Illistration by Mike Padilla

College students are rarely afforded a better opportunity to look ridiculous than when they are all simultaneously attempting to impress and attract one another in a small, enclosed space. Parties would be an excellent example, but the frequent presence of alcohol usually renders us neither impressive nor attractive.

On the other hand, the Student Recreation Center, seemingly one of the few places on campus where drinking is not fervently encouraged, provides the perfect venue to observe college at its silliest. It has all of the prerequisites: loud, jarring music, plenty of mirrors and an abundance of revealing sports bras that do much to suggest a different kind of “sport” altogether (common sense would dictate that flirtation is a pastime best enjoyed when you look and smell good, but simple logic is apparently a luxury to be dispensed with at the Rec Center).

Like most other sites that are frequented by young adults, the Rec Center sports a hierarchy that is vaguely reminiscent of a middle school playground: By virtue of their physical appearance, students are divided into different categories, and their group assignment governs the level of contempt that they are allowed to have for others.

Damion LeeNatali Columnist

In a manner that evokes a host of bad Marxist analogies, most students consign themselves to certain groups of their own. In the interest of convenience, we’ll label them as the Attractive Users, the Occasional Users, the New Users and the Indifferent Users.

The Attractives are generally easy to spot. The girls of this group usually sport brightly colored, skin-clinging designer fare perfectly matched to their trendy running shoes. They are typically well-tanned, bright-smiled and perfectly devoid of any traces of sweat. The males in this category are, to be quite frank, enormous. They predictably relegate themselves to the weight machines and repeat simple motions to increase the size of their already freakish biceps.

Occasionals drift in (strangely enough) on occasion, and they are usually earmarked by the slightly huffing breaths attendant to their waning fitness. New Users always look slightly stunned, as though the machines before them were some sort of inexplicable Japanese appliance — nice to look at, excellently constructed, but ultimately impossible to use.

And then there are the Indifferents, complete with comfortable clothes, steely resolve and plenty of water. Indifferents are there to exercise, and they dismiss the Rec Center’s social system as irrelevant to their calorie-burning cause. Not coincidentally, the Indifferents are generally professors or university staff, and much like the shunned but incisive loners in middle school, they know hogwash when they see it. Suffice it to say, there is no shortage of it.

As is common in any place with a lot of good-looking people, the Rec Center resembles something more akin to a dating pool than a Mecca of fitness. The Attractive girls give coy glances from atop their whirring Precor machines, and the weight-lifting guys give ear-piercing grunts as if to say, “I can bench small cars. Wanna go out?” Sadly, the rest of the Rec Center’s denizens are excluded from this Spandex-clad matchmaking, wistfully wondering what it would be like to exchange numbers to the chorus of clanging weights and epic grunts.

Just as in middle school, the Attractive Users assume the role of parceling out social law in the Rec Center because, well, they are the most attractive. Much to the annoyance of the New, Occasional and Indifferent Users, the Attractives demand deference, which usually means that one must immediately surrender his machine if it is demanded of him.

Unfortunately, this fact is not remedied by the presence of the Rec Center employees, who tend to be attractive themselves and who seem to consistently side with the Attractives in order to preserve some secret social system that protects hot people everywhere. This subtle but undeniable arrangement does not go unnoticed by the other users, all of whom appear to be getting tired of garnering contemptuous glares from their Attractive counterparts.

Given the simmering tensions, it does not require a leap of imagination to predict an Occasional-New-Indifferent revolution. Sympathetic to the unwilling subjects of the Attractives, one would hope that they stage an Arizonan equivalent of the Boston Tea Party — watering the unsuspecting cacti outside the Rec Center with the Gatorade from the Attractives’ fashionable Nalgene bottles.

Of course, if this all sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is. At an institution of higher learning, personal worth should be judged by factors more substantive than mere outward appearance.

That being said, get off my treadmill.

Damion LeeNatali is a political science and history sophomore. He can be reached at letters@wildcat.arizona.edu.