The best of times

I don't know if you know this, but there are speakers in the bathrooms at Irvine Auditorium. If you just can't hold it in during a performance, don't worry -- at the urinal (I can't speak for the women's bathroom) you'll hear everything going on as if it's right over your shoulder.

I know this because I wrote about those speakers in my application essay for Penn. It has since been suggested, perhaps not implausibly, that maybe the admissions office didn't really mean to let me in.

My friend Jessi and I were talking a couple weeks ago when somehow the subject of Irvine came up. Not even four years after it seemed like every new student orientation event was held there, just five years after I wrote my essay about the speakers in its bathrooms, I couldn't for the life of me remember the name of the auditorium at 34th and Spruce.

"Is that Zellerbach?" Jessi asked.

"I thought Zellerbach was in Annenberg," I replied. Eventually, we had to go online and look it up.

Sometimes, like when I can't remember what Irvine's called, it seems like I've been here forever: for God's sake, I can barely even remember my freshman and sophomore years at this point. Other times, it seems like it's all gone by faster than we ever thought it would, like we all still have the glazed-over look of surprise and awe that we had as freshmen and that we all see in the eyes of this year's new class.

Three days after this column appears, I won't be a Penn student anymore, and I have no idea what to say about that. Speechlessness is not, as I'm sure the family members who have gathered in order to utterly embarrass me this weekend would attest, my normal state.

But there it is. I'm leaving, and I don't know what to say.

To be completely honest, I think my speechlessness is because I'm scared. I am totally, utterly frightened of ever leaving this place. I'm not scared of what awaits me out there in the real world. I'm just scared of what it means to leave this world behind.

I know that by now it's a sad, tired cliche, but when I say that these four years have been the best of my life, I mean it wholeheartedly.

There have been times I have been infuriated at Penn, times I felt like the institution itself didn't care about me or any other students, times like the mandatory meetings with my freshman advisor, who never knew my name and who recommended classes I would never consider taking.

But there have also been times I was proud to go here, and times that I was glad I was fortunate enough to get in here, where I had the kind of professors few others get to enjoy.

But, as my father has always been disappointed to know, it was never about the academics or the school for me. It was always about the people. I've watched friends from high school who had miserable experiences in college, who transferred -- or just dropped out -- to look for something they just weren't able to find in their first school. I felt bad for them, sure, but I was never able to fully understand, because from my first moment here, I was surrounded by amazing people -- people I've always been proud to call my friends. To all of those people, if I've never said it before: thank you.

I do have to apologize for one thing -- before I sat down to write this column, I asked Jeff Shafer, the DP's editorial page editor, what he thought I should talk about.

"Everyone does something sappy about how much they loved college and how they'll miss all their friends," he said. "Don't do that."

I'm sorry, Jeff. I didn't want to do it, believe me. But when I sat down and tried to think of all the things I wanted to say about my time here, well, I'm sorry, everyone, but I couldn't help but be a little nostalgic.

In three days it'll all be over, and whether I can remember a single building or not by this time next year, I know I'll always miss it.

Alex Koppelman is a senior individualized major in the College from Baltimore and former editor-in-chief of 34th Street Magazine. Rock the Casbah appears on Thursdays.

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