Olin is a beacon. It is impossible to overstate its centrality in the lives of so many Wesleyan students. It is a home. The kind of home where you try to get in the front door, but actually the front door is at the back, so you have to maneuver around hedges and snow banks and your children or whatever to get inside. And the front of your home has huge, majestic windows, so you can see all the wonderful things happening inside bathed in soothing yellow light, but you can only look. Your kids could be on fire in there, and you’d spent twenty minutes edging your way between your house and the Clark Hall that is your garage to get to them.
Oh, Rollie Pollie Olin. On the first floor, there’s those giant dictionary pages with seemingly arbitrary words highlighted. You assume they have some sort of important meaning but you’re not really sure what it could be, kind of like Pascal’s Triangle or Wolfmother lyrics.
There’s the weird half-floors that no matter how much physical evidence there may be of their existence, you have a hard believing actually exist. But enough about Rho Ep. Can’t you just picture someone getting lost on 2B? He opens the door and the smells of the orient waft towards him.
Where am I? He tries to find a book and the Dewey Decimal system doesn’t apply. Nooooo! What’s going on??? Running back to the staircase, he finds that all other floors are closed off, and no matter how far he runs, he stays on 2B. Damn you, Escher! He can see people quietly studying on 2A as though through some kind of haze. He shouts, but no one hears him. Back to the staircase and finally another door opens! But where is he? And then he realizes: Usdan. NOOOOOO! Michael Roth wakes up in a cold sweat.
Then there’s that weird little room on the second floor with the couch and the nice lighting that’s ideal if you’re alone, but too intimate if someone else is there, like Thai Gardens. From the hall, you can’t see if there’s someone sitting there until you’re basically in the room. Bad design for sure. Speaking of which, did I mention that SOMEONE SHOULD PUT A BACK DOOR ON OLIN. I’d do it myself but I need to brush up my networking skills at a continental breakfast.
