Roses, Resumes and Red Pills: Student Leadership and Achievement

A red pill moment is defined as an event or series of events that changes someone's perception of the world forever. Having lived in two very different parts of the east coast (a liberal college town and a conservative small town), I've had my fair share of moments that completely shook my world view, although none more so that my "induction" into the National Society of Leadership and Success.

First, a little backstory. It was December of my junior year of high school. I was working on a group project in physics class, each of us group members discussing our plans for Christmas break, when the door slowly creaked open. Adam, a member of the National Honor Society and my teammate on the cross country team, entered the room with a rose in his hand. I let my pencil fall from my hand, my breath catching in my chest as he opened his mouth to speak. I'd been waiting for this moment since freshman year...

"Andy Luke?"

Andy, a tennis and basketball star with the highest GPA in my year, confidently strode to the front of the room. His induction was well-deserved, but I was still waiting for my name to be called. Without another word however, they turned and left, leaving me to complete my group project like the rest of the class.

When my name had been dropped in morning assembly back in October by the NHS adviser, I was one of the first to run down front and grab an application. I'd spent hours listing all of my achievements and writing and re-writing my character essay, telling myself I was a shoo-in to get in. Unfortunately, I learned a harsh lesson in humility.

I was crestfallen to see a dozen students carrying their roses proudly in their hands as I passed to my next class. They were holding them by the stems, so that everyone could see. Teachers clapped them on the backs as they passed by, hurling congratulatory words at them, which felt more like silent bullets to me.

I met with members of the NHS Committee afterwards, and was told I didn't exhibit enough leadership qualities. The sour grapes were practically growing out of my ears, but I knew I couldn't change their minds. My name had never been announced before a big soccer game, nor had it ever popped up on the first page of a school playbill. In those days, there was only one thing I was confident in; my writing. Unfortunately, writing wasn't a performance, at least not in my small-town high school.

What's more, I never had the time to be a leader. It took me those two first years to adapt to the high school, and nearly every night was spent slaving over a Geometry or Trigonometry textbook. I sacrificed school dances, homecomings, and proms just to score 10 points lower than my high-achieving peers. While many of them effortlessly made the high honor roll each semester, I was pleased just to make the merit.

The next two years, I watched with envy as the NHS was made to be something much more than what it was. They kissed farm animals in front of assembly after successful can drives, missed class for "NHS Meetings," and sat in the front row at graduation. Even as my friends and I joked about how spoiled they were by the school staff, I silently dreamed myself standing among them, having the time of my life knowing I was perceived as one of the elite.

College began, and a new leaf was turned. While many of my classmates were off to the same schools as their friends and siblings, I left everyone behind to go to college out of state. Though it was frightening, I also knew that for the first time in my life, I didn't need a letter jacket or the approval of popular teachers to succeed anymore. College was my oyster, and I was going to take the opportunity and hug it with everything I had.

That was until I received an invitation to join the National Society of Leadership and Success in my sophomore year. The college equivalent of the National Honor Society, nominees for NSLS membership were required to undergo four months of supposedly rigorous leadership training. This training included leadership training seminars, success network team (SNT) meetings with other nominees, and televised speeches delivered by best-selling authors and public figures.

Finally, I thought. I'll get the recognition I deserve. There was no way I was blowing that opportunity again. I received the scheduled list of meetings for that semester, and prepared to take every step necessary for induction.

For all of the accreditation the guest speakers had, however, I found that none of them said anything remotely memorable. These weren't minor celebrities or restaurant managers either; there were CNN anchors, CEO's, and authors of very successful self-help books. The lack of charisma was appaling, and I found myself browsing Facebook on my phone instead of listening.The leadership seminars boiled down to a bunch of buzzwords and common sense. If there was a drinking game for every time the words synergy, leadership, and success were used, I would've needed a liver transplant.

The SNT assignments were a farce. In order to be fully recognized members of the NSLS, we needed to complete individual "leadership projects." We then had to report to our group three times and update them on our progress. There was no completion requirement; all you had to do was prove that you tried something.

At the "induction" ceremony, I couldn't help but feel I 'd been ripped off. Was it really this easy to get into an accredited college honor society? As I was handed my Leadership Training Certificate, I asked myself; what did I actually accomplish? A few lines on a resume? A piece of paper my mom can put in a binder somewhere? Little did I know that I'd swallowed my red pill, one that made me question the definition of the word "achievement."

The Student Government functioned much the same way that the NHS had in high school. It wasn't a secret that the SGA focused more on fundraisers, elections, and virtue signalling diversity than actually doing anything. You wouldn't hear from them for months at a time, and then BAM! A mountain of emails, just in time for elections. They'd get in your face as you ate in the cafeteria, begging for your signature and urging you to vote at the end of the semester.

Vote for what? The next cavalcade of talking heads that college officials could use as scapegoats for everything that went wrong on campus? Meanwhile, as these elected students lounged in their air-conditioned offices, sipping Powerade from their SGA water bottles and browsing Reddit, student life on campus floundered. Yes, someone actually though putting six students in charge of all the student activity budgets was a good idea.

In three years, the amount of clubs dropped from over fifty to a baker's dozen. The school's Quidditch team had to ride in the team captain's van to their out-of-state games because the SGA considered Quidditch an "intramural." Unless it was election time, emailing the SGA for funding was like putting a message in a bottle and shipping it out to sea.

It'd be unfair to say it was always the SGA's fault.  In many cases, elected club leaders dropped the ball themselves. There hadn't been a solid campus newspaper in years, as every student leader who ran it had a different vision, but gave up when the going got tough. Willard and Maple, the school's literary magazine that had once published work worldwide, nearly folded.

The sad reality of student achievement and leadership is that it is selfish.  Elite college students already have a lot to worry about, from the job hunt, to homework, to internships. They don't have time to care about you. They could care less if the student newspaper they manage folds before your story makes it in, or if the astronomy club can barely afford bread. College students are trained to always be thinking about the next step, and all of the fancy things they can tell their next employer or admissions counselor...and more often than not, those things don't involve you.

In college career readiness workshops, professors taught us what it took to get hired. That only the well-rounded students got the good positions, instead of the ones who specialized in one area. As a result, every activity became artificial. There are so many means, but there's never an end. We don't think about the here and now, but rather the if and when.

To recent college grads, resumes are akin to their first child. They're given the right nutrients until they have that silky sheen. Resumes have to be treated this way; they are the meal ticket for the recent college grad. Interviewers don't have to hear from the members of clubs they refused to fund when they were in student government, nor their roommates who had to listen to them get plowed on the top bunk every night by the RA. It's not about being good; it's about looking good.

Often, this comes at any cost. A long time back, my Mom mentioned a book that published the names of stellar students called "Who's Who in America." If you had a great GPA, you could pay money to have your name put in this book. What difference did it make? In her words, "absolutely nothing." My Dad, who also paid to have his name in the book, called it nothing more than a scam. A line on a college application.

We can decry this kind of dishonesty all we want, but this is basic economics. W.P Kinsella coined the phrase "if you build it, they will come." If you claim to build someone's self-image, who wouldn't pay the $50 membership fee? And this was back in the '70's; today, it'd be more like $80. What's more, we have LinkedIn profiles and Facebook pages to spread the tales of our achievements farther and wider than my parents ever did.

In her book The Happiness Effect, Donna Freitas describes social media as "the CNN of envy, a kind of 24/7 news cycle of who's cool, who's not, who's up, and who's down." With the constant war for likes and retweets, we lose sight of who we are and focus on what society wants us to be. We swipe left on true love and hashtag every achievement. We strive to make the perfect life by avoiding the mediocre and risque, instead of letting things fall into place.

Living in the future is certainly healthier than living in the past, but where does the present factor in? Everything we do is a means to an end...except there isn't an end. These achievements that we once craved suddenly become cheapened by our obsessive need for self-sufficiency. Instead of enjoying Key West, we'll spend all of our time taking pictures and bragging about it. Instead of enhancing the student experience at our college, we'll run around campus and ask for petitions so we can stay in power.

Growing up in the Great Recession, our teachers openly expressed how competitive we would have to be to even get interviews. In college, we were taught to obsess over how we presented ourselves to the world. Our teachers and authority figures had always pushed us to think about what we would do next instead of what we were currently doing. We participated and experimented... not because we were curious, but because we had to.

Unfortunately, life is not like The Office. You can't load up Netflix and binge it over and over again. Life is temporary and fragile, and if you move too fast, every memory will merely be a broken fragment. Every second we think about the future is a second wasted on the present.

The Festival in All of Us

For most people, Williamson is a three-minute town. One you pass through on Route 104 when you’re trying to get somewhere exciting like Niagara Falls or Buffalo. Maybe where you stop and get gas, or buy a snack at the Rite Aid, or get lunch Orbakers or the Mason Jar.

For me, this three minute town is home.

For many others, however, it was home, past-tense. In high school, us seniors bragged about where we were going to go next. Some of us were off to save the world as a member of the armed forces. Others would challenge the college education system, and get the career of their dreams...or whatever one would guarantee them the most money.

Whatever the future held, it wasn’t in Williamson.

We all went our separate ways, connected only through Facebook messenger, Twitter updates, and risque Instagram pictures of frats and club scenes. Over time, the likes, retweets, and hearts from the friends we once played sports, did shows, studied, and slept over with slowly ebbed, replaced by coworkers, college classmates, and people you once got drunk with but don’t remember.

And then, Williamson’s Apple Blossom Festival would roll around. It’s your typical small town carnival, held strategically in the third week of May, just as we all returned from college. While some of the events vary from year to year, a typical Apple Blossom features a 5K, two parades (a Kiddie and a regular one), a carnival, a car show, and a grandstand for concerts. Apple Blossom may be the closest thing Williamson has to a true Homecoming...but that doesn’t mean it’s too exciting for your typical 18-24 year old college student...

As a kid, however, Apple Blossom time was like a holiday, akin to Christmas or Thanksgiving. Never will I forget the days the bus driver would yell at us for screeching at the top of our lungs when we’d drive by Breens Shop ‘n Save, where the carnival rides were parked. Or the infamous “Tilt a Whirl” speech our gym teacher would deliver, to keep us from banging our heads against our lockers, disrupting classes, and ripping water fountains out of the walls in excitement (and yes, the latter actually happened).

Of course, in our youthful ebullience, we ignored the many faults of our beloved hometown festival. Like an electric lamp, the festival does tend to attract the more...questionable residents of Williamson (if there were more than a hundred teeth present at this year’s event, you can color me shocked). The rides, vendors, and participants in the car show have been the same for almost 20 years. On top of that, downtown Williamson looks like a town from the Walking Dead. The faces of the blandly-colored buildings are freckled with wear and tear, while untrimmed grass and cigarette butts sprout from the cracks in the sidewalks.

High school came, and as we grew more cynical, we threw off the blinders our childhoods threw over our eyes,and we caught on to all of these faults. Catching Jolly Ranchers thrown by local firemen in the parade, consuming pounds of fried dough, and trashing your friends in bumper cars didn’t have the luster it once did. Our weekends were better spent inside playing video games, perusing social media, or (God forbid) preparing for our Regents exams, rather than puttering around outdoors with people we saw everyday anyway.

As underclassmen returning from our first years of college, Apple Blossom became a convenient excuse to see old friends again. But as we reached our junior and senior years however, bogged down by college capstones, theses, and internships, all memoirs from the Apple Blossom days faded into the dustbin of history, one that many of us were happy to discard.

Except me.

I’ve been out of college for two years and out of high school for four...and yet I still find myself in the Village of Williamson on the third Saturday in May, wandering back and forth under the sole streetlight in the middle of town between the two blocks, hoping I run into people I know. I still drag my friends on the Round-Up, watch the fireworks from our secret spot behind the district building, and pick numbers in the annual cow plop (Google image it, I dare you). It’s been this way for 8 years now, and I don’t see it changing anytime soon.

But why? Why do I come back to this stupid, congested, malodorous, trashy festival every year?

The answer is simple: I don’t have a choice.

I suppose I’m cursed with love; a love of tradition. Like I said before, Apple Blossom was like a national holiday in my younger years. To give it up would be like not putting up a pine tree in December, or eating turkey in November. I know all the floats and marching bands in the parade by memory, and can probably name all the rides and vendors too. It’s a curse of love and, perhaps, a little insanity too. Every year, I return expecting the Festival to do something different.

On the other hand, I’m blessed to have such a healthy network of friends still in the area. For every classmate or peer off completing a summer internship, there’s a friend keen on keeping the tradition alive while making new memories. This year, we stole an abandoned grocery cart that was lying in the middle of the street, and rode it down the steep hill behind the abandoned Gallo’s hardware store. We convinced a man in a gorilla costume from the parade to harass the people across the street. We made new friends with some of Williamson’s future graduates (and the future is certainly bright, there).

I like to think that we’re the ones that never grew up; that got away from the constricting tentacles of adulthood, that forces to forsake the very memories and happenstances that made us who we were. Even at a festival where things never change, that childish imagination effervesces within us.

You might not think that way. You don’t have time to be a kid anymore. You have ambitions you want to fulfill, a house in some upscale suburb you want to buy someday...and there’s nothing wrong with that. God knows I have my own ambitions, from getting published someday to returning to school at NYU and getting a Masters at the Gallatin School.

It’s true that life only moves forward, and that we need to adapt or perish in this dog-eat-dog world...but who’s to say we can’t stop and sit on the sidewalk for a parade? That we can’t stop for two minutes and enjoy a ride on the Round-Up? We’re taught to constantly produce, never consume. To never look back and always find a way to move forward. It’s hard for us to remember that a healthy amount of tradition can keep us sane when the ecology around us is constantly changing.

No matter where we end up in the world, the Festival will continue, in the physical and metaphysical sense. There’s an Apple Blossom Festival in all of us; it’s just a matter of whether we embrace it or not.

And next year, I hope I meet you there.

Entrance-d: The brilliance of Asuka's ghost-like entrance

Welcome to the first Entrance-d blog post, where we take an aesthetic, cultural, and semantic look at some of the best entrances in pro wrestling. To me, there’s nothing more important than a wrestler’s entrance. It’s the first time you see him (or her), and the entrance establishes a wrestler’s character and how the match will play out.

For my first blog, we’re going to take a look at the beguiling, enchanting entrance of the Empress of Tomorrow, the holder of the longest undefeated streak in WWE history, Asuka! Nobody may be ready for Asuka, but you better be ready for a lesson in Japanese drama.

Before we get into the actual entrance itself, though, can we all agree that the low warbling note when her mask first illuminates on the tron is probably the most terrifying thing ever? In an age with even-Steven booking and generic metalcore theme songs, Asuka’s entrance music has that "oh sh#@" factor few other themes have. You know what to expect when it hits...and if you’re standing across from her in the ring, you know it isn’t going to be pretty.

As the vocals drop, Asuka appears, garbed in traditional kimono and donning a rather creepy mask. One doesn’t need a bachelor’s in Japanese culture to understand the kimono...but what’s up with that demonic mask? Why is she swaggering? Why is she flailing her arms around like a drunk?

In order to truly understand Asuka’s entrance, one must have a good understanding of Japanese culture. First, let’s discuss the mask. Masks are an extremely important part of Japanese culture and history: the samurai wore masks for protection and to balance the weight of their heavy kabuto helmets, while performers and dancers wore masks during festivals to praise Japanese deities, such as the goddess of good fortune Okame, and the female demon Hannya.

A traditional Noh performance. That mask sure seems familiar...

The mask Asuka sports to the ring borrows elements from several types of traditional masks, though it’s most akin to a Noh mask. Noh is a type of traditional Japanese performance, a combination of western musicals and religious ceremonies. If you’ve ever played the Lickitung minigame from Pokemon Stadium, you’ve heard the "yooOOOOOOOOOooooo" that’s often associated with Noh performances. Noh masks are unique, in that they are designed to take on different expressions depending on the angle they are viewed from. How many different expressions have you seen Asuka’s mask make?

Noh theatre also invokes characters from Japanese mythology, which explains the way Asuka moves as she makes her way to the ring. When she has the mask on, Asuka isn’t a wrestler; she’s a performer. The same could be said of pro wrestling itself: is it a performance, or a sport? If you notice, most of her masks have blank expressions...which only adds to her mystique. She moves rather like a child, perhaps a young, precocious spirit, more curious than dangerous. I suppose it's true that Noh-body is ready for Asuka...sorry.

The tengu and a buddhist monk. Who would you rather face: Asuka, or this thing?

What kind of deity is she portraying? While it’s hard to ascertain exactly what myth she’s drawing from, her movements are reminiscent of the tengu. The tengu are a species of Japanese yokai, or spirits, that control the wind, and are based on birds of prey. In modern pop culture, they are usually depicted as having fans and getas on their feet, which gives them a strange movement cycle (if you’ve ever played Dead or Alive, you know what I mean). Asuka’s swaying hands and swagger may be her way of portraying the wind spirit. She could also merely be a ghost, flailing about carelessly since nobody can see her (figuratively).

When she enters the ring, she removes the mask to reveal her trademark smile. One that can cut its own promo without having to emit any words. She’s not the demon anymore...though once the bell rings, her opponent wishes she was.

Who would you rather meet in a dark alley, Asuka or a Japanese spirit? I’d say neither...or should I say, Noh-ther?

I'll show myself out now.

Previously published on Cageside Seats