This place is really remarkable, you know. I woke up far too early last Saturday, and as I trudged across the Lawn while the sun was rising and the cool wind was picking up, all I could think about (other than the immediate necessity of a shower and much more sleep) was how great it is here.
I mean, the light at 5 a.m. on Pavilion IV's windows is like seeing another world. We have really nice sunsets, as you may have noticed. And at Convocation, President Casteen told us to explore the beauty of the campus by moonlight. I have, and it's worth it.
For all the beauty of our days and nights, though, I have been struck more recently by the odd forms and fashions of our society here. We live our lives according to a set of rules totally out-of-sync with those of the larger world.
Take, for instance, the vast array of handicapped pads all over Grounds that open the doors. Though I don't need these devices myself, I find myself irresistibly attracted to them. They endow me with the powers of a god.
I have encountered only a few things more satisfying in my time here than the ability to simply step down and have a door swing open before me. There is an art to the proper use of these devices; you'll find it if you carefully watch those who use them. There is a delicacy to the timing, an adjustment that must be made to the stride several paces in advance, a squaring of the shoulders to express to any observer just how impossibly cool you are.
The handful of times I've reached this transcendent plane of door-opening perfection, I've experienced a sensation of utter validation and all-consuming bliss that definitely exceeds anything the Buddha ever found under his tree.
Keep an eye out for my fellow members of the "Hoos Using Handicapped Buttons/Floor Pads to Open Doors Without Being Handicapped" facebook group. If you are fortunate enough, you may catch a glimpse of someone in the middle of one of these supreme moments of accomplishment -- that, too, is worth it.
There are similar unique peculiarities of our culture, like the importance assigned to one's first-year dorm or our bizarre obsession with the animals displayed on our clothing -- or, for example, the "boombox man." The boombox man is maybe the perfect archetype for the University's madness: blithely sailing through life, wrapped in a bubble of sound, behaving according to rules contradicted by the world outside. He literally marches to the beat of a very different drummer.
I've seen this particularly in the University's strange relationship with sleep. I've set my sleep schedule with total disregard for medical advice and normalcy since the first night I spent on Grounds.
As far as I can tell, this has been true for everyone else, too. No one ever sleeps. With the exception of a girl I know who likes to get six full REM cycles a night, and this other character who bears a startling resemblance to a sloth or a drowsy koala, everyone I know accumulates sleep debt with the carelessness of the Bush administration's deficit policy.
A few nights ago, I slept just more than three hours and awoke expecting my body to scream at me in rage. Much to my delight and surprise, though, my body has apparently become perfectly acclimated to its perpetual sleeplessness. Not only did I feel perfectly fine as I sat up, I felt better than fine for that entire day. I felt like a dynamo; electricity seemed to be shooting out of my body, enervating the whole world I walked through.
Most people, though, don't have that luxury, leading to the eternally long lines at Starbucks and Greenberry's and our improbable reliance on sleep during class to replace the lost hours of the night. I actually know a girl who brings a pillow with her to class so she can sleep more comfortably. I might ask why she doesn't simply skip and sleep at home, but there seems to be a moral issue involved. Oh, wacky Wahoos.
We live our lives in a flood of experience running swiftly over the rough surface of the world beneath, and more often than not the path we follow bears only the faintest resemblance to the dusty track laid out between the hard rocks and the dark places that are offered by the real.
Here at the University, though, my friends, our path diverges by a wider and a stranger margin, and in that distance we find the unique character of the place that Mr. Jefferson built, a place where one can move in and out of buildings without ever using one's hands and exist almost entirely without normal sleep, curled up dreamily in a corner of a lecture hall as the distant sound of a boombox echoes through our sunny dreams. Enjoy the weather.
Connor Sullivan can be reached at sullivan@cavalierdaily.com.
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