All right, so I'm sitting around, and it is Thursday, and I just love Thursday -- it has a good vibe -- vitality, pep and a punch. Not like Wednesday, which a more mediocre feel -- cloudy, homely, sullen, not sure if it's first or last on the spectrum of calendar division. So, students feel they must always live up Thursday -- bite the bullet, play with fire, whatever people are saying these days.
But today I have the jitters -- the shakes that come from caffeine overload that brings on speed reading, speed running, reckless driving, any way to get every moment out of this Thursday -- because it is spring! Everyone is spring frenzied.
Go and dig out that Frisbee, get all ultimate and throw it, dive for it, you athletic beast.
Sure, your legs are pasty, sure you have the coordination of a baby fawn wobbling on its first steps, but get out on those grassy green fields, Bambi, because it is spring!
Envision yourself on the Lawn with extreme physical prowess. Your hair is breezy, your calves taut and you are reaching, soaring through the air to catch the rotating disk. You're on fire! Be that whole "work hard, play hard" Jeffersonian ideal. Be the Frisbee. Be it, just be it.
Are you feeling like I do this Thursday? The jitters, a little spastic if you will. Maybe it's not the coffee. Maybe we're about to be infected by spring fever -- get out the thermometers. Innoculate us with pastels -- Gatorade glacier blue, Pepto-Bismol pink, Mountain Dew yellow.
Never mind, it is not the Technicolor yawn of polos and Bermuda shorts that is giving me the shakes.
Instead, it must be the ticking in my head. Tic tic tic. It is the clock in Alderman, the digits on your Timex, the hands on those sleek platinum Swiss Army watches.
The second hand ticks and taps like the fingers of the piano guy at Coups who taps away on his synthesizer, salivating on the microphone at the girls in their painted on denim jeans -- their legs toned from a psychotic relationship with the elliptical machine.
What is his name? The piano man (not Billy Joel) at Coups -- the one who plays "Fire and Rain" -- oh if I hear that song one more time I will ask God to "make me a bird so that I can fly far away!"
Wait, maybe that's it. Maybe that is what is causing these spastic sensations inside all of us this spring. (Not the James Taylor overdose -- Mexico, Carolina on My Mind. Sweet Baby James, please tell the piano man at Coups to change it up, stop the insanity) The fact that there are only 17 (count them), 17 days until the last day of classes. That's 408 hours, or 24,480 minutes or 1,468,800 seconds for you multitasking buffs. And everyone knows what that means ...
It is spring. Dust off your burned ultimate-driving-through-the-countryside-of-Charlottesville CD mix. Alabama, Robert Earl Keen ... Farmhouse Phish for all those Vermonty types. Whatever floats your land yacht, Land Cruiser. Pop it in and ride the wave out to Beaver Creek, but stop of course at Belair to pick up a Jeffersonian. You green-acres/lunch coordinating creative genius you. You are the quintessential spring University student. Gas up, roll down the windows and don those sunglasses. Don them, just don them.
So maybe Beaver Creek is just a reservoir devoted to girls and guys who delight in PDA. No problem, because you, we, us embody the preparedness of a mountaineer who packs freeze-dried baked beans i case an avalanche or other natural disaster erupts in the quietude of Ivy.
Whip out that Frisbee and get all ultimate again. Let it skim over the noses of the faces of the bodies that are sprawled out on stripped terry cloth towels -- bodies that ignore the insinuated "public" in "Beaver Creek." Don't make eye contact with those who caress, stroke, fondle the earth, the sky, each other, as they simultaneous chow down on Farmingtonians, the cranberry sauce smeared on their faces. Now be Bambi, Bambi at Lake Tahoe! Prance to catch that Frisbee and frolic and prance because here comes the forest fire spreading to Beaver Creek and ...
Cell phones are ringing. Is it mine or is that yours? No, it is yours. Remember, mine goes brring brring, and yours sounds more like ring-a-ring. We are social butterflies!
Spread those wings, and flutter -- just flutter over to the course at Birdwood. Sure, you've mainly played in mini-golf windmills and plastic brontosauruses. So what if you associate eagles with the bird, the band and the football team and associate club with the sandwich or discotheque. No worries! It is spring and the sweet spot on your Big Bertha is as jumbo as your Land Cruiser.
Smack that white, dimpled puppy and watch the Titlest skyrocket 250, 300, 350 yards past the little man who motors around in his caged in cart which sucks up every hook, shank, worm burner and slice on the driving range. What a crank! You are Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus ... Sam Snead!
Strain your eyes and watch as that white Titlest paints itself against the blue sky and soars -- past the vineyards dotted with formal tents, past the fences of Foxfield.
Keep watching as it heads up to D.C., over the heads of the alumnae hobnobbing on Capital Hill, to the investment houses that sprout from the sidewalks of New York like rows of corn in a field. "If we build it, they will come."
Watch as it heads up to Boston or out to the laid back coast of San Francisco, or down to Texas or Atlanta and think: That is me -- I am or will be that ball in three years, two years, one or even, don't say it, a month.
Because don't forget that if not now, there will evidently come that spring, when it (the Titlest), will be driven far, far away. So get out from whatever pitcher you've been hiding under. Didn't your mother ever tell you that plastic can suffocate?
And remember that golfballs, frisbees, time and spring all fly in this surreal world where life begins on Thursday. But there is a looming future beyond the Blueridge mountains, where Friday is revered. So now we must live up Thursday ... and maybe that is why I feel all jittery and spring frenzied.
Anyway, so I'm sitting around and it's Thursday, and I just love Thursday, it has a good vibe -- vitality, pep a punch.
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