Have you heard Coltrane’s “Ascension”? A continuous barrage of dissonant and formless avant-garde jazz, it is the sound of rules being rewritten, of phantasmagorical revelry, of “ascension” to a new plane. It is also, then, the sound of my freshman year — and beyond. I say “beyond” because just as first-time “Ascension” listeners come away feeling ambivalent about what they’ve heard, I have found myself in an awkward post-frosh transitional phase, unsure of how to reconcile progressive inclinations with doting on the epic experience that was freshman year. Put simply, I have been in limbo. Put even more simply, it’s kind of sucked.

Yesterday, I resolved to make sense of this situation at Full Moon on the Quad, that monument to sketchiness. I reasoned that the role of the sophomore in Full Moon is a microcosm of Sophomore Slump Syndrome (SSS), in that there is a lack of clarity, direction, identity, purpose. For the freshman and the senior, the situation is simple: The freshman must kiss a senior if he or she is to become a “true freshman,” and the senior, when not kissing a freshman, must march around in a circle chanting, “Fresh meat, fresh meat, ooga-ooga-ooga,” stopping only to wipe the drool from his or her mouth. (Fine, so I made that part up.) For the sophomore, and to some extent the junior, and to some extent that 70-year-old man with the missing teeth claiming he’s an IHUM major, the proverbial lines are fuzzier, which, as I discovered Saturday night / Sunday morning, is not necessarily a bad thing.

My sophomore friends and I arrived at the pre-event show fashionably late, but I don’t think anyone noticed or cared, let alone thought it fashionable. Slipping through cracks in the crowd, we oozed our way to the designated front where we were afforded a good view of several musical acts, among them the mighty K. Flay. I couldn’t understand a word she was saying, but was impressed by her energy and breath control. Taking stock of my surroundings in the main Quad, I noticed some of my friends were looking rather unengaged.

“WHAT’S UP?” I asked over crashing drums.

“WHOOM ABDH GIF,” one responded.

“I CAN’T UNDERSTAND YOU,” I yelled.

“GWOOMF AWGH NAWFT,” he assured me.

“OH,” I replied. “OK.”

I began wondering why we even came.

Certainly my desire to sort out this sophomore slump business sat at the front of my mind. But what about “The Group”? Why did we, a collection of different people with different interests, decide to band together and share this experience? Was it for the kissing? We had all agreed we were not actively seeking it (that’s code for “We were prepared to go home sad and alone”). Was it the music? The music was fine, but really, does anyone attend Full Moon for the music? Was it a lack of better things to do? That likely played some role, but even that didn’t seem to equate with this need to go that so many people feel this time every year.

The nature of this X factor remained unclear to me until about halfway through K. Flay’s performance, when familiar faces began materializing out of the ether. One, then two, then three and four and five and six — before I knew it, I was surrounded by people I had seen every day of freshman year. Our exchanges were unintelligible, our mannerisms flamboyant, our collective reason for being there now boneheadedly obvious: We went there to be there. Being there. Being there in the company of others, in the middle of something bigger than ourselves, embracing the idiosyncrasies of university life. That’s the source of magic behind events like Full Moon and even, one could argue, behind the Stanford Experience.

Paradoxically, it seems the Experience and everything it entails (academics aside) can only make sense when one is not trying to make sense of it. Thankfully, I realized this just as we hit midnight. A girl politely approached me:

“Are you a freshman?”

“No.”

“A junior?”

“Nope.”

“A senior?”

“Hell no!”

“OK, let’s do it!”