In a city oozing with youth, Boston sometimes feels like a fenced-in rendezvous of kids left to their own devices. Still wet behind the ears, we buzz around with such an air self-importance that our playpen becomes a microcosm of the bureaucratic, no-nonsense Universe, supervised by people whom we still call 'adults.' Even on a glorious weekend of repose, when I leave college life to inconspicuously assume the guise of a Bostonian, my awkward age of 20 -in limbo between responsibility and legality - often thwarts my attempts to enjoy 'adult' indulgences. Of course, in a restaurant teeming with underage college kids, it's hard to expect the management to look the other way, but easy to blame the lawmakers for imposing the belittling restrictions.

For those of you who resent the ageist distinction between college student and adult, let me point out that as a Brandeisian, our claim to maturity is far shakier. Sheltered by nine miles of suburb, a demure student body and the University's obligation to provide $36,000 worth of self-actualization, we are excessively pampered and supervised. Hopping from one school-sponsored activity to another and then onto the Boston shuttle, which whisks us away to the big city at a cautious 40 miles an hour, I'm all but ready to light a fire and sing Kumbaya with my fellow campers.

Contextualized in this pleasantly demeaning existence, our gung-ho involvement in school clubs, boards and bureaucratic organizations is tinged with absurdity. We draw up constitutions, hold meetings and sign contracts, confusing an extracurricular pastime with a socially indispensable service. In simulating a real governmental body or publication, we deal with simulated snags as bona fide real-world dilemmas, discounting the relative impotency of our actions. Sitting in a Senate meeting, I watched our student representatives, well-versed in political jargon, eloquently argue whether or not to extend the allotted speaking time from two to five minutes. By the time they had democratically reached their agreement via a straw poll, the speaker in question could have made his point three times over.

We haughtily impose ourselves onto the world, formulating swaggering opinions about issues we care about, should care about or want to care about, often neglecting our ignorance of the facts. Even during Justice Editorial Board meetings, a smile would periodically flicker on my face as I watched a conference of 20-year-olds grapple with University issues and internal decisions with the gravity of a United Nations delegation. While we are smart and indispensable enough to maintain the highest level of sobriety in our respective Brandeis commitments, sometimes I feel like we're playing a game of 'office' which ran way past dinnertime.

In order to fight a noble cause, we're apt to create it, generalizing a singularly spotted evil on our campus into a University-wide epidemic which we are obliged to uproot. Whatever may be brewing beyond our walls, a few scattered racist remarks accidentally catapulted to public attention do not incriminate the entire campus of similar sentiments. It may be useful to flex our social justice muscle and rehearse our proactive technique, but our Brandeis training ground rarely provides us with adequate targets.

Be it a Senate meeting or politically-charged strife between a student group and a newspaper, we are bound to get carried away with highfalutin' words and overzealous actions. And while we have an investment in the integrity of our organizations and their contribution to the community, so much of the political minutia that trips us up is only practice for a much more convoluted and political world than the one we've engendered. So in this petri dish of budding bureaucracy, let's indulge in an occasional disembodiment from our self-important selves: We can all use a good laugh.