Somewhere Else book 1 preview
Once upon a time, there were a bunch of Fucking Nerds who were my best friends. Even though almost all of us were sensible enough not to declare as philosophy majors, we ran an ethics club together.
Our faculty advisor quickly realized that our wide ranging debates would lead us into more readings than he had time for. He made the assumption that we would learn just as fast without his interference, so he set Holden free with the snack budget and left us to our own devices in our club room. The room was in the upper floor of the Natural Sciences Annex, and we met there almost every weeknight during the school year.
Our first formal club meeting was started by Noam, questioning whether it was appropriate to have a philosophy club in a natural sciences building. Noam was a man who was such a picture of a nerd that it almost hurt to look at him sometimes. His polo shirt with a subtle Star Wars icon on it hung loosely over him, not because it was oversized but because there was so little of him even relative to his unremarkable height.
Holden was the club founder, Noam’s best friend, and a man whom I always thought of whenever I read memes on Twitter about “nice guys,” even though I knew he didn’t really deserve it. At least, not all of it. He sat backwards in a chair with his legs stretched straight out so we could see his hairy ankles under his beige khakis like a middle school math teacher who was trying to be cool. “So, what does everybody think?” He asked, obnoxiously refusing to share his own opinion.
I ended up in the club because of my friend Paris French, a woman whose idiotic name was only matched by her beauty and coolness. She staked out the first policy position in the debate.
“We should be kicked out of here because we’re wasting university resources so we can sit around and have stupid nerd arguments. The relationship of this club to philosophy at all is more tenuous than the relationship of philosophy as a field to the natural sciences.”
She sat on a couch and didn’t look up from her phone, but projected her words easily and clearly through the room. Moments before, she had slipped off her heels and put her feet up on the couch. As I was sitting on the other side of the couch, that put her feet in my lap. I tried not to make a big deal out of it.
“Seconded,” said Alex, a friend of mine from high school who first dragged me into hanging out with Holden for reasons I still don’t understand. Alex was sitting on a large desk and kicking their feet back and forth underneath it, causing the vivid purple patches on their bright green capris to move in and out of my vision.
“I’ll take the lukewarm position then, that we should be in a humanities building.” James was sitting in a chair sideways, with one leg thrown over the chair back and the chair tipped over so that foot pressed against the wall. The tears in his black jeans stretched open, revealing various parts of his leg but thankfully none of them were too high up. I had learned early freshman year that James regularly went commando. “I’d say my argument is based on the idea that everyone else in the humanities is also just fucking around, so we have as much right to that space as anyone.”
Holden’s face slowly dropped as the debate became more dismissive of his major. I shifted my hips under Paris’ feet and used one of my feet to pull a chair over to prop my foot up on and stretch my thighs. I leaned forward until my stomach pressed down on Paris’ ankles and my boobs touched my leg through my sports bra, and with one sweaty, hairy armpit facing in his direction for maximum disrespect, I threw Holden a bone.
“So do you think philosophy is a science, mister philosopher?”
“Well I’m starting to feel like this group specifically isn’t very interested in asking the big questions and finding out the Truth about the world we live in, but that’s what I think philosophy is about.” Holden’s voice got more nasal when he was annoyed, and he tried to wipe hair off of his forehead three times before continuing. “And I was hoping, at least, for the applied ethics club to be more scientific, to talk about decision-making in the real world, to explore the empirical consequences of everything, and, um…”
“And to not be worthless like most philosophy departments?” suggested Alex with a twisted smile.
Holden snorted and narrowed his eyes at them, but nodded. “Yeah, I mean, I don’t think that’s a helpful framework for thinking about it, but the conclusion is pretty much that.”