You begin to recognize your fellow bus riders. The increasingly suffocating American summer air is undercut by graduate student ennui. The buses, the library and the cafe are mostly populated with those who have no reason to leave: PhD students, post-doctorates and internationals who want to avoid leaving the country as well as undergraduates who work way too hard. The organized chaos of the semester surely cannot be sustained year-round. There are no run-ins with someone who was briefly your best friend before you dropped the only class you shared, no unbearable tableside gossip that really ought to be said in a way lower voice and no NPCs awkwardly trying their best to look busy, like distracting movie extras. You have access to all the best seats in the house and find yourself cradled by a calm silence typically reserved for the Pentagon-like facility stored five levels below. The library is particularly eerie in the summer, its usual bouncy vim totally flattened. We are much cooler to them than we ought to be, the "mind-forg'd manacles" they hear not. As they were escorted out, Dallas Boy and his friends stared at us, the grownups, and murmured things to each other. “Hey! You can’t be in here,” some poor Hopkins sophomore in an orange hi-vis zipped at him. Gotta be a doctor.” It occurred to me that the age of the innocent child must be getting younger and younger: How institutionalized is this 14-year-old boy from Dallas, still wet behind the ears? What does he like instead? “I’m fixing to get into med school, you know how parents are. It was one of the least boring things I’ve heard in a while. “Quantum mechanics, really boring stuff,” one of them told me when I asked what he was learning. They are easy enough to spot, bearing bright red lanyards, free from bags under their eyes. Three jaded postgraduates playing pool, periodically interrupted by the swathes of high schoolers on some kind of big-brained Hopkins summer program. I spent a few short summer nights in the rickety comfort of Levering Hall. “When will you graduate?” I asked as I moved towards the exit. I spoke briefly with my new fairy godfather. He was already giddily working the keypad, and before I knew it the dark corridor took an orange hue the globe had turned into a giant pumpkin. “I’m sorry?” I replied, looking at his kind, bearded face. My trance was broken by a sudden voice: “Are you here to see the pumpkin?” I turned to my interlocutor, a fellow brown boy. My exploration eventually landed me at the foot of a large electronic globe, displaying a live heat map of carbon emissions, which I admired for a short while. The building was totally empty as far as I could tell except for scattered bags, discarded ring-bound theses and the plain faces of Nobel Prize laureates on pastel posters taped to the walls. That’s where all the money goes, I thought. Its axis mundi is an impressive telescope at the center of a sunlit cylinder. I turned to the stone wall on my left, the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy. Somehow drawn by a deep ancestral compulsion, my body had divorced my mind and found its goal: air conditioning. Wiping the sweat off my face, I wandered my way into a building. I discovered as such one warm Friday afternoon, walking along its hidden creeks and trails. Indeed, it was only during the summer that I realized how lovely Homewood Campus could be. Here, as you enter academic purgatory - otherwise known as a master’s degree – you gain the posture to look beyond your next step and notice the redness of the bricks. Only when you dare to spend all summer on campus do you break the cycle. Constant classes when it’s cold and horrible, midterms in the peak of spring, everything due when you’re dying for the Beach, and so on. The nicer it is outside, the less time you spend there. Such is the tyranny of the academic calendar. A cruel irony that is only understood after your second year: The best time to be at college is when you’re not there.
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