On February tenth in Athens, it’s seventy degrees. I’m sitting on a bench picking at a cup of Luigi’s Lemon Italian Ice with a spoon I stole from the dining hall and my face is drinking in sunlight to hoard a New York winter reserve. My boyfriend is beside me, though he’s much further along in his Italian ice. We stay at the bench for what could be hours—we talk, we watch, and I can’t stop watching—swaths of young people pouring out from the dining hall, splashing onto crosswalks, weaving incomprehensible footpaths on the city streets, trickling down hills to class or through the sidewalk before us to the student center. We’re tucked securely in a valley, dwarfed by the Georgian Neoclassical that almost keeps growing through the crackless pavement; a portrait of old, but of a much different kind than Columbia’s.
Baxter street is the central artery linking Bolton, UGA’s glittering new dining hall with retinal-scan meal swipes for cuisine that vanquishes Columbia’s claims to ‘best college for food,’ and Sanford Stadium, home to the powerhouse football team. The energy of the arena (which I once referred to as the colosseum before being affectionately corrected—no, that’s where they play basketball) hums even a month after the Bulldogs took the title of NCAA Champion for the second consecutive year. I suspect the electricity won’t go out anytime soon. The University of Georgia takes the ion flow into its own hands with great care, and its current bristles at my fingertips with even a featherlight tread on the sidewalk. This school is a beating heart of something that, even after three years in college, I can’t quite name—but its voltage strikes in every step.
Four days at UGA, sneaking into my boyfriend’s lectures where I’d go unnoticed and otherwise pretend to have forgotten my student ID while I wandered around, I watched. I grew up two hundred miles from campus, but even in beach grocery stores, you can throw a seashell in any direction and it will land on University of Georgia paraphernalia. It was the first college that accepted me in high school and I still wear their welcome package socks to the gym—I never gave much thought to going there for undergrad, and after two years in New York, I don’t regret my choice. But there was something different about being there, and I was, truly, in it. I went full throttle, wearing red and caffeinating at Jittery Joe’s and raising my hand to contribute in classes that it would’ve been impossible for me to access the readings for—and I watched, and kept watching, until I realized why it felt like there was such a thick glass wall between this school and mine. The thought sank its teeth into me until I couldn’t ignore its sharpness anymore. This is what college is supposed to feel like.
Before transferring to Georgia, my partner echoed my pre-undergrad expectations about Columbia. I had long anticipated that this institution, with its Parthenonic libraries and subway line funneling us through New York City, would epitomize the American university. My first week back after the visit, I observed Columbia like I had at UGA—imagining an alternative where I didn't know these libraries or city streets or unspoken dining hall mannerisms so intimately. I caught so many traces of this place in myself, of course—compulsively checking my email as I cross Broadway between classes, the daily five forty-five wake up to ensure an uncrowded Dodge session, a silent breakfast in Ferris besides a stranger made as efficient as possible so that I never take up a valuable seat for too long.
In Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino dissects these mechanically-enhanced human practices, fueled by a capitalist socio-cultural slot machine, as a need to “always be optimizing.” There’s always one foot out the door, even with our best intentions to slow down. Google Calendars color-coded to the last second of the day, racing the time that always seems to be closing in, and for what?
Most of the time, I never notice my feet moving beneath me until I get where I need to go; whether I’m running five miles in Central Park or walking to and from the bartending job that swallows my weekends. At two in the morning, the wind bites at my face after eleven hours of crafting cocktails for my wealthier peers who never tip unless I mention I’m their classmate, and I am never mistaken; this is another line in the sand. I have never been, will never be a ‘Columbia Student’ of that kind. Maybe this is why I feel so at home at UGA, where it is not an anomaly to reveal you attended public high school, where people don’t ask, bewildered, if ‘Columbia students are allowed to work here’ at the job you need so you know where your next meal comes from. It’s not rare that I feel like a much less prodigal Will Hunting, or one of the ‘poor’ Brooklynites of Gossip Girl (if they were, in fact, poor).
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, week after week. Serving rounds of top-shelf tequila on tabs my classmates open with a platinum Amex, feet aching from ten hours of standing, while they snap their fingers to get my attention, watch me stir their frozen margaritas with empty eyes as they discuss their summer plans to shadow someone's dad at a finance firm. Condescending smiles framed by outfits that could pay my rent; the chasm grows deeper. We go to two different schools, live in two different cities. Theirs is one they shell out hundreds in Ubers for each weekend, is glamorous nightclubs and twenty-dollar cocktails and spontaneous trips to Ibiza. Theirs is leaving a bespoke vintage purse at the bar for days because you don’t even miss it. Mine is the New York that kisses the bruises it gave me if I’m ever so lucky, the New York from which I never quite feel clean, whose pavement has grown up around my feet so leaving feels like betrayal, whose loud, whose gritty, whose dark and dirty is the drug that keeps me here.
When I begin to wonder where the sidewalk ends and I begin; the fabric of this city, of this school, rushes around my feet until the calculated choices that brought me here stop feeling like my own. I wake up Sunday morning wondering how I got there, wondering where the daylight of my weekend went. I wonder if we’re all entranced by the pace of our stride to the next, and the next, and the next, that we forget to look up.
I know that time, that glitz and reckless glamor, are commodities of the ones whose parents have their semester bills on autopay. The longer I’m here, the more time I spend on the other side of the party, the more I notice every time someone walks straight into me at the dining hall without looking back, the more I notice the doors that shut and people that follow wherever I go, unless they’re the ones I already know and love. New York reached into me to bring out what needed to bloom, and I wonder why Columbia’s gravity seems to insist that when I dare to walk here, I keep my head down.
At Georgia, there are trees, sprawling lawns, and people. People that really look at each other when they talk, people aware of their presence in the world and of those around them. Acknowledging one another as human beings, at the most basic level, and not as obstacles standing in their way of getting where they need to go. Community means something different here, and naturally, so does college. It is a definitive experience, all on its own. The University of Georgia isn’t whittled down to feel like a pre-professional stepping stone its students tolerate as a means to an end, but as the central theory of life—and not in the seventy-two-hours-in-Butler way. Their striving for excellence is palpable in their care for their students, from the salient attention to student spaces, financial aid, even bathroom hygiene—to the sea of red, white, and black that dominates a ninety-thousand-person stadium every fall.
So. What was everybody wearing?
Athleisure. Lots of athleisure. Lululemon 4” hottie-hots in Barbie pink and electric blue. Black yoga pants, Hokas and On-Clouds and the occasional pair of Nikes, UGA sweatshirts and Greek letters and a big Kate Spade or Michael Kors tote to carry it all. Everything in vivid color. It wasn’t all unfamiliar—I saw little bits of New York in the details. There were flashes of Barnard in the deliberateness of a frilly sock, a vintage sports jacket, fringed leather paired with a satin skirt, luminous pink hair. Overalls and cowboy boots, flowy long skirts and graphic band t-shirts from the 70s, bell bottoms straight out of Mamma Mia that I wanted to track down for myself.
Usually, when it’s warm enough to sit and stay in Washington Square Park, I people-watch. I try to watch in the same way at Georgia, seeing which flocks of students take a feather in which direction, but the glaring difference makes my original intention impossible. I’ve spent a day or two home by this point, so I don’t notice immediately, but then I see it. Everyone is talking to one another. Walking to class, back home, to eat, sure—but not in a winless race to out-pace the tick of their schedule. They linger magnetically beside one another, conversation dancing in circles around their faces and binding the humid air between their bodies.
My best friend’s roommate told me when I asked about student culture at Georgia, that if he runs into a friend on the way to class, they carry out a full, unrushed, conversation—this is real life, the lecture can wait. Some girls I’ve never met struck up a chat with me in line for ramen and I swear my brain short-circuited. I thought of the wordless nudging of filtering through crowds in Hewitt and John Jay, about people in Liz’s or Diana ordering coffee or sushi without ever looking up at who’s making them—and the undercurrent of fervent individualism that Columbia insists we insist on. An Ivy League in the city of cities, there’s a molotov of social norms that seduces us all at one point or another into its rat race—but that’s all it is. A sprint to embody the unique that is winless as long as it’s obligatory.
When I set out to write this piece, about athleisure and the always-optimizing and the yassified neo-capitalist influences in campus couture, I thought of Bloom nutrition and the ever-present Amazon ad on TikTok and what new product you need to buy now to be that girl. I didn’t consider the ways this sneaks itself into the swim against the current—in our perpetual pursuit of eccentricity, are we a vintage dress or cigarette away from our own pocket of this culture? I think of the tinge of superiority (and narcissism) in the air here, and where it comes from, and wonder if we’re all doing what college students do, and insist we’re different for it. I wonder if our stubbornness to chase the next big thing in our lives, internship or job or post-grad marriage to a foreign land, to always be optimizing, crystallizes this search of style that ultimately connects us all.
Maybe it’s not such a bad thing.
I can’t help but link the collective disdain towards state schools here to the grimace I get when I tell people I’m from the South, can’t help but draw a line to this city, with so much wealth and power and these people’s parents who reign at the top. Maybe there is somewhere they learned to step on other people to claw their way up, and it is not something I learned in Georgia. Maybe there are valuable humanisms we miss out on when we’re on an endless quest of originality directed only inward, only towards the individual. Connection doesn’t have to mean sameness, and practicality is not mutually exclusive from creativity.
My friend and roommate Alma was an exchange student from Copenhagen last Spring. She’s famously fashionable and feminist, and once said she would get a Barnard sweatshirt—never a Columbia one—but only to sleep and exercise in. This seems to be a shared, albeit unspoken, sentiment here. Most of my CC friends joke about dressing up for their Barnard classes; that it feels criminal to wear leggings on our side of Broadway.
Most public schools in the Southeast require uniforms, and maybe that sense of utility carries on in lecture outfits at schools like Georgia. I’m not proposing an athleisure uprising at Columbia or Barnard, just wondering what it really means if a space exuding self-expression has so many strings attached. The rules we impose on ourselves to follow echo our inclination towards an endless ladder-climb even more loudly than, say, a matching set from Girlfriend Collective. This hyper-individualism borders on self-delusion if we truly believe we’re exempt from the fashion instincts of college students at large—to think that what we do at Columbia has never been done before.
So at Georgia, I study the sunshine and striped polos and Lululemon (coincidentally, another establishment from which I’ve made my rent in the past.) I think about how to think about it. There is, of course, an implication of geographical aesthetic—dressing for the place you’re going, or the place you came from. I touched down in the land of the Delta blues in a full black ensemble with red lipstick and a leather jacket; I left in my boyfriend’s Savannah Fire sweatshirt, and a Bojangles chicken biscuit in tow, feeling more human than I had since winter break. I began to understand Georgia a little more. The slow walking, the sangria dispensers in the fridge, the dinner parties on weeknights.
The bus home from the airport screeches to a stop. I’ll make sure I change into a pair of jeans before heading to Milstein to write.
Maybe today I’ll keep the sweatshirt on.
