Every spring, some things start happening. The birds fly north and the baseball teams fly south, and sometimes they collide in midair. Things that were once one color become a different color, I think; or else the things stay the same color but start to taste more like raspberries. Those happy people on the allergy commercials skip around with giant shit-eating grins on their faces because they're so happy they don't have allergies anymore, and it almost makes you wish you had allergies too so you could join them in their private skipping field and punch them in the face.
Spring is also a festive time here at Brown. Barefoot hippies prowl the campus, foraging for roots. Giant tours of wide-eyed high school students prowl the campus, foraging for roots. The indoor kids in the Center for Information Technology feel the harsh sunlight on their delicate skin, and they get nervous and start to draw the blinds, until they stop and try to figure out if they could invent a computer to do that for them.
But spring isn't all sunflowers and sunspots and sunken battleships. Spring, like a row of photos of Michael Jackson arranged chronologically, has a dark side.
For instance, in the spring, professors start holding classes outside, just in case Brown needs photographs for next year's brochure. This seems nice at first, until you consider what everyone knows: you can't learn anything outside, because 80 percent of your brain waves escape out of the top of your head. And if you think you can keep them in with a hat, you're kidding yourself.
So spring might seem like a time of warmness and niceness, but really it's the time when the universe sucks out all your smarts like a vampire. But a vampire that comes out in the daytime and that sucks smarts instead of blood.
Spring is a weird time. It's a time of renewal, rebirth and patient hunting to make sure the rebirth doesn't get out of hand. With all of that going on, who wants to be in a so-called "class," having a so-called "discussion" about a bunch of dead white men? Aren't any white men still alive? And, if not, what is killing them off? Are they malnourished? Is there some sort of ethnic cleansing going on? These are the questions we should really be "discussing," whether indoors or out.
And some of the things that happen in spring are totally disastrous. For instance, every April the clocks "spring forward." But did you know they spring different amounts in different places? At this point, California is almost three hours ahead of us - which, of course, means they will be the first to know if we are attacked by Martians. And New Zealand sprung so far ahead that it's a different day there! Sure, I know what you're going to say: "shouldn't it be 'sprong so far ahead'?" All I can say is, if you think that, you must have been to one too many outdoor classes.
One of Brown's cherished spring traditions is Spring Weekend. But this celebration too has a dark side - a very dark side. Think "Thriller." For one thing, "Spring Weekend" is a very misleading term. Probably due to some sort of Daylight Savings conspiracy, it isn't spring right now in Chile. Is this our way of saying that Chileans are not welcome at our weekend? It certainly seems that way. Also, last time I checked, Thursday wasn't even part of the weekend. And I just checked two minutes ago on my Blackberry, just to make sure, so I'm really, really sure.
These may seem like small issues now, but isn't that what they said about Hitler? Isn't it? I don't know, I'm asking.
A lot of things are off about this "Spring Weekend" - or, as we protesters are calling it, Days Toward the End of the Semester Leading Up To and Also Including the Weekend. Even the very schedule of DTESLUTAIW is fishy. Tonight, they tell us, there will be a rock 'n' roll concert - in a hockey rink. Does this sound strange to anyone else? I'm no Casey Casem, but I know a thing or two about rock 'n' roll. Big rock concerts don't happen in hockey rinks; they happen in baseball stadiums. And yes, I know what you're about to say: "it's 'stadiiae,' not 'stadiums.'" Well, the only people with good Latin grammar are dead white men, and you know how I feel about them.
Just because Brown is too poor to build a stadium for rocking doesn't mean we have to suffer. I, for one, refuse to get stick-checked while I headbang to Wilco. I will sit in the penalty box instead. And I will get very, very drunk - so superbly drunk that, if I slip on the ice, I will be able to blame it on the alcohol, and not on the vampirish planning of the DTESLUTAIW committee.
Andrew Marantz '06.5 studied comedy for six years in a Tibetan monastery with Jack Handey.
