Ether way, it's still spring

Aaron Wells

Copy Editor

5-1-2001

Springtime is like a mouthful of ether just as I'm trying to finish a marathon race. It leaves me disoriented, disconnected, pleasantly dazed but with the feeling that my uncontrollable stop to enjoy the sensation is wrong, since I need to hit that finish line.

Maybe I just need to build up a tolerance. I grew up in Las Vegas, a place where the seasons pop like light switches from summer to winter and back. One week you're stewing in the pool like a hot potato in a glass of ice water, sucking on otter pops and praying for rain, the next week you're shivering on your front lawn in a heavy jacket in the 50 degree freeze (and 50 degrees is FREEZING in Las Vegas), waiting for the leaves to hurry up and fall off the trees so you can rake them. Then, there months later, you step outdoors in your Vegas-parka to realize that the outdoors are an arc-furnace once more.

In Vegas, spring is something like an episode of "The Golden Girls" ­ it lasts roughly half an hour.

So this is only the third time I've experienced spring, true spring. The first time it happened, I was literally floored. I spent hours, unable to go to class, forced to wander outside on previously snow-covered streets, staring at trees with flowers on them, feeling the air like velvet on my skin, watching the squirrels have sex, obeying some inchoate instinct in me that had lain dormant until now, to rise like a millennium plant's stalk and demand that I go out there and be fertile!

The next year, I was failing all of my classes because of an illness in the middle of the semester, but still I felt a disconnected euphoric sensation virtually all the time, and once again I found myself drawn unresistingly to hang out by Manzanita Lake and in front of the library when I should instead have been hanging my head against the wall in preparation for tests it didn't matter if I aced because I'd flunk the class anyway.

And this year, again, I'm flunking my classes for mysterious reasons no doubt wholly unrelated to my twice-a-week all-night stint as copy editor at the Sagebrush, and while a part of me sharpens the mental knives to slit my mental wrists rather than keep showing up at CS 336, which I love but could never somehow manage to do the homework in, I still find myself, barely conscious, drawn out to stare in infantile glee at the vast quadrangle of grass in front of Morrill Hall, and gaze upward at the newly green leaves that shower over it like a blessing.

Maybe it's the way the tree outside my window, with its leaves returned, blocks the sun from waking me up as easily in the mornings. It filters the harsh, baking light of the sun into a gentle, green-tinged glow that invites me to stay in bed until noon watching "Alvin and the Chipmunks" on the Cartoon Network with the birds chirping through my open window rather than go to CS 336 and learn about how computers work.

Maybe, too, it's the smooth night air that seeps in through the same open window, and beckons me to stay up until 3 a.m. writing short fiction and reading obscure science fiction novels by wacked-out authors I've always wanted to read.

In any case, it's spring again, and once more I feel the bizarre separation of a man who's flunking his classes but has reason to be happy anyway because the sun is warm and the grass is soft. Even though I got a 1490 on my SAT's but can't manage to pull a B in PHYS 201, even though I had a 3.5 GPA in high school and a 2.85 at an engineering college but barely keep a 2.4 here, somehow spring still drugs me into being happy on some level.

Maybe I should get a hold of some ether. I bet that would shut the damn season up.