Observations from Farrell Hall

Happy Tuesday, Deac families! I was in Farrell Hall over the lunch hour today, and while this is not an official Five Senses post, I will tell you some of what I observed.

In the Living Room (the big ground floor atrium), there were about 11 groupings of people when I arrived:

4 of the 11 groupings had 2 people working together

2 of the 11 had 3 or 4 people

1 of the 11 looked like two faculty or staff having a meeting

11 of the 11 groupings had at least 1 person on a laptop. A couple had laptops open and were also consulting their phones, multitasking. At one of the tables, two students had both their laptop screens in my line of sight – Student A was doing something that looked like a PowerPoint with charts and bar graphs, Student B appeared to be looking at Instagram. The contrast was funny.

Something caught my eye out the big windows and I saw a male student run and take a flying leap backwards to launch himself onto a retaining wall. I can’t do justice to his movement, but imagine a guy running at pretty good speed head on towards a maybe 3.5-4 ft. retaining wall and then at the last minute he swivels to hop up onto it backwards to sit on the top of the wall/ledge. He made it up there without a problem and had a look of pure, unadulterated joy on his face. Had he failed, it would have been a spectacular (and likely painful) fail. Way to go, Wall Man!

Out past Wall Man in the distance I could see the practice soccer field. There is a soccer camp going on this week for younger kids and on my walk to Farrell I could hear peppy, upbeat pop music blasting on their PA system. I can make out kids running around behind the soccer fence.

One of the conversation groups near me has three students, two girls and a guy. At one point the guy draws something in his notebook and shows it to the other two students. I can’t hear their conversation, but based on their body language and expressions, it seems to be a very congenial, collaborative meeting. The male student in particular just has a really warm, friendly face. He reminds me of someone, and the best I can come up with is Robin Williams – not that he resembles Robin per se, but they both have smiles that seem very casual, friendly, and real.

Some other students head out near Wall Man, maybe 6 or 8 people total. One is having a cigarette. They must be on a break from class. The majority of the guys look like they are just chilling on a break, but one of them hops up and down (jumping so his knees and feet come up pretty high off the ground) as if he is trying to wake himself up. After about 5-6 minutes, the group heads back into Farrell.

A couple of students come in and head to Einstein’s Bagels, and I was sure they were going to get lunch, as it was around noon. Instead, both the students just got drinks – coffee for one guy, soda for another.

Suddenly there is a lot more activity – looks like a class must have let out, because there is a lot more coming and going of students.

During the 20 minutes or so I was there, the one smell that struck me in waves was toasting bagels. A delightful smell if ever there was one.

So there is your impressionistic glimpse of Farrell on a Tuesday at noon.