These sorts of pieces have one of two endings. The first kind ends happily—the message being that things at this school are improving, that we are being kinder to each other or more inclusive, that everyone is trying and things are working. The second kind is admonishing, usually, telling us that we need to change, things aren’t looking good, someone messed up. But, on occasion, there is just a day in early May, that you spend wearing crop tops with your friends. Sometimes there is nothing to write. Floralia is just such an occasion to put down our pens and put on cutoffs, stop critiquing each other just once.
Newer readers and writers of The College Voice might say, “But the rampant drinking!” “Oh, the waste!”—“There’s an angle here!” Others will cry, “Misused funds!” or “Horrible, horrible music.” Believe me when I say it has been said before—I know because I’ve said it before. There is no angle. It’s just a nice day. It can be so exhausting to be constantly mining for the next thing to criticize.
On the night before our last Voice meeting, I was in a panic looking for things wrong with our school. I was pouring over other online college newspapers, I was thinking of everything that had bubbled up rage in me recently, and was drawing a blank. I don’t know if it’s the calm resignation that happens as you approach the end of a year or the way spring makes people the best versions of themselves, but I began to know that there was nothing to say.
We traffic in opinions in college. We have opinions about government and political correctness and language and food service. But there is something to be said for blankness, that kind of early-May, happy vacuity. It doesn’t mean we’re stupid or unengaged, disimpassioned, or “complacent youth”—whatever the critique may be. It just means we’re open.
It’s a common enough thing to be sitting on the third floor of the library and thinking about how the four people talking loudly next to you have committed the most unforgivable of Conn sins and are most definitely going to the darkest depths of hell for it. More common still is feeling that wrenching in the stomach when you have a particularly uninspiring meal (literal wrenching) or class discussion (figurative wrenching). What’s clear is that some things are worth writing about and getting angry about, and some things aren’t. You’ll know it when you see it.
And despite what Conn College marketing would have us believe, mostly this is a place like any other; sometimes it is a little painful to be here, irritating too. We all have our criticisms. But this is for a less predictable ending for an Opinions piece: it can be blissful, every once and a while, to not have an opinion. Sometimes the hedonist god within us all is honored with golden rays of sunlight falling on paper plates of abandoned chicken fingers, and synthesized-hip-hop-drum-machine-samples sound like the voices of a thousand angels—and that is enough.
-Madeline
