college – Amanda Salisbury

Who can resist campus in the fall? Not I.

-AS

Campus in August

Originally posted on a 6s community, August 19, 2010 at 9:58am

Sunlight dapples the carpet of grass, lined as it is with color bursts of ornamental foliage. Energy is palpable, erupting through every pore as first-semester youth and the fire-baptized unite along lines of commonality, especially if the only thing in common is the desire to be different – different from the majority, different from their past, different than the expectations of others.

The new ones can not yet comprehend the distance between old life and new, but given time to spread their docile or rowdy wings, these will venture into yet-imagined circles of influence. Will their old lives recognize them after three-and-one-half brief months? Baptism by fire can change the exterior almost as much as the interior, though the one aflame may not realize the change right away.

So, frolic on, ye sun rays of late summer, and set ablaze the tender youth who, in the midst of so much change, need you to carry on.

Of One and Eleven

This was a particularly difficult class lecture, obviously, though this is all I now remember of it.

-AS

Of One and Eleven

Originally posted on a 6s community, April 21, 2010 at 10:30pm

Silence is a tool I use to suit the situation in which the eleven stare blankly, loathing me, deploring the process, desperate to give me nothing I may want. And, the silence unwinds the unspoken pact you eleven share, you know, the one where you exercise your mighty numbers to my humility. Ah, but then, I am remarkably comfortable in silence.

I stand patiently and wait for you to crack, and the stress fracture reaches maximum tolerance, and you relent, you eleven, how quaint, almost as if I orchestrated the evening…almost.

Of course I do not control you, and I do not want to. You alone are responsible for accepting the tools I offer and using them to your own collective (and individual) benefit, even now I have only forced you to relinquish your salty silence, but the ocean of resistance calms enough for me to ride the remainder of tonight’s class.