WVU’s fall semester started, and Morgantown is a flurry of frenetic activity once again. There are just people everywhere, and the traffic is terrible (by local standards). The bus I take to work and back usually takes 20 minutes to get there (which is still faster than driving, because you don’t have to spend 30 minutes finding a place to park), but yesterday it took 50 minutes.
Because I will be busy, expect this blog to slow down during the days. I will still have all my morning posts and updates at night, but since I work during the days (and on Wednesday, from noon until nine), daytime updates will be minimal to nonexistent.
Still, this is my favorite part of the year. You can feel the electricty and energy in the air, Mountaineer and Steeler football are about to start, and every semester is a chance to start anew. One of the things I really enjoy is watching the students. As they get younger every year (I stay the same, of course), it is endlessly amusing to watch them try to assert their own identities and struggle to express themselves.
There is no better life than on the college campus.
capelza
Went back to college (Oregon State University..go Beavs!) when I was 30. I know what you mean. Watching the kids, and the excitement, for me anyway, of getting into new classes. Loved the bookstores…but I love books.
Something else, too. As fall descended and the light changed, from the high summer white to that angled, golden light..walking to class from my car (I commuted 55 miles oneway everday) was such a pleasure, hard to describe.
Marcus Wellby
Autumn on a tree-lined college campus is a wonderful thing to behold. Too bad i was too bombed or hungover to enjoy it at the time. Though I live right near a campus now and can enjoy it on a level I just couldn’t as a young man. Just need to get rid of all those punk-kids and it would be heaven :)
Tony
Go Hokies!
TallDave
Damn, I miss college. Esp the girls.
Maybe it’s time to go back for another orgy. Degree! I meant degree.
Tim F
Campus is nice as long as it’s too warm for the coeds to cover up. Then you have to get coffee at night and hope for streaking.
sean
which is one of the reason why i spent 8 1/2 years at Tulane.
MC
Brother, I wish I would have figured that one when I was in college. I just drove from downtown Raleigh toward the NCSU campus at lunchtime. It’s not at all like the cold and rainy streets of Pittsburgh.
Go Steelers. F-WVU.
Tim F
Pittsburgh may not be Chapel Hill but I can report that at least for now, the weather is just fine. Fifth and Forbes are stuffed to the gills with overheated frosh and sweaty parents ferrying stuff around. It’s just too bad knowing that we have about a week of this before the weather gods turn on the shitty-weather tap.
Another Jeff
While Philly has it’s faults (highest car insurance rates in the country, an idiot for a mayor, a baseball team that’s happy to be .500 every year), and it’s not technically a “college town” in the Ann Arbor, Chapel Hill sense, but you can’t beat it when the students come back.
UPenn and Drexel are only ten blocks from my office, University of the Arts (yes, there is such a place. Laugh all you want until you see all the 18 yr old freshman dance majors) is eight blocks, Temple is close enough.
Definitely keeps you feeling young.
jg
ASU! ASU! OK I actually went to Boston University but after one night hanging out on Mill Ave in Tempe I really wish I went to ASU. Nice scenery.
rilkefan
Talking about energy and electricity and endings…
Andrew J. Lazarus
I wish they all could be California girls.
Oh, wait! They are all California girls.
RSA
I agree that there is no better place to live than a college town: Amherst, Madison, Berkeley, Chapel Hill, Boulder, Austin. . . I wish I lived closer than half an hour away from one (e.g., Chapel Hill or Durham instead of Raleigh).
Unfortunately, as I approach middle age, I begin to realize that my long-lasting impression that being surrounded by young people keeps you feeling young isn’t quite right. Even if I’m always about the same age in my own eyes, this perception is not symmetrical in all the students around me.
danelectro
john is the anti-wooderson.
cac
I feel your pain regarding the traffic.Oh yes, they are definitely back in Gainesville.By the way, GO GATORS!!!
SInequanon
I love being on a university campus. It is the most open forum of ideas anywhere, bar none. You are right on target here.