UBC: does it mean something to you?

This post is for men and women who like me spent some significant life-time at the University of British Columbia. I was last a student there a very very long time ago, but I thought I still felt a connection to the place--as I have to a neighbourhood I once lived in and a company I once worked for, and even to a town, far away, that I visited only once.

But no matter how much I wanted that, I must admit that it isn't true.

When I go there now--to see something at the Chan Centre or the Belkin Gallery, or to just drive around the campus--I have a curious feeling of "didn't I used to know you?"--familiar, even intimate, yet also distant and alienated. Like seeing someone you once thought you loved.

I spent 7 years of my life at UBC, and I spent a lot of intellectual and emotional energy there. So why is it that I now have so little feeling for the place?

Is it because it is a city-state of sorts whose "citizens" are continuously changing? Is it that the real world of a university student for someone who, like me, was taking the whole business of being at University very seriously (young men can be horribly serious when they are not being damned foolish), existed mostly in his head and not in the surroundings. So maybe it left with me and resides in me not out there at Point Grey.

I don't know. I find it odd, weird, that I don't care much for this place, this quite beautiful place where I did in fact learn some things that are still with me. Maybe there is something fundamentally unlikeable about a university: too big, too busy with its own business, too clearly not needing much from me, though it will take my money.

Maybe others who have passed through UBC and other universities can enlighten me.

Why doesn't it mean more to me?

Brian