SATC: The ultimate final

If Spring Weekend has taught me anything, it is that nothing ever goes according to plan. Obviously, the remarkably bad weather and the consequently postponed concert threw a bit of a wrench in the weekend’s trajectory. But there are other ways in which this weekend was unexpected, some good and some not so good. It started on Thursday, when my friends talked me into the Lost Kings/SV concert. One small detail escaped their mention: the show was EDM, something I didn’t know until it was much too late for me to back out. To say that I am not an EDM fan is a generous understatement, but despite the night’s soundtrack, I had a really, really good time. While every song sounded the same to my untrained ears, they each had a good beat conducive to dancing, and that was the real reason I agreed to go in the first place. I let the crowd sway me along, laughing at myself and everyone else as the sea of people crushed in and out like an accordion. Friday brought a lightning storm that I wouldn’t have been prepared for had BCA sent twice as many emails. As a child of the Los Angeles desert, I have literally never considered what I would do or where I would go if lightning struck. One of my hallmates walked in from the pouring rain and announced that the concert had been cancelled. Everyone groaned, the people who had already made it to the Main Green were herded into Salomon, and the night went in a very different direction from there.After an hour or two spent party-hopping in the rain, our phones all ding-ed at the same time, letting us know that Aminé would be performing shortly, but that we should “take our time” getting to the gates. Of course, no one took their time. I was reminded of movie theater warnings to “walk not run” toward the exit in case of an emergency, which I’m sure would be blatantly ignored in the actual case of a fire. It felt so good to run down George Street, my rain jacket flapping in the wind and my feet sliding into the toes of my boots. It was a rollercoaster of expectations: the suspense had risen in the days leading up to the weekend, then fallen with the rain, and then risen again. It was exhilarating.We sloshed around in the crowd, somehow migrating more and more toward the front of the audience as the show went on. When someone suddenly fell on me and their elbow jammed into my throat, I really thought I was going to die right then, wearing my teal raincoat, my jeans soaked to the knees in mud while I listened to Aminé sing “Caroline.” I only managed to escape death by stampede because I stuck close to my friends, whose arms wrapped around me and rescued me from the depths of the crowd. Even that moment, so unexpected, so unpleasant, was actually fun.Maybe it was because my friends were there to buoy me in the roiling ocean of students. Maybe it was because the pendulum of anticipation had swung back and forth so many times that I could no longer orient myself in the real world. I didn’t know what to expect anymore. That’s the beauty of the unexpected: all intentions and objectives are suspended, plans thrown out the window, itineraries ripped to shreds. No plans means no predictions. Sometimes, not having the time to prophesy or process is liberating; with no map or outline, there are no self-enforced boundaries or limits to where you can go or what you can do. It's not possible, for example, to choose where you land in the audience, so you might end up right near the front, fighting to stay standing. You can't ever be sure of the weather, so you might end up ruining your brand new Nike Air Force 1s. My friend Miranda, who did just that, shrugged as we walked home Friday night and said she’d deal with it later. Today, she threw her shoes in the washing machine with some baking soda and pulled them out an hour later to find they had returned (almost) to their original color.There’s no space to be disappointed or doubtful. There’s not a whole lot of time to think back to your original expectations or ahead to the consequences of the night. For someone like me, who gets wrapped up in expectations, tangled in a web of uncertainty and indecision, it can be terrifying when a single thread is pulled loose and the whole intricate weaving comes undone. But when the only thing left to do is throw on a rain jacket and brave the storm, we are forced to do just that. Sometimes learning to weather the setbacks, to dodge the lightning, feels better than surviving a weekend of uneventfully filled expectations. Sometimes a bump in the road or a wrong turn teaches you how to change a flat tire or leads you to a new, more interesting route home. My friend Charlotte describes Spring Weekend as the Ultimate Final. “40% of college is in the classroom,” she said as we recovered from sleep deprivation and dehydration. “The other 60% is everything else, and 20% of that is Spring Weekend.”She went on to list out the rubric: can you have a good time, pretend to know the right lyrics, say yes to the right things and no to the wrong ones, and stay alive all at once? Can you, I would add, manage risk and expectation, surf the waves of unpredictability like the random guy who actually (crowd)surfed in the rain on Friday night? (And if you fall into the mud like he did, can you stand back up and keep singing/pretending to sing the words to “Reel it In"?)I can already feel the anticipation for next year’s Spring Weekend building. Standing in the cold wind as we waited impatiently for Daniel Caesar to come on, my friends and I started naming our ideal lineup for the coming concerts. I think it’s safe to say we all passed the Ultimate Final, but we still have to take our actual finals, and we still have to wait the entire year between now and the next Spring Weekend. I can only hope the weather is a bit better. Wait, scratch that. I can only hope that I don’t spend the next year wishing for certain conditions, experiences, and outcomes of Spring Weekend 2020. I'll just keep driving. I'll take the cool new scenic route, and I'll stay present enough to respond to the unexpected, because that (as cliche as it is) is the only thing we can ever really expect. Image via Brown Concert Agency.