it through the front door of our apartment there wasn’t anything left to do to it. We’d sanded and shaved and lacquered it as much as made sense; then, it was done. It’s nice to hand in a problem set or stick a ten-page paper in a dropbox and be rid of it, but it feels a whole lot better to eat dinner at a table that used to be a pile of boards and is now as functional and pretty as it is ever going to get.

But I’ve found you can get that buzz from more hands-on projects. I made the ceramic mug that sits on my dresser and holds my keys, the goofy little set of plywood shelves that fits under my desk, a little side-table for my record player. I didn’t save any meaningful amount of money by doing that stuff, and IKEA definitely makes sturdier furniture than I do, but I wasn’t shooting for thrift or quality.

Without exception, those objects are the result of my having decided to sneak off to one of the handful of places on campus where you can make things (Berkeley Woodshop, Sculpture Building on Edgewood, CEID, and the Trumbull pottery studio are among the easiest to access) and use my hands to keep my head above water and my feet on the ground. Make something! You’ll dig it.

Top 5 Ways to look like a football fan for The Game

5. Wear all the blue-and-cream swag you’ve got, obviously, but go for the generic “Yale” vibe over the dead-give-away “Yale International Relations Association” look.

4. Slap some face paint on that cute mug of yours. A couple finger-breadth stripes under the eyes, and it’ll at least look like you know the difference between the safety and the tight end.

3. Actually go to the goddamn game.

2. Yell at the ref. Everyone yells at the ref. Make him feel like he’s doing a sub-standard job. “Hey ref, go fuck yourself” is a safe bet.

1. Wander around asking, “Hey, anyone know the spread on this game?”, then take a pull on your beer and say “Anybody? None of you assholes know the spread on this game?” and spit.

I don’t have the faintest little whiff of clue what I’m doing next year, but I’ve damn well worried plenty about it. Here I am, twenty one, head full of good books full of big ideas, and utterly without a plan. Time to get a plan.

We do a lot of fretting over this stuff, but I think too often we’re wrestling with the wrong questions and not asking the right ones loudly enough. I’ve got a few ideas of my own, but rather than just grinding my peculiar little axes, I thought I’d try to distill and combine some of the insight that people who I’ve asked for advice have laid on me. So, here are three considerations to chew on:

Don’t bail on what makes you happy. 

We talk like where we’re headed after college begins and ends with the workaday world. It’s easy to forget that work isn’t life. My friend Charley talks about how what she’s most psyched for next year has nothing to do with the nine-to-five she’s bound for. Very few of us are going to wind up with jobs that make us tingle with satisfaction. Mostly, we’ll be somewhere near the bottom, taking orders and learning. So Charley’s making sure she’ll get her nights and her weekends to herself for romping and stomping and reading. We’ll all be hobbling our chances at a rich, happy first couple years out of school if we sacrifice what keeps us smiling and sane. I’ve promised myself I’ll find something to do that lets me fish sometimes, read a bunch and stick dollars in a jukebox whenever the mood strikes. For me, that means no ninety-hour work weeks and no Manhattan. For you, maybe it’s killer museums and a good club scene. Manhattan all the way, then! You love stuff that’s not work. Don’t bail on it.

You’re not the only best and the brightest. 

It’s easy to get into the habit of believing we’ll be painfully bored if we ever wind up in a room full of people who didn’t go to good colleges. Recruiters and interviewers sell this idea hard—“You’ll be surrounded by really brilliant people at …(Bridgewater, Google, Goldman, the IMF, the Atlantic)” That can be a toxic criterion. I’ve only ever worked jobs with people who never read Proust or stepped inside a wet lab—cook, busboy, ranch hand, landscaper, warehouse grunt—and my coworkers have, without fail, been a howling far-cry from boring. There’s a whole other breed of wisdom happening in the brains of human beings who never drank the liberal arts Kool Aid we’ve been chugging for years. I got all my good jokes from cowboys, drank the best beers I’ve ever had with waiters, listened to a brilliant defense of the free market from a line cook and was schooled on three or four resounding truths about girlfriends from the dude I spent a summer unloading tractor-trailers with. It’s good medicine and a much needed wakeup call to learn from and laugh with people who are unfamiliar with ivory towers.

You ain’t getting any younger.

Do the wild shit now! If you’ve been dreaming up a six month wander in Southeast Asia or a year on a farm, pull the trigger. From here on out, it’s only going to get harder to pick up and dip out. A couple weeks ago, I was talking to the director of a San Francisco food-think tank—the kind of guy who’s got exactly the job I want—and, when I asked him what he thought about taking a couple years to work on fishing boats and ranches after school, he hit me with some blunt and sound advice. “I don’t know about all that. But you’re not going to be able to buck hay forever, that’s for sure.” Our bodies are up for some abuse now that they won’t be able to handle in a few years, and we’re only going to get more and more tethered to the ground as the years wear on. Right now, we don’t have to walk away from a $60,000 salary with a looming promotion, or make insurance payments. We can just walk to the bus station with a backpack, tell your mom where you’re headed and get there.

Unless we’re med school bound, it’s anybody’s guess where age thirty will find us. In all likelihood, we’ll be working jobs we like and trying to find jobs we love, the insatiability that got us this far still gnawing and egging us on. This isn’t the first time we’ve made a tough call, and it sure as hell won’t be the last—might as well figure out the best way to go about choosing.

A

t midnight on Sat., Oct. 26, the bartender at the Black Bear Saloon grabbed a mic and announced that there were three-dollar shots of Fireball whiskey until the song that was playing, “Royals,” by Lorde, ended. Heads perked up all over Black Bear, a standard-fare tavern at the corner of Temple and Crown that turns into a nightclub on weekends, and each group of partiers sent a representative to the bar to take advantage of the deal. At this point, there were still five days until Halloween, but most of the crowd was already decked out in full holiday gear. Dudes with plucked eyebrows wearing colorful Afros jockeyed for position at the bar next to a girl in camouflage pants with plastic dog tags. Later on that night, I relocated to a bar a block up Temple Street, the Russian Lady, where it was full-blown Halloween—a trio wearing face paint ordered vodka redbulls and eyed a group of nurses, somebody was dressed as grapes, and I peed next to a guy in a cloak wearing stilts.

But nobody was wearing phony badges or blue uniforms. The cops were all real, and outside they were everywhere. There were police officers leaning on telephone poles, police officers sitting on their Harleys, and police officers standing next to the bouncers. They chatted quietly with one another, watching the in-and-out flow on Temple and Crown streets, and seemed to be doing their best to avoid interaction with anybody not in a uniform.

There has long been a strong New Haven police presence in the downtown club district, but since mid-September they’ve seriously upped their presence. The heavy-duty law enforcement came in response to a decision by the Chief of Police, Dean Esserman, in an attempt to crack down on what had become an inordinate amount of illegal activity in the area, in the eyes of the City and police.

On the morning of Sun., Sept. 15, downtown police found themselves with their hands full. At 12:30 a.m., an officer led a police team into the club Exhibit X on Center Street and collared eight underage drinkers. Around the same time, in the courtyard outside Club Pulse (north of George between College and Chapel Streets), two men were shot in their backs. Soon after, another shot was fired in the same area and officers chased the gunman down in a nearby parking garage. In response, New Haven’s finest flooded into the downtown club district.

You can still feel this presence today, with the most immediately noticeable changes focused on combating underage drinking. Although ID-checking raids have always been part and parcel of the police’s relationship with downtown clubs, the bartenders and bouncers that I spoke with noted that routine walk-throughs are now a reliable set piece on every weekend night. In the following weeks, at any given point throughout the night, several officers walk through the bar, keeping an eye out for patrons who look too young to be drinking, and check their IDs. After having my ID scrutinized by the bouncer at Black Bear, I was asked to look into a video camera in the foyer before walking into the club proper. It wasn’t exactly airport security level precautions, but I certainly would have been sweating had I not been of age.

Club employees said they haven’t noticed a marked change in attendance as a result of the arrival of a heightened police presence. A clean-cut bartender from the Russian Lady claimed that things hadn’t changed a bit. “We’re not doing anything different,” he said. “[We’re] still not letting people under 21 in, still playing good music. The cops haven’t grabbed anybody out of here, and they’re friends with the bouncers. They say hi, walk through, check a couple IDs… People don’t mind at all.” The bouncer at the Lazy Lizard, a bar on Crown Street near Temple, said the same: “They’re just doing their jobs. As long as you’re not breaking the rules, they don’t bug you.” However, the thick-necked guy working the video camera foyer at Black Bear was a little more dubious about how receptive club-goers are to having their ID’s checked. “After a while, people get sick of being harassed,” commented the bouncer, whose name, along with the names of the other club employees I spoke with for this article, I chose not to print in order to avoid jeopardizing their employment.

Some folks aren’t as keen on the extra-heavy police presence. Jason Cutler, the owner of Club Pulse feels like his bar has been made the victim of undue attention from the cops and City government. While the courtyard behind Pulse has been something of a hub for violence of late, Cutler feels that its unfair for him to suffer because of what happens outside the walls of his club. “What happens on the street, I cannot control,” Cutler said in a hot-blooded response to questions about safety from a New Haven Independent reporter, recorded on video that was posted to YouTube.

Things have not gotten easier for Cutler and Club Pulse, the site of the double shooting on Sept. 15. A Connecticut State Liquor Commission policy, renewed this year, allows local police forces to identify problem bars and recommend the suspension of their licenses to the commission. Cutler feels unjustly targeted by this policy, by the New Haven police, and by the mayor. He recently sued the city for harassment. “The cops have been harassing me mercilessly because the mayor told them to,” he told the New Haven Independent on Thurs., Oct. 5, 2013. “He’s trying to shut me down, and he’s made it very clear.” A group of regulars, mostly from Southern Connecticut State University, recently used Twitter to promote a Thursday night Pulse event as a “Fuck the Police” party, hoping to give the place a boost after a stretch of lean weeks. Cutler said he had nothing to do with the party.

The outcry in response to this heightened scrutiny has stretched beyond the club owners and regulars, and onto the Internet. A lively and sometimes loud discussion of club violence has emerged in the comments sections of a number of New Haven Independent and New Haven Register articles. Many of the commenters blame rap music for making the live music scene violent. One anonymous commenter, posting under the name “trustme,” wrote, in response to an article about the Sept. 15 shooting outside Pulse, “I love hip hop, but I will never go with my friends to a hip hop club, and will not think about taking my girlfriend to downtown neither. Most of these gunshot victims are far from innocent, they flash gang signs and gun gestures… inside these hip hop clubs throughout the night and the bouncers allow it, which they perfectly know what it means.” Another commenter, posting under the name “DrFeelgood,” wrote, “They should not allow these ridiculous clubs downtown or even allow hip-hop nights…they are ALWAYS a problem. Just look at Bar [the pizza restaurant, which doubles as a nightclub on Crown Street], do they promote any hip-hop nights? Nope..and they do not have any violence.”

In line with this sort of concern, for both safety and legal reasons, Kudeta, the restaurant and bar on Temple near Crown, recently decided to stop hosting after-hours hip-hop shows, opting instead for a calmer late-night scene. A bartender and hostess at Kudeta told me that the change was likely to give Kudeta a new vibe, making the bar’s feel “less about the drinking and the partying. It’ll be classier. More about the food. I think it’ll honestly impact us in a positive way.”

In a city infamous for its divisions—black and white, rich and poor, town and gown—the downtown club scene has emerged as a rare example of overlap. Local rappers from rough neighborhoods play shows attended by white guys from Westchester, dubiously-legal college kids smoke cigarettes on the street next to cops, and people from a constellation of backgrounds drink vodka shots and see if they can’t get lucky. At its best, it’s a laughing, dancing, booze-loosened cross-section of a city whose residents sometimes fail to get along. At its worst, it’s shots fired, punches thrown, partiers tazed—yet another reminder that New Haven is still a long way from beating its demons once and for all.

Incoming: Pomp

Tap-tappity-tap-tap! Coming down the pipe as we speak, comrades. Jeesum crow, this shit is weird. We’re about to be surrounded and infiltrated by a whole gang of jack knobs donning wacked-out medieval mask-and-robe combos. Let the horse-trading of human beings commence! They’re important, these traditions! Otherwise, how would we know who among us is popular and promising? Give me candle wax and antiquated nouns or give me death.

Outgoing: Glow

Folks, pucker up and kiss that tan goodbye. Over break, you spent long, laborious hours greasing down with SPF 10 and fine-tuning your bronze. Aloe. Moisturizer. Probably other stuff I’ve never heard of. Your epidermis was a tropical-scented cocktail of pricey Neutrogena products. But it was all for naught, shitbirds. Nothing gold can stay. Sunny McTannerson, meet The Baron Von Flakenberg and his cousin Paley Palerton. If your skin tone was gonna gitchu laid, youda already done got laid. Back to the ol’ dim lighting and vodka shots maneuver.

Damnit all, Yale, I wanna talk about farts. I want to hear about the time your shorts fell off in the pool and the good-looking lifeguard laughed at the mole on your butt cheek. I want to smoke a joint in your bedroom on a Tuesday afternoon and fall asleep listening to Bon Iver, grinning and covered in Oreo crumbs. I want to know all your best jokes. I want to skip class and then a meeting and then section because it’s Shark Week and you bought a 30 rack. I want to hang.

There are some things we Yale folks do that I’d like to disqualify as hanging. We like to do homework in the same room, looking up from the screens of our laptops every few minutes to fire off a sentence or two. It’s nice to breathe the same air as a couple of friends while you read Wittgenstein, but it ain’t hanging. It’s just sweetening the bitter horse pill that is German philosophy. We like to sit across a table in a dining hall and compare notes on summer internships, midterms, hookups. We call this “catching up.” Important in its own way, but still not hanging.

A few nights a week, many of us crank music and pound booze, then go out in search of the night’s best available action. Sometimes there’s dancing, sometimes it’s the same conversations that happen in dining halls except you’re standing up in a crowded room and trying harder not to slur your words. This is called “going out,” and on the right evening it can be terrific. Here again: close but no cigar in the hanging department. Every once in a long while, we sit cross-legged on a futon once our homework’s done and start touching the void. “Am I living up to my potential? Where do I fit in here? What am I missing? Do I have the right friends?” We guzzle tea or wine depending on the night and give answering these questions an earnest shot. This is called “having a talk,” but it’s still different from hanging.

Each of those has got its place and purpose. Blowing off steam, untangling an emotional knot, coming up with a plan of action for the summer—we need to go out and have talks and catch up. But the troublesome bit, the pothole that blows out a whole lot of our tires, is that we’ve coached ourselves out of ever doing anything that isn’t goal-oriented. We’re in love with the Means to an End and Time Well Spent. We’ve got friendships that are slaves to the clock: 45 minutes for dinner with Emily, 35 minutes for coffee with Jim, got to make sure we don’t forget to talk about his ex. The skills and neuroses that got us in the door here—time management, impatience, efficiency—don’t always jive when it comes to human connection or personal sanity. Be productive with your errands, when you’re working on an essay, when you’re trying to milk a couple of extra dollars out of the Yale Corporation’s ample teat.

Then forget about productivity for a little while. First off, it’s wasted energy. We’ve got M.C. Escher to-do lists at this place—we’re never getting to the bottom of those sumbitches. But we don’t have to. We’re all fighting a losing battle in a war we’ve already won. Because you will be fine. You’ll graduate from one of the best colleges on the planet with a sharp brain full of good ideas and a phone full of the names of fantastically interesting people and Honey, now, just listen… you’re gonna be FINE! Second, it’s destructive. If we can’t cool it on the Creed of Productivity and Potential, we’re going to wind up with minds and souls that look like downtown Shanghai—all cranes and smog. And then the bottom’s gonna drop out and it’ll look like Camden, New Jersey—burned out and lonesome. Ditch the productivity.

Here’s what we’ve got to do: we’ve got to talk about farts. We’ve got to leave some of our goddamn emails unanswered for a while. We’ve got to get the asses of our friends onto the couches of our homes, and we’ve got to breathe deep and we’ve got to drink deep and we’ve got to spend long hours getting nothing but laughing done. No getting smarter, no getting further ahead. No summer plans allowed. On a Saturday afternoon or a Wednesday evening or any time at all. Just smiling at people we dig and letting the music play, because that’s good stuff.