When I think of college (some years hence) I will think of many things, I'm sure. (Or, as sure as I can be when hypothesizing on a still sort of distant future.) I sort of want to list those things now, but I also sort of don't. In writing, at least while you're in the thick of it, Quizo and good friends and not-so-good friends and conversations about shit (literally) and peeing on Huntsman Hall all seem kind of trite. I mean, they're great and crucial and college and Penn, and I hold them all in the highest esteem, but they're also just ... well, you know, and that's the point.
No, when I really think about thinking about college, I think about the few all-nighters I pull in Rosengarten each year. Generally, I'm an insomniac and a slacker, and when I get it together to write a four-pager, it's at 3 a.m., on Sebastian (my lover, aka a 12-inch PowerBook with mystique), on my bed. I've been invited to Van Party, and I know enough regulars to occasionally make my way onto the list, but a hostess I am not. I've dabbled in the afternoon study session, but I'm usually happier outside, on the grass, waving to those who really know what's going on inside.
Still, every semester there are those nights -- often one or two, occasionally more -- when shit needs to get done and I recognize that I'm the only one who can do it. Final papers to write, exams to prepare for, and study habits poor enough to leave me with mere 12-hour windows to work with. And though I don't look forward to those nights, though I, in fact, dread them as they approach, there's just something about them. They're so, so ... well, so college.
Already, I can't remember all of them distinctly. Maybe there've been eight, maybe 13, and all I have are pieces: nights when I took a break to go to Copa, nights when I abandoned the prospect of productivity altogether to go hook up with a boy, nights when I came, stocked with provisions, and waited until the 2 a.m. pussies had left before getting down to business. Really, though, it has become an amalgam of a night. Bumming cigarettes at 4 a.m. (or, more often, being bummed from), stilted telephone conversations as I trace and retrace the brick paths outside of the library in the dark, chats with the people I've grown used to seeing singularly during these studious escapades, watching the light coming through the Rosengarten windows.
These nights feel interminable, but are always finite. Each time I know I'm stuck for hours straight, but I also know the paper will get done, the test will end and as the sun comes up, I will be free. There is an exquisite beauty in this event, this emotion, one that even I, not the kind of person who says things like, "I feel really accomplished when I've worked hard," can appreciate. They're just sort of visceral. I dunno. Can I say, "They make me feel really alive"? (Ha, I can say anything I want. Yeah they do.)
'Coz she knows that it'd be tragic if those evil robots win --
-- Yona
