Idealist meets cynic

Out the window, two brick smokestacks expel a shimmering mist over the sixth story view of DC suburbia.  A parking garage is below, and directly across stacks of windows in rooms just like this one stare back at me.  If I'm lucky someone will leave the blinds open and I will get a clear view of scandal and intrigue in their room.

You can tell so much about a school from it's dorms.  This one is long hallways that twist at right angles-a maze of identical doors only distinguishable by the hall-themed name cards.  I've gotten lost, three times, wandering in circles until I find elevators and begin again on the top floor.  Every third or fourth door had sparkles, balloons, signs that declare "Phi Sig Princess" "Chi Omega Star!"  Glitter trails down the hall, open doors show crepe paper and silly string  covering beds, desks; any surface that will stand still long enough to be bedazzled.

The lounges are windowless boxes; complete with the standard old furniture that has been there since the 1970's.  If these couches could talk.  Screams down the hall, people enjoying their inside jokes loud enough for everyone to hear.  Typical college freshman, everyone believing that their experience is individual and unique.  Maybe I'm just idealist turned cynic, but nowadays this all seems so cliche, life seems so cliche.

This school is full of worker ants, happily running around their concrete cells.  Worse even then Meadville, these people run on clockwork without ever pausing to consider things larger then their own small corners of the universe.  I would like to believe that someday they will come to realize that they are wrong, success is not measured in pinstripes and pumps, but in sunlight and trees and life.  But I know, or believe that I know, the way the world works, and the chances of these people changing their lives are slim at best.  

So it's left to the cynics like myself to see this, and lament the tombs that most people spend their days in.  But, for the record, much as I worry about the rest of the world and it's single-mindedness, I just have to live.  I have things those people will never have.  I have the ocean, I have my books and my movies, and right now I have love.  More cliche.  But somehow, I don't care...