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Three times a week, 80 students, sporting face masks and keeping dutiful six-foot distances from their peers, file into the Bryan Center’s Griffith Film Theater for an Economics 101 lecture.
It’s a tale as old as time: you enter a movie theater with the intention of escaping reality—at least for the duration of the film. The lights dim, the darkness swaddles you in a cozy trance and you briefly trade your own world for an exciting and emotional glimpse into someone else’s. Your fingers, which are greasy from the warm, buttery drip of that famous movie-theater popcorn, plunge into the medium sized bag between your knees, blindly grope for another handful of Hollywood’s sweet ambrosia and move mechanically to your lips in an endless cycle.
As a first-year student at Duke, I was often warned (with distaste and a strange gravity) of life on Central Campus. Sophomores would shake their heads disapprovingly at the mere mention of their housing, citing moldy apartments, broken faucets, and an irregular bus schedule that quite literally dictated every minute of their days, as proof of Central’s inadequacy. “The apartments are too old,” I would hear, “it’s in the middle of nowhere,” Central residents would shiver.
Imagine a typical Wednesday night at Duke. As students filter out of classes and pack up to leave the library, they scroll through their phones—texting friends and catching up on missed GroupMe messages—to coordinate their plans for the night ahead. In the midst of stressful and busy weeks, many students look to unwind with their friends, dancing the night away at Duke’s most frequented bar, Shooters. Though many students enter the night hoping to make wild memories, it’s decidedly improbable that they fear this outing will cost them their lives.
On the last night of October, as darkness diffuses through the air and witches ascend into plumes of ominous clouds, we step into our costumes. We paint our faces, wrap feathered boas around our necks, and transcend the confines of our mundane appearances for one mysterious night. As shrieks of delighted fear echo throughout the streets, we promote false images of ourselves and ride this wave of illusion into November.
I’m having one of those weeks. Four midterms, classes as usual, club meetings, this column to write and the pressures of finding a summer internship looming annoyingly in the backdrop of all my thoughts. (Seriously though, people, stop talking about your LinkedIn while I am trying to grind on second floor Perk. It’s distracting, first of all. Besides, those cubicles are supposed to be my safe space. Read: quiet).
As students at Duke University—encouraged to explore the multiple opinions that surround every issue, analyze a variety of approaches to a given problem and ask an abundance of questions—we often take freedom of speech for granted. We rage about the piles of homework we are assigned each night, criticize our politicians and debate which football team is very subjectively “the best.” And in all of this discourse, we forget how lucky we are to live in a society that protects our right to expression.
I can still remember the day I came to Duke. The warm feeling of pure euphoria that bubbled through my body upon opening my acceptance letter, that validated all of my hard work throughout high school, that carried me joyfully through the summer as each day brought me closer to warmer weather and gothic architecture: to my future. I can still remember the crash, the startling and unforeseen collision of this exhilaration with a colder and darker anxiety; the realization that I had no idea what to expect of college.
As the ferocious wave of final exams, presentations and papers quickly builds (its size augmented by the tears and cold sweat of anxious students), we prepare for the deluge in the only way that we know how: by taking on more work. In the face of ominous deadlines and assignments worth 30 percent or more of our final grades (psh, if you have time for five hours of sleep, you are slacking, my friend), we are simultaneously asked to determine our plans for the next semester of overscheduling.
Enough is enough
In ancient Greece, Pythagoras, followed by Anaxagoras and Aristotle, proposed the notion of a spherical earth. Christopher Columbus is often credited with this discovery, and his infamous voyage from Spain is celebrated yearly as an incredible achievement in the way of both science and geography (insert momentary cringe). Today, a society of passionate science-dissenters—including Duke’s very own former basketball player, Kyrie Irving—believes that the planet is flat, and meets annually to condemn the conspiracy of the sphere, fueling each other’s stubbornness and providing our friends at NASA with immense entertainment. In the face of such forward thinking (and clearly, no right answer), I stand to argue that we are all actually living inside of an hourglass.
How do you know when you’ve found “the one”? Is it the bubbly feeling that melts through your body when you look into their eyes? Is it your heart doing somersaults in your chest when they enter a room?
