Cam says
It’s bloody great to be back. It’s fan-fucking-tastic.
This week, Dan and I are poorly reenacting a high school debate club and debating the point ‘Is it actually good to be back on campus?’. I’m taking the Affirmative. I do believe it’s good to be back on campus. I genuinely do.
Maybe it’s the rose-tinted glasses after so many months at home with cabin fever, but I’m actually fine with how busy campus is right now. The quad may be filled with first years, the lecture theatres crammed full, and Alfred St cluttered with bible bashers handing out flyers, but this won’t shake my enthusiasm. Ain’t nothing going to break my stride. Nobody is going to hold me down. Oh no, I will keep on moving.
Truly though, I do love the hum of business on campus. Of students reconnecting with university and of rediscovering all the good parts of UoA. I’m not talking about lectures or assignments. I’m talking about all of the other peripheral things that make being on campus so great. The coffee runs before class, the run-ins in the hallway, the Thursday Food Trucks by AUSA. I know it’s all small things, but campus really only feels alive only when it’s busy.
So savour this time at University, oh how lucky we are to spend so much time and money commuting in, drinking overpriced (and sometimes terrible) coffee and being knocked around in the hallways, We’ve seen the alternative and frankly, it’s rather lonely.
Cheers,
Cam
Dan says
It’s great to be back on campus.
I love chilling in the library. I love wandering around the quad. I love being able to study in the airy, wide-open rooms of the science building, instead of the dusty, mould-covered wardrobe that served as my study space during lockdown.
It’s great to be back on campus. But my god, does it suck that university is back.
That’s because, with the return of university, there are students absolutely EVERYWHERE. There’s students clogging up the quad and the libraries and the corridors; there’s students queueing at Munchy Mart and Gong Cha and UniSushi; there’s students taking seats and using toilets and just generally being everywhere all the damn time.
Walking from one class to the other feels like picking my way through a goddamn Tour de France cyclepack, or walking up the middle of Times Square on New Years Eve. I tried using the HSB microwaves the other day, and that shit was like a WWE Royal Rumble: thirty students flinging backpacks and chairs at one another in a desperate attempt to get a spot in front of the one microwave that worked.
Basically, all you goddamn students are ruining my beautiful campus. Stop it!
And before anyone complains – I know, I know, I’m just being a curmudgeon. Students are what make a university – they’re the best part of coming on to campus. Bumping into mates in the middle of the quad, meeting new people in tutorials and classes, having drinks with randoms on a Monday morning in Shadows – these are the moments that make university amazing.
But man – I fucking hate crowds. In a couple of weeks everyone will remember that the lectures are all online now, and the lines and the crowds and the WWE microwave wrestling will all slowly subside. But until that day comes (usually about two weeks into the semester), imma complain until my lungs dry up.
Cheers, and fuck you all,
Dan
