`So Like This Page. Click Like'

Do we “love” the university that employs us? She’s an alum and has worked there, in various capacities, for twenty years. I’m the tyro at four years with a hole in the middle. No, she said, not love but likewise not hate. The university, like a person, is too vast to merely love – or hate -- too complicated, too contradictory. To say “I love this school” (or “this person”) is a sentimental convenience. To describe the array of emotions a person or institution elicits would try the patience of  sane listeners or readers. I love much about the university – the trees, a handful of colleagues, the library, the respect with which I am treated. With that, my friend could agree. She’s less sentimental than I, more of a realist, as women often are. When I suggested in a faux-hippie tone that we might agree each of us “likes” the university, she didn’t bother answering. See A.E. Stallings’ “Sestina: Like” on the empty ubiquity of “like”:
 

“But as you like my friend. Yes, we're alike,

How we pronounce, say, lichen, and dislike
Cancer and war. So like this page. Click Like.”