It’s Friday morning, and it’s raining, and the very last thing I want to do is go to class. My lack of motivation isn’t helped when I discover my roommate has already commandeered the bathroom … even though she doesn’t have to leave until at least an hour after I do. Which means, of course, that I’m annoyed with her even before she starts playing Taylor Swift’s new song ‘White Horse’. If she were playing it on a CD, instead of out of her computer, I think I would have broken the disc by now. Swift whines in an emo half-whisper about how she’s “not a princess and this ain’t a fairytale”, and first of all, it’s “isn’t” not “ain’t”; second, how surprised is she, really, to have discovered reality; third, the whole problem seems to have stemmed from her dating a world class jerk, so again, how surprised is she by this outcome; and fourth, no she isn’t a princess, but she is a very rich, famous, and successful teenage country star, so maybe she should count her blessings and shut up already about her ostensibly terrible love life. Also, stop making stupid girls even more emo.
So I get dressed and trek off to class a bit earlier than usual, partly because it takes longer to walk in the rain, but mostly because I’m pretty sure I’ll be coming around on a white horse to trample Taylor Swift if I have to listen to that stupid song one more time. Consequently, I’m the first person in the classroom, but this blissful solitude doesn’t even last a full minute before the door opens and my least favorite classmate enters with her friend.
She’s a sophomore with the whole bohemian “I-don’t-care-what-people-think-of-me” thing going on, and has the extremely irritating habit of loudly proclaiming just exactly what she finds wrong with world at that particular moment – there’s always something – but she does it with an impressive vocabulary, and the other sophomores think she’s brilliant.
I’m not surprised, this morning, to hear her complaining about something – children or her Linguistics homework or the fickleness of men or her parents deciding to take a second honeymoon in Mammoth during Spring Break – it doesn’t matter what it is, really, her point is the same as Taylor Swift’s: life sucks.
And the most frustrating part is that I can’t really articulate why she’s wrong. I can’t help thinking that if I’d met her when I was a junior in high school or a freshman in college, I would probably have loved her and found her hilarious – which probably says more about me than it does about her. As it is, though, she happened upon me in the stage of my life where any cynicism that isn’t my own annoys me, for reasons I can’t fully explain. My ever-present optimistic streak is strong this year, and life’s rough, sure, but it doesn’t suck as much as everyone seems to think, and then my realistic side jumps in and snaps that maybe if people didn’t have such stupid, unrealistic expectations in the first place, they wouldn’t be so jaded now.
It’s stopped raining by the time I finish my classes at noon, and I’m walking back to my apartment still struggling with the paradox of my own cynicism and my loathing of the cynicism of others, when a cloud slides away, and I’m hit by brilliant sunlight. Suddenly I’m forcefully reminded of walking this same road two years ago as a freshman, wondering if this was how the next three-and-a-half years would be: the bright sun, and the awkwardness, and the vast, terrifying, unknown blank that is the future (and the terrible irony is that I wasn’t that far off).
I get home and try to distract myself for a few hours, and then one of my roommates comes home and announces she’s going for a walk, and I remember that I’m supposed to be exercising for my P.E. class, so I should probably go on one too. I get my shoes on and grab my iPod, and it’s only after I’m in the neighborhood that I realize this probably wasn’t the best idea if I didn’t want to have to think. It’s nearly sunset as I turn on to Hill Street, which is just far enough away from my apartment for my pessimistic side to kick in and remember, hey, wasn’t it supposed to rain again tonight?
I look up, but the sky is completely clear. I follow its ever-lightening curve down to the clouds lining the horizon, behind which the sun has just disappeared. Below the ocean is laid out, muted colors in the pre-twilight, pastel shades of orange, pink, blue, green, gray, and brown, and the combination should be ugly, but somehow it isn’t.
I’m supposed to be getting my heart rate up, but it’s hard to care about passing a P.E. class when confronted with such overwhelming natural beauty. Instead, I stop and take in its vastness, and – just for a moment – feel that maybe it’s enough.
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