A buzzing and abrasive drone of yet another dubstep remix mingles before exploding onto the street and intruding into your room. It’s 1 PM. Welcome back to Madison.
A college with a dress code seems entirely antiquated but walking the streets you find that a voluntary and all encompassing agreement has been ratified. The dirtiest hipsters with their skinny jeans and the greasiest frat guys in their pastel shorts wear the boat shoe. Among the hipsters it’s plaid and denim and plaid and denim. Among the frat-stars, its pastel shorts and old lacrosse or 8th grade boys basketball jerseys.
Ok, so there are more than two uniforms to choose from. And please, do not let me forget the hats. There are so many 80’s and 90’s team hats that if the correct were applied to a photo of the campus crowd, anyone would have a genuinely difficult time guessing what decade it was.
Summer is over. But why, then, have I never seen so many guys wearing athletic jerseys that barely cover some of their bellies? Why, then, have I never seen so many empty alcoholic beverage containers colorfully confettying the streets every morning?
It’s back to school but people are scoffing at their books, if they’ve been purchased yet.
This conversation unfolded at my friend’s apartment on Wednesday.
“You coming to the terrace with us?” said a student more akin to the frat-star, with, yes, a ’92 Redskins super bowl champs hat backwards on his head.
“Nah man, got to go read,” replied the other student adorned in a long-sleeve Henley tee slurping home brew caf?.
“What? It’s the first week of school, just tell the professor that you just picked up the class and that you won’t have your books for at least another week,” he jested, unable to grasp what the student meant by “reading.” “If you play it right, you won’t have to do any work until October.”
School’s beginning has hardly anything to do with academia, at least for most of the undergraduate body in Madison. If it can be described as something, it will never be any one thing. It is what you have been waiting for after a gruelingly mundane summer internship that you swear will benefit your future. It is the reprieve from action, just sitting and not doing, perfect. It is your own space after a summer of living with your family. It is the opportunity for new love and lust. It is the opportunity to rekindle old love and lusts.
The terrace will be ransacked with students guzzling there favorite brews or guzzling what brew they can afford, all merry and enjoying the end of the summer that is the break before school even when classes have started.
As always you won’t find just twenty something’s or kids with fake id’s at the terrace, but older and grayed academics, business men and other eccentric citizens of Madison grappling at the final red and orange pandemoniums that are the sunsets that tell you that summer still is.
“I love it. I don’t do s*%t all day. After having camps more-than-scheduled-life every single day for the past three months, it couldn’t be better,” explained a YMCA camp coordinator and counselor.
Seemingly the strangest encounter in the culminatory and orgasmic summer’s end is finding anyone that does not look like a perhaps homeless, absolutely cat-ridden-homeowner, or caffeine-crazed professor in the library, reading.
Passing through (I swear, just passing through), I saw a female student still brandishing the sundress encounter her buddy reading with a cup of the most terrible coffee on campus from Espresso Royal.
“Oh my god, what the hell are you doing in the library?” remarked the awestruck passerby.
“No, you don’t understand. This is amazing. I literally worked five hours everyday this summer at the Audubon center back home, and after that I would mow lawns. This is amazing.”
“Haha. Well, are you coming over to drink with us later?”
Regardless of the student, summer’s demise is something that must be celebrated for two weeks, however mundane or abrasive their form of celebration may seem, because after the first couple weeks back in Madison, most students know its back to coffee they usually wouldn’t drink and books they definitely wouldn’t read.
But everyone knows it’s actually just the beginning of football season. And whatever that entails.
