Appalachia Year

My friend Travis once stated that in Columbus, people worship the darkness, and in Athens, people worship the light.

Yes, this is a party school. In some ways, I think this school is too Party to even fall under that umbrella. It is more than a school with a partying problem - it is a party that sometimes goes to class. Weekend nights - and some weekdays- on Court Street are entropy manifest.

But it never fails. By 10 a.m. the next morning, all the lawns have been combed for castoff red plastic cups. Groups of ponytailed girls are out jogging. The dreadlocked masses are playing frisbee with their dogs. Athens pukes itself inside out like a sea cucumber, suddenly rid of the dark toxicity of the night before. Everywhere people are rising up from mysteriously damp couches, taking two Advil and steeling themselves to go serve breakfast at a soup kitchen. Or run a half marathon. Or hike at Stroud's Run.

While I think the student population of a college town can be like a cancer, choking the town with rich-kid entitlement while also sustaining the town with rich-kid tuition payments, there's something about the resilience of its youth that makes the place so vital. Imagine if the whole world was still drinking and loving and working and believing in things like it was 19.