Casual Fridays: Home alone

We’re really excited for Bacchanal. Not just because of WizFace Khalifa of Montreal, the most popular and best-known band ever to grace the face of Alma Mater, and not just because there will be free stuff (which is, naturally, our favorite kind of stuff). No. We’re excited for Bacchanal first and foremost because we are finally going to see throngs of our classmates. On the weekend. On campus. At another school, this might not make our hearts sing a free concert of their very own. But at Columbia, this is a rarity. A rarity that we’re going to be there for—and you will be, too.

Look, kids. We knew when we signed up to go to “Columbia University in the City of New York” that we weren’t headed for an isolated, insulated campus. We knew that everybody wasn’t going to show up to class on Monday talking about the same party at Animal House. And we like that about Columbia. Really, we do. It’s just that, well, it gets a little lonely sometimes.

Take last weekend, for example. What did you do? Probably not the same thing as any random person in any one of your random classes did. Maybe you went to see the naked people at MoMA, and he went to a swanky bash in Chelsea. Maybe you studied in Butler, and she studied in Avery. We wouldn’t know. We were busy chasing tumbleweeds across the empty Steps.

And this weekend’s going to be different. But wouldn’t it be great if there were more different weekends? More Monday morning lectures in which you could respond, “Yeah, you and everyone else” to that kid who talks about how awesome the concert he went to was? More clubs who put on big weekend bashes that keep all of us here just to have fun (for once)! More things that all of us, as a campus, could do together at Columbia University, and not in the City of New York? Isn’t this city big enough for both? Events are challenging to put together, and the Bacchanal crew Bacchs around the clock to make this happen. But when it happens, it happens to, if not all, then a lot of us. Together. As a community. There should be more of that.

But for now, we’ll look forward to the weekend. We’re already cleaning the tumbleweed off of our Ghost Canadians of Khalifa T-shirts.