guys in ties

I'm staying the weekend at my second-choice school, with my first-choice friends. Randolph College is a mixed identity. It is in a transitive state from its cohesive but imperfect past as Randolph-Macon Woman's College to the cloaked future-state of Randolph College. Whatever this current state is, the qualities of it I find admirable. Consider this: the people here aren't afraid to talk. They talk, they talk inspiredly, they talk unfoundedly. But they talk. As far as I can tell, most everyone is a slob in some way; people are creatures of glaring deficiency. But what stands out here is that when people stumble about, they end up talking; there is an expository tradition that exposes everything and nothing.

And at UVa? Proportional to the higher population of people in such crushing proximity, the inability to speak rises. The chances to develop the inability to care are numerous and incredible. The ability that UVa students have to bask narcissistically in the light-pollution of inadequacy is incomparable. We need to learn to speak, and to care. Associations out of convenience are the evil at UVa, because you miss out on simply needing to know someone, like you have at a school where the student body is small enough you could meet half the school in a month. What you gain at Randolph, being shoved close together, is that you are desperate to speak and share and understand and grow and know and meet and love, above all, to love. When you can pick and choose on such a discriminating level who your friends are, you can easily miss out on exploring someone almost completely different from you. We need to learn to speak, and to care

or something