Here are a slew of photos I took this past weekend while visiting UVa. I took photos of all my undergrad dorms, the new South Lawn Project, and a few other places on Grounds, as well as some photos of the celebration weekend itself. I myself even appear in few of these.
White pillars and brick everywhere. God, I went to such a beautiful school.
This weekend I had one of those transcendent experiences that doesn’t happen to me much anymore.
I went down to the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the 140th anniversary celebration of the Virginia Glee Club, the men’s chorus I sang with in college and law school. It was my first visit to Grounds (as we call the UVa campus) since my previous visit in 2003. I lived and/or worked at UVa from 1991 to 1999, so this weekend felt like a time warp, like the events of my life had been chopped up and rearranged in a different order. Things that happened in the 1990s seemed more real and recent to me than anything that has happened in the last decade.
I took Amtrak down to C’ville on Friday morning, checked into my room at the Red Roof Inn around 2 pm, and then made a beeline for the Rotunda. I had a few hours to kill before the weekend’s festivities started, and I wanted to take a long walk to see what had changed and what had stayed the same.
I walked around Central Grounds and saw the Special Collections Library, which is new since my last visit. More importantly, I visited the three dorms I lived in during undergrad. I didn’t actually go in, but I took lots of photos.
Neurons in my brain associated with different memories kept firing in random order. I was at UVa from age 17 to age 25, so while walking around on Saturday, I’d suddenly feel 19 years old, and then 17, and then 18, then 22, and so on. Years in my life were more distinct back then, because I changed so much during that time; I was a very different person in my second year of college than I was in my first, and I was even more different during my third and fourth years than I was in either of the first two. In different years I lived in different places and had different friends and was part of different social groups. It wasn’t really until my third year that my college life began to gel.
I saw so many people this weekend that I hadn’t seen in ages, and a few that I hadn’t even remembered until this weekend. I got to reconnect with four different conductors. There was a reception. There was a concert. There was a banquet. There was lots of singing. There was lots of drinking. I ate a Gusburger at 2 in the morning. I visited the Glee Club house. I got very little sleep.
God, it was a great weekend.
And now I somehow slip back into the present.
Pics of hot shirtless law students notwithstanding, this reminds me why I didn’t have such a great time at UVA Law. I’m not talking about the Confederate flag beer pong tables; I’m talking about the totally extroverted overgrown fratboy culture of the school.
I’m sure there were people there who loved it. But it wasn’t the right place for me.
I’ve been in the process of ripping my CD collection to iTunes. I have a few hundred CDs, so this is taking a long time. But it’s also making me aware of how many CDs I have that I haven’t listened to in ages, or listened to only once, or never even listened to at all. (Dvorak’s Stabat Mater? When did I buy that?)
I used to have all my CDs sitting in their original jewel cases in a big CD rack, but a few years ago I bought a few hundred Case Logic sleeves and transferred my whole collection into them. I then put the sleeved discs into boxes. My collection takes up a lot less space, but since I no longer have the CDs in a rack with all the spines facing outward, I no longer know what I have in my collection.
I’ve got a ton of classical CDs. During my second year of college, I became interested in classical music. I bought a classical music guide recommending recordings for famous pieces, and I used to pore through it all the time. In Charlottesville I’d go to Plan 9 Records and flip through their offerings and sometimes even buy stuff; I’d do the same thing at Tower Records when I’d come back home to New Jersey and New York.
I became addicted to buying classical music CDs. It continued from college through law school, still in Charlottesville. What I loved most of all were complete collections: all of Mozart’s string quartets in one box, or all of Shostakovich’s quartets, or all of Brahms’s chamber music. They always came in such beautiful cardboard cases; how could I resist? I would stand there in the store, holding it in my hand, looking at the price tag, thinking, oh my god I want to buy this so badly, but I shouldn’t be spending 60 bucks or 80 bucks on CDs, and who knows if I’ll ever listen to some of these pieces? But I wanted them. It wasn’t just about listening to them; it was about having them. I would be paralyzed, standing there in the middle of the store. Reason might win over and I’d put it away and go home. But the next time — or maybe the time after that — the addiction would win. Trembling, excited, I’d go up to the counter and pay for the box of CDs, feeling guilty and ashamed but really wanting it anyway.
I should point out that I was completely in the closet at this point in my life and had no sexual outlet. Make of that what you will.
I was also really picky about which recordings of a piece I’d buy. If the store had a copy of the Penguin Guide or the Gramophone Guide, I’d study the entry intently for the piece I was looking to buy. If the store didn’t carry any of the recordings that were recommended by the guides, I wouldn’t buy them.
Anyway, I’ve been importing my CDs into iTunes one by one, and I’m already benefiting: it’s great to do a search and see everything I have that’s conducted by Leonard Bernstein or Robert Shaw (shaw shaw shaw) (sorry, inside joke), or everything by Mozart, or whatever. I have lots more CDs to import, though. I may need to buy a bigger external hard drive to store it all.
The chapel at the University of Virginia hosted its first same-sex commitment ceremony over the summer. Very cool. Of course, since it was in Virginia, it didn’t have the status of law, but the couple is planning to get married in Washington, D.C. in November, where it will be legal.
I’m pleasantly surprised to hear that this was allowed. It’s always been hard to peg UVa on the political spectrum. When I was there, it was said that compared to the Ivies, UVa was conservative, but compared to the other top college in Virginia, it was liberal. Charlottesville, of course, is a bastion of blue in central Virginia.
I’m a geek about dates sometimes. I remember the exact dates of many events in my life. I don’t know why.
For example, I’ve always remembered that I moved into my first-year dorm at UVa on August 24, 1991. (Oddly, I started law school on the exact same date, five years later — though maybe it’s not so odd; each date moves ahead one day further in the week each year, so five years plus two leap days (in 1992 and 1996) equals seven days, and therefore August 24, 1996 fell on the same day of the week as August 24, 1991, and UVa always does its move-in on a Saturday in late August. Geekitude!)
So this afternoon I realized that it was 19 years ago today that I moved into my college dorm. And then I realized, wow — 19 years ago, most of today’s entering college students weren’t even born.
God, I feel old.