By Andrew Ramirez
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It’s around this time of the year that things go quiet: midterms and paper due dates blossom like rare flowers over night. The demand for fantastic undergraduate work is heightened, and at 2AM the students tap on laptop Macbook keyboards and drink three dollar cups of venti Starbucks coffee, bundled in sweats, closing in on page five double-spaced, blinking and yawning, and if you ever catch me complaining—remind me I don’t have a real job and then kick all the teeth out of my mouth.
It’s not the academic bubble, more like the academic snow globe. I swear if you listen late enough at night you can hear an adjunct professor winding up the music box in a basement somewhere. This isn’t to say any of it is bad—just real pretty. Sometimes I lay with my back on the grass and a hardback open over my eyes, imagining myself in a brochure, my last name in bold: Ramirez. Or even better: Ramírez. Other times I roll over in that same grass inspect it for fake snow. When the earthquake shakes Los Angeles—as it inevitably will—look on the bright side: the powder will rise up in great sparkling billows and swirl down on the beautiful campus and all the crumbled buildings like Christmas.
More so this year than any other however, it would appear all the fun’s been pulled inside out: a naughty frat email went viral and pissed off a significant amount of people, kick-starting a man hunt for a mysterious east coaster with a nasty flair for defining his terms. (It’s one of my greatest hopes that he’s an oil tycoon by day, rowdy emailer by night, egg-shaped and mustachioed, going Ha Ha Ha in the dark.) But tack on two co-eds humping on the roof of WPH and make no mistake: this doesn’t just mean a bad year for Kappa Sig.
I’m superstitious. I like signs, and if you squint your eyes just right, it’s not just a guy getting his rocks off. That’s a big white omen staring down the entire city.
Before the tsunami, I’ve heard the tide pulls so far back you can pick up seashells as big as dinner plates.
Kappa Sig has been suspended indefinitely from the row as the hunt for the masked misogynist continues—spanning the globe. Anonymous tips have him riding a camel on the dunes of West Central Egypt. Others: sailing off the cost of the Mediterranean, cliff hanging in the Andes, smoking Peyote with tribal Shamans and dancing in firelight somewhere in the nineteenth century in Arizona.
But meanwhile, we’re all still here in 2011. And there’s still spring rising over there in the Los Angeles haze, dirty and glazed, swaying to the fumes coming off the freeway. And meanwhile, there’s still 200 million dollars donated to the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. And meanwhile it’s still sunny outside and the weather is warming and students are finishing midterms and running to the beach, and the palm trees are still made into silhouettes by the orange sky and Tuesday and Thursday are a little quieter on the row now, red and blue solo cups scattered in the wake like tumescent pimples. As smooth as shells and as silent as the bottom of the ocean, or the top of WPH before anything happened.
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