When you’re in the air, everything looks a lot different. Almost nothing looks better than the top of a cloud. When the Assembly Hall looks like a small mushroom, it can be startling. But flying above the ground opened my eyes to something else. Well, a lot more than else.

There are a lot of cornfields in Champaign-Urbana. But there are a lot of things that aren’t. As my plane passed over the town, I was probably 10,000 feet above the ground. But I could still manage to see Uni in the distance, looking about as big to me as one of these letters looks on your monitor.

How could I see it from cloud level? Because I saw a building that looked about two lines tall from up there, and about 18 stories tall down here, about three blocks from our school.

Our two-tonged city is growing up. Granted, it’s not Chicago, or even Peoria for that matter. But it seems like there are buildings popping up all over the place.

The one on Springfield Avenue — the one that helped me find Uni on an American Eagle — is 18 stories and growing by my count. There are two going up on Green Street — one about eight stories high on Uni’s lunch row, and one a few blocks farther down on the same street that should have a two-figure number of stories.

To someone living in Chicago, this is probably comically uninteresting. The architecture is far more interesting than ours here. But I also had a look at both Chicago and Champaign from the air around 10 at night.

The contrast between the sky and the ground was quite remarkable, but it was also a little bit sickening. I understand having lights around the airport, just so the planes can land, but are those many lights needed in commercial areas? Chicago is a very large city, but the lights were highly concentrated as well as spread out. Is all of that really necessary?

Our world has a lot of people, I understand that. But can we separate what we need from everyone from what we simply want?