to be an amherst student

Sunday,December 16, 2007 at 7:39 pm (Barnard Year 2 Semester 1)

I’ve spent the last four days here in Amherst. On a snowy Sunday afternoon, looking out the big windows of their music library, I feel nothing like a visitor. Perhaps because i’ve been here numerous times, because I feel so happy here, or because i’ve been here for longer than usual this visit, it somehow  feels like there no difference between those who live in these buildings, pay this tuition, eat these meals, and me, the outsider who calls the big city 175 miles south of here, her home. Trudging through snow this afternoon, moving from building to building, space to space, wishing that this whole semester and all the words and sentences and concepts and everything could disintegrate into the grainy snowbanked sidewalks, I found myself wondering what it would be like to be here, doing this, day in and day out for even longer.

Contemplating the world of academic snobbery not unlike my very own institution of choice, I realize its all part of the game of college. We challeng ourselves, each other, the world, to get at the answers about the things we’re supposed to care about, while quietly pondering the things that make us actually feel something (the music, the love, the anger, the jealousy) in the in-between times. In the times in between awake and asleep, between class and library, between dinner and dessert, between the sheets of soemone elses bed, between the pages of the reading, between the punchline and the laughter, between the extended hand and the handshake; it is the moment’s pause the dimensionalizes this otherwise detached and cerebral existence.

And that is true as a student in Denison, Ohio, in Miami, Florida,  in Amherst, Massachussetts, and New York City, New York. Cynical? Perhaps. More on this later, back to studying…