Enjoy the small pleasures of college

column ENJOY THE SMALL PLEASURES OF COLLEGE

Lucas DiBlasi

Senior Staff Columnist

One of my first social outings as a first-year was a screening of an Avengers movie on the Cathedral of Learning’s lawn. I remember walking down an unfamiliar hill — I’m from flat, flat Minnesota — and staring up at the shockingly low helicopter landing on UPMC Presbyterian with a sense of awe.

And awe is truly the right word for these incredibly new experiences — biblical awe, awe in the sense of a great and terrible god, awe at the vast unknown. There’s a completely overwhelming amount of choices available in transitional times such as arriving at college, and the breadth and depth of who you can become is staggering.

The four years stretching out in front of me seemed endless. I remember looking at Mad Mex’s menu and realizing I was still going to be in college when it was legal to order a margarita. It’s been legal for me to do that for six months now.

I’m always skeptical of the cliché that “time flies by” because I think that idea is just a perception or a trick of the mind. When I take a second to consider all that’s happened since glancing over that drink menu at 18 years old, it can start to seem incredibly distant, not achingly close.

And yet my mind tricks itself anyway, and the first day of my first year feels as strange and close a concept to me now as it did then, but it’s almost three years in the past. It may be an annoying platitude, but you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.

The thing about platitudes and clichés is that they became platitudes and clichés because they were, at one point, considered full of meaning. They’ve lost that novel sheen and that new car smell, but it’s still true — you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

There’s never been a more clear demonstration of that than the COVID-19 pandemic. I don’t need to spell it out, we all know what and who we lost. But there’s another category of things that we lost that often gets overlooked — small pleasures.

We lost small pleasures such as the view of the Cathedral from the hill near Irvis Hall on a spring morning, the joint suffering of studying until the wee hours of the morning in Hillman Library, sitting in coffee shops and simply seeing the dogs on campus. We even lost the little annoyances that we gloss over with nostalgia, such as the necessity of walking up and down hills and almost getting hit by buses going in both directions down Fifth Avenue.

The class of incoming first-years hasn’t experienced the little delights that going to college in Pittsburgh has to offer yet, but they also haven’t experienced having them torn away from you with no warning. What’s different about this upcoming academic year is that everyone else will be coming to campus with fresh eyes, not just first-years. See DiBlasi on page 47

Promiti Debi senior staff illustrator