The Grammatitarian, Part I

I really can’t stand this guy. This guy, I really can’t stand.

Me, I was jeans and t-shirts. Him, he was cardigans and khakis. Me, I was feet up on the chair. Him, he was perfect posture. Me, I was ivy league for four years. Him, he was ivy league born and bred. Me, I was unpopular. Him, he was the shit.

You could find him walking the quad in between classes. While everyone else crossed the lawn, arms furiously pumping at their sides, hurridly tromping down the blades of grass in a rush to make it to class on time, he stayed on the sidewalk. Somehow his path was always straight ahead. Somehow he’d never once been in a hurry.

My first week there, the whispering willows dangled down like witches fingers, inviting me into a cocoon of relaxation under their shade. Moving on, I ignored the trees and instead searched out the campus for a code of names and numbers. The buildings loomed about everywhere, all of them dressed in identical red brick and tiled roofs; materials mandated by the University a hundred years ago in order to maintain the prestigeousity, inside and out.

I followed no path on my quest. I was off-roading, moving forward, moving sideways, backtracking, possibly even levitating at times, in order to find Hamilton Hall 109. Halfway through the class, a class I had yet to track down, I gave into the willows and laid down, assuming the wind and the leaves were as good a guide as any, trying to utilize some transcendental tricks, and fell asleep there, two yards from Hamilton Hall, the most gorgeous building on the entire campus some would say, because it was camouflaged in ivy and tucked behind a veritable forest of healthy arbors.

I awoke to a tickling sunlight slipping down through the split seams of foliage. As I crawled out from beneath my willow’s fortress of branches, I was introduced to an unwelcomed number of curious glances, disapproving brow furrows, and even a few ivy-league-level scowls.

And there he was, as the crowd broke and the waves of legs pleated aside; him, like the sun, with student bodies acting as planets and moons and stars and invisible gasses and mysterious blackholes, rotating about him, scared of being burned. None of them ever dreaming there was unchartered territory. None of them having the foggiest idea there was perhaps even galaxies beyond their own…

The goal at Saint Eclaine’s was to never be diverted. No matter how many times your thoughts deviated in the direction of smacking that cute girl’s ass as she sashayed past you down the hall in her robe, fresh out of the shower, or taking a flask into your art history class because it would guarantee a better understanding and interpretation of the pieces being presented, or attempting to climb up the brick wall of the Dean’s office simply because it sounded like a good time and a good climb, the goal at this college, unlike so many others, was to resist the temptation and stay on the straight and narrow. What may have passed for bad-ass in my hometown would immediately become passé. Everyone seemed to recognize and accept it but me.