STORY
Waketaurs
The lifestyles of extreme sports superstars. by Kenton deAngeli
POETRY
The remains of my apple pie
America. by Daniel Wright
STORY
A curious haunting, part II
The exciting conclusion. by Kevin Clair
PICTURE
Horse barn
by Kevin Clair
EDITOR'S CORNER
The school year has started again. Last Friday at our Critical Mass there were quite a few alumni gawking at us, in for the football game against Penn State's historic rivals, Florida International University; last Saturday there was a veritable parade of RVs motoring past my apartment as they all (well, slightly less than half of them, probably) went back to Pittsburgh. I learned that, three years removed from graduating from my teeny liberal arts school, I still haven't gotten over how big state schools are. Seriously, you guys, the incoming freshman class here is like five times the size of my entire school!
This is my first real post-school fall semester, as I spent the previous one living in my parents' house, frantically sending out résumés every day and being terrified. Now that I'm here, I idly wondered along my bike ride to work every morning in August whether it would be any different when everyone came back for the new semester. Graduate school didn't change anything in that regard; even though I had a job and worked more-or-less full time during the summer, it was still fun to get syllabi and do projects and all of that when the time came. But now, I'm in it 40 hours a week, and on top of that I work on digitization all the time and hardly ever see a real Penn State student. How different, how exciting, could it possibly be?
I won't lie; my first reaction upon arriving on campus for the first day of class was slight irritation. "Where did all of these people come from?" I thought. "My bike ride is five minutes longer because I don't have the sidewalks to myself. Nuts to this." But then I stopped being such an old man, and remembered how nice it is to have people in town again. You see, I live in a Real College Town™; when school is in session, State College quite nearly doubles in size. So my coffee shop has more stuff going on now, and there are people in the library (and the library no longer closes at 5:00!), and there were tons of people along the streets cheering on Critical Mass last Friday. I love having people in town again; it's just more fun around these parts when school is in.
So I am excited that fall is here. But we'll see if I feel the same way when the town doubles in size again for the Notre Dame game this weekend. -kmc