There is nowhere to rant about how much I love this school. I try not to take any part of this for granted, and I am filled with gratitude for public education every day. I am overwhelmed with how awesome this place is, every day. I am a tourist every day.
So, today. I am in love with the Campanile. In the morning, it rises above the mist, and yeah, I pretend it’s Hogwarts. In the afternoon it shines bright white and helps me find my way. On the hour it tolls the bell and it’s everything I ever wanted in the trappings of academia: lovely, traditional, constant.
I love the libraries. All of them. There are 18… or 118… there are a LOT of libraries at Berkeley. I love the weird niches of the anthro library and the piles of paper in the folklore library. I love the corrugated metal that wraps the music library and the absolute silence of the math library. (Mostly because of naps. I bless you, math majors.) I love the enormous barrel-vaulted reading room in the Doe library, with its tall graceful windows and cavernous echoing space that makes church mice of us all. I love the old heavy chairs that scrape the ground and the thousands of outlets to plug in. I love the tappity-tap sound of students at work and the bend of every head toward a book or a laptop.
I love that we’re all here for roughly the same thing. I love how nobody I’ve met is just punching in and trying to do the minimum- everybody is trying to excel at at least one thing. I feel embarrassingly and uncoolly earnest about this, and I walk around grinning and staring like Gomer Pyle.
I am so, so lucky.
Shazam.
