It’s 12:04 a.m., and I cling to life with “Breaking Bad.” Brains and blood and buckets of ketchup textured blood coat my screen and I feel more. Surrounded by tame and listless orchids, soft yellow light and pastel colors — yet in the clutches of fictional meth, I awake.
It’s 9:43 a.m. and I sit in Alderman under the circular lights around groggy students and a bearded man who wears his large headphones and beerbelly proudly. Sorority girls pick up bananas and apples and they try to stay warm with bare legs and neon Nike shorts. A teaching assistant, who holds office hours reading obscure historical texts, is surprised no one has joined him, or maybe not.
It’s 3:16 p.m, and I watch a muttering class leave Wilson, an Econ midterm completed. My lecture filters into the stained seats, each person leaving at least one seat between the others. Three sit in the front row, and they pepper an aged and liberal limping man with questions about the origin of life, stereotypes, the ruins in the Kashmir Valley.
It’s 10:18 p.m., and I refresh my email and my newsfeed while diligently neglecting the philosophical theories on abortion and organ donation I need to understand for tomorrow. I browse through Terry Richardson photographs and Beowulf quotes, and I check my texts for flickers of light in a dim room.
My days at U.Va. run together. Spaced in between moments of happiness and laughter, of eating Milanos with a tiny sex-challenged hamster on my friends’ couch, or talking to a mentor who connects melancholia and mourning to my ceaseless life as a student, I confront a problem.
What do I do during my days here that actually makes me happy? Is it my activities, numerous yet occasionally superficial; my textbooks, dry and underused; or my walks in between class, crowded and slow?
I call my mother, hoping her reassuring tiny southern drawl and even more southern boyfriend can offer a resolution of my second-year crisis. You should get out more! Meet people! Get good grades! Join things! Have fun!
I walk to a fraternity party, desperately sober, and watch drunker people dance to autotuned pop music, socializing in small words and even smaller meaning. They won’t remember my face tomorrow, and I couldn’t be happier.
I ask my professor about the context of Wordsworth, and he tells me to get in touch with my inner child. Go out and play in the yard and in the grass — scream like a native, like a pagan. Do what made you happy then; connect with your youth, and you will be happiest.
I apply a shiny pink unicorn tattoo on the top of my shoulder, but I feel no more pleased about my life at U.Va.
I work through Madison House, hoping for a spark of life, of inspiration, of the giving spirit to wash over me. Instead, I sit in an empty room, waiting. The walls are decorated with motivational quotes and smiling, bright people plastered on the walls, a community invigorated with something more profound than I can access. I leave feeling empty, unconnected.
I ask my friend, and she tells me to run with her — nothing beats exercise, she says. I run for five blocks and, puffing, sit down on the curb, my legs aching, air caught in my throat. I am not an exerciser. She agrees, and we walk to Starbucks and I sit, wondering how I can find happiness in a community where everyone else but me seems to have found it.
It’s 1:43 a.m., and I switch on my computer, buzzed after another night at Coupe’s with similar people and identical conversations, and I resume my episode of “Breaking Bad.” Jesse Pinkman and Walter White become more real than any student, any illuminated spot on the Lawn, any corner of Alderman with frustrated words engraved by students taking finals marked into the drawer of a desk. “Raisins Rock!” one says; another, “JACK WAS HERE.”
My episode finishes, so I start again, clicking the next episode, forsaking John Donne and Benares and a half-completed paper on Yeats for a chance at making meth. For a screwed-up life that seems so much more invigorated and real, in the midst of a student body that seems always perfect, animated, happy.
Grace’s column runs biweekly Fridays. She can be reached at g.muth@cavalierdaily.com.
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