Forty thousand is a really big number.
With $40,000, I could buy five dozen pairs of Monolo Blahniks. Forty thousand people holding hands could make a 44-mile-long chain, and 40,000 seconds would take more than 11 hours to count. A freshman at University Park campus will be facing 40,000 new people.
The key to being Samantha or John instead of social security number 226-35-3744 is friends and experiences. Memories are priceless and cannot be measured. All you really have to do is introduce yourself to a few students here and there, and everyone is totally open to reciprocating your effort because they are so grateful you have extended yourself, saving them the cumbersome task. Each soul you salvage from the hateful scenario of initiative will in turn introduce you to their friends.
As long as you stay amiable and smile a lot, the acquaintances grow at an exponential rate until names and faces blur. Then it all seems like a waste because not being able to recognize or differentiate a single Penn Stater from another has a psychologically drowning affect, and you feel yourself sink back to square one... Until someone else recognizes you, and sheer satisfaction courses through your nerves, and you visit a moment of subliminal heaven because you belong.
It cannot be denied because a real citizen of zip code 16802, as ordained by the mayor at convocation, recognized you and not the other way around.
You are home, and the moment wears off, but you can feel free in your newly ordained element until it happens again.
As you turn off Curtain Road and down Shortlidge Road, a crowd might beckon you over outside the HUB. They might recognize you from an apartment party the night before and want to see if you actually are that funny when they're sober.
You might invite them to lunch, casually, as if you just stumbled on the idea and as
if it would be all the same to
you if they had prior plans
preventing them from accepting your offer while secretly
hoping they will join you.
Then together, you might continue down the hill past the White Building and across Shortlidge, narrowly escaping a Loop bus screeching to a stop in the crosswalk. You'll turn on College Avenue with your new friends, who have agreed to join you in Redifer Commons to dine together, without ever letting on how much it means.
When that happens, you have become someone with a name and a face. People will miss you if you decide to spend the night in. They know you're name, and if you're lucky, soon enough they will call you by another: endearing, but not your own. Lunch plans with the girls and a dinner date with Mr. Handsome leave little room to worry about the 40,000 students on campus. Very quickly 40,000 becomes very small. A pile of 40,000 atoms is still invisible. Forty thousand grains of sugar could not make one cake. Forty thousand sheets of paper stack only as high as two people. It is within your ability to make 40,000 the smallest number in the world -- except for 39,999.
