The Article below was published in Vol. 136, Issue 3 of the Lake Forest College Stentor on November 13, 2020.
Cole Wimmer ’22
Staff Writer
“Zoom crush probably hasn’t noticed me”—thinks forlorn student.
All types of people have had to restrict their normal and abnormal social interactions to Zoom, and there may be no group more hindered by this exclusively virtual experience than the Romantics among us. The head-in-the-clouds dreamers who have watched too many early McConaughey films in their formative years populate our Zoom classes and have been forced to base the irrational crushes they have developed on their classmates on the information gleaned from the two-square-inch box on their computer screens or the tantalizing, though infrequent, rush of the occasional speaker view.
This phenomenon, in which one finds themselves head over heels for someone whose name they only know from mousing over their Zoom window, has become known as the “Zoom crush.” These poor lovestruck saps have spent the last half of a semester admiring their classmates, hanging on their every word during discussions of Noam Chomsky, and studying the fleeting glimpses of barely visible posters behind them in their childhood bedrooms.
One student, who wishes to remain unnamed, admits they “had a melancholic epiphany that [their] unrequited COMM 110 Zoom crush (1:00 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays) probably doesn’t know who [they are]”. This student, who again prefers to remain anonymous, came to this sad realization after getting back a lackluster participation grade which had been marred by sparse unmuting and rarely turning on their camera. The “lamentations” this unspecified student feels as a result of allocating their affection for their classmates, as well as their friends from high school to Snapchat and the biweekly eighty-minute windows of Zoom class, have translated well to the solitary walks they take in the park across the street from their “childhood home during the brief escapes from the ivory tower of quarantine.”
As a service to readers as well as to the nameless student who served as my source for this story, I have transcribed the unidentified source’s flowery language here exactly as it was relayed to me and left it unaltered as best I could. These painfully grandiloquent musings of a young person who, I can only imagine, probably got really into Keats and Shakespeare during the poetry unit in AP English in 12th grade, paid close attention to the DiCaprio gangland version of Romeo and Juliet, knows every word to John Legend’s “Ordinary People” and “All Of Me,” and has most likely seen La La Land an ungodly amount of times.
“Ah, I knew that” reports student who didn’t unmute their mic.
For months, people across the globe have been adjusting to the new normal, and amid these adjustments, Zoom seems to have become a fixture of our modern civilization that is here to stay. Zoom has brought us many unexpected things including virtual happy hours, “Zoombombing,” “Toobin-ing”, the “Zoom crush” (see above) and a reply to a question first posited in 1986.
Zoom Video Communications Inc. has finally introduced to our increasingly digital society a 21st Century response to Mr. Lorensax’s classic refrain from 1986’s critically acclaimed film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Mr. Lorensax, for those who may be wondering, is the economics teacher played by actor and real-life economist Ben Stein. For those who may have had to wonder about this, you make me sick. Almost as sick as I was in grades two through twelve on days when I stayed home from school, ate green Jello, drank 7-Up, and watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray before finally evolving to Prime Video.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a classic American flick and a cinematic touchstone. Everyone should know Mr. Lorensax, or at the very least, the main characters: Sloane Peterson, Cameron Frye (who inexplicably wears a sweet Gordie Howe jersey despite living in Chicago), Abe Froman the “Sausage King of Chicago,” Principal Ed Rooney, and, of course, school secretary Grace Wheelberg, who is played perfectly by the incomparable Edie McClurg. I’d like to stop here and give a quick thank you to myself for allowing me to indulge myself in this tangent related to John Hughes’ seminal coming-of-age movie. The quintessential questions of the teen comedy and of any classroom, respectively: “Bueller? Bueller?” and “Anyone? Anyone?” have found a new home in Zoom classes.
Professors regularly find themselves staring unblinkingly into blank faces and blacked-out screens after asking the class a question before answering the query for themselves. After the professor breaks the long silence with the desired answer, students invariably say some variation of “Dammit, I knew that” aloud without unmuting their microphones. In order to avoid another 80 straight minutes of speaking into the void, professors elect to pose the question to one particular student. After a long silence, the professor mercifully grants their pupil’s pitiful plea for the repetition of the question. This period of time is, in the words of one student, “just enough time” to close Twitter and put their phone down in order to muster a half-a**ed answer deemed acceptable enough for their instructor to continue on to the next slide of their PowerPoint.
