Friday, February 14, 2014

Leaves and People

The weather this week at Cedar has been strangely pleasant. Gray clouds still occasionally accumulate overhead, but they only whine a little with a poor excuse of a rainstorm before grumpily bumbling off to allow the afternoon sun to brag of sixty-five degrees. The best part though is that except for the large, old piles still found in the shadows, the snow has all melted away. My roommate and I closeted our coats and toyed with the idea of wearing shorts.

Even my English teacher says this has been the mildest winter he's experienced in thirty-five years. He said it worriedly and grumbled something about global warming before assuring us that that April and May would surely bring an "unexpected" snow storm. Some hipster in the second row protested. "But my birthday is in May!" Well excuse me little Miss Early Spring, couldn't you let us late winter birthdays have our little moment in the sun?

I mean, although the birds have been chirping happily in the mornings, it's still not entirely spring weather. It's almost like a rerun of fall. For one thing, it was pretty windy today, which we definitely got a lot of last fall. Today's wind was just a little more than a breeze, but last semester the wind was so fierce you could hardly walk in a straight line on campus; anyone driving past must have thought we were all drunk. And there were leaves everywhere. I felt like Pocahontas gone wrong. Instead of this


It was like 



One particular day there were even leaves spread across the floor of the science building. I had arrived early and found a spot in the circle of armchairs and couches leaving, of course, a buffer cushion between me and the next guy so as to avoid human interaction. After playing around for a while on my phone, a group of students came in opening both of the building doors. The wind burst in and caused the leaves to flip and roll around the room, making a crackling noise like a bonfire in full blaze.  It really was the weirdest thing. It's one thing to find mud and leaves tracked in the hallways on a rainy day, but here we were chilling out on some furniture, and these leaves just start violently flying around us. 

And you can't just ignore something like that. All our efforts to keep to ourselves were whipped away with the magical leaf tornado, and we all kind of looked at each other like, "Are you seeing this? This isn't normal." Yeah that's right. We like, made eye contact and stuff. 

The weirdest thing though, was that some students still tried to ignore it and everyone else in the room. And it's like, um, the world just did something extremely strange and...leafy...and you're just gonna sit there like nothing's happening because, why? What is it about connecting with other people that's so scary you'll fight against the world just to be alone? I mean there's the element of "I don't want to bother you because you're alone and my presence might be annoying to you," but...I mean...whatever. People are weird. 

So, I guess that's the moral of the story. No matter how weird the world gets, people still try to be weirder.