“Wow,” I think to myself. “What a beautiful, unified-looking campus.” Then, I suddenly get very frightened. “This can’t possibly be BU. Where the hell am I?”
As I am writing this, it’s Thursday, because I am so very, very late with my deadline. No big surprise there. The big surprise was that after days of dreary, drizzly weather, today (yesterday, for you crazy future types) was downright gorgeous. And as invariably happens on the first nice day of spring, the campus came alive.
It’s not just that there’s people sprawled out on whatever spare bit of grass they can find, trying to soak up some rays but instead soaking up mud with their pants because it was rainy Wednesday. On these early spring days, you get the impression that people genuinely want to be here.
My favorite thing to do on these days is to walk to the “Beach,” because on days like yesterday, it almost doesn’t deserve those ironic quotation marks. On these days, it seems like it really is the center of campus activity. Witness the hippies in shorts and hemp necklaces thicker than their forearms playing Frisbee. Behold the President’s Host tours full of pre-frosh who look as though they actually would like to go here. Yesterday, Birthright Israel had sponsored a rock-climbing wall on the Beach. Friends, I don’t especially want to go to your country right now, and I certainly don’t want to climb your wall, but it warms my heart that such a thing is there anyway. Hell, between that and the sumo-suit wrestling at D’Angelos, it’s like every MTV Spring Break ever, right here on our campus. All that’s missing is Kennedy. Not that the importance of Kennedy can be underestimated.
But while I was circumventing the GSU, trying to find where they were taping Singled Out, I got to thinking. It’s something I’ve been doing a lot lately, despite my best intentions. In these final, introspective days of my senior year, I’m beginning to question a lot of the choices I made in college. For instance, I’ve pretty much decided that if I had to do it all over again, I’d freak out because there must be some kind of hole in some kind of continuum, perhaps of the space-time variety. But once I got over the initial freak-out, I think I’d be a TV major instead of an English major. Why? Because TV majors watch TV and then get graded on it. What a racket! I’ve also regretted not getting to know the city of Boston well enough. It’s not very often I get beyond our little microcosm of a campus, unfortunately. To rectify that, I’ve resolved to go exploring the city some day when the weather is nice and I don’t have a column to write at the last minute. So, after questioning my choice of major and my choice of social activities, it was only natural to take a step back and question my choice of school.
You can’t see a day like yesterday and help but ask, would I have been better off somewhere where it’s warm all the time instead of in a school where half the year I could hang-glide to class from the freezing, gale-force winds outside my front door? Would I have enjoyed school in California more? Or perhaps one of those shady Mexican med schools I’ve heard so much about? Happily, I think the answer is no. In a few months, we’ll be used to this. Soon, temperate spring will give way to sweaty, sun-burnt summer (all while the Student Village maintains a happy 71-degree Fahrenheit medium), and we’ll be wishing for the cool of autumn again. We might even start yearning for a snowstorm, which always seems cooler when you’re not actually having one. It takes you until July to forget that snowstorms pretty much suck.
My point is, someone somewhere once said you have to take the good with the bad. I’m no philosophy major, but I’m pretty sure it was someone who predated Facts of Life. If we didn’t have those cold, infinitely crappy New England winters to suffer through, days like yesterday wouldn’t be nearly as meaningful when they finally come. Sure, nice weather is nice weather, but I guarantee you that if the University of Florida had a sunny, 60 degree day, they wouldn’t think twice about it. They wouldn’t feel the sense of joy that I felt as I walked around campus yesterday. We might not have the best campus or the friendliest campus, but when everyone’s in a good enough mood, and the angle of the sun is just right, it feels as if we have a campus I’d want to live on. I’ve got to hand it to you, BU: You’ve got your moments.
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