Interests:Books and knowledge. HAH! I want a hippopotamus for Christmas (I don't think Santa Claus will mind, do you?). Expertise:I'm an expert tease. I've built up a great resistance to caffeine and sugar.
Wrote this after the Halloween trip and dumped it on the Tumblr. Yesterday, Irksome Irviner made a post that reminded me of it.
In six weeks, I never adopted the habit of referring to the dorm
room as “home.” The associations were still too strong for me: “Home”
was a buttercream house with roses out front at the end of a suburban
cul-de-sac, not this cramped, cluttered living space shared with three girls. Perhaps I do return to this place every night, perhaps I have made this address my north star. But it’s not home. I live here, but I don’t inhabit it.
A while back, I said that nothing is so stabilising at university as
the first storm, when you flee under a concrete partition to take a
breath and look at the absolute hellhole roiling an arm’s length away,
numbing you through three layers of rain-soaked clothing (no, SoCal did not prepare me for this at all), and you see that this
is where you’re spending the next four years of your life, through all
the barmy monsoons and the irritable equinoxes.
I contest that.
Nothing is so stabilising as the first trip “back down/up,” to the
place where you used to live. Where you left everybody else behind.
Little compares to walking into a bedroom and seeing everything as you
left it, and finding that everything has stayed the same, but you’ve changed, and that’s why you’re seeing all this as if from behind an observation window.
Yes, I used to live here. I used to sleep in that bed every night, spend my hours at that desk.
And, when the bags are dropped and I’m sitting on the edge of the
bed, breathing in that house-smell that’s familiar and comforting (but nothing like Davis),
I can’t help but make comparisons: The residence halls are never this
quiet, especially after ten on a Friday night. The silence pounds on my
sternum, digs holes in my ears with a melon scooper. Even the pipes at
university are loud, I realise belatedly.
At the intersection of Baldwin and –Naomi, is it?– I look at the
storefronts whose names I know like the first three rows of the
periodic table while I wait at the red light with a pulse as familiar
as a heartbeat, and I know that this is how things must be from now on.
After seventeen years of recognising few streets better than these, I can
only be a visitor. I can grasp for moments (long weekends,
Thanksgivings, winter hols) to replenish the memory, but
I will live the majority of the next four years some four hundred miles
away from this secluded suburbia. And after that, there’s a whole
rest-of-the-world for exploring, and Arcadia will become the “hometown.”
“Oh, hometown. That is where I grew up. For seventeen years, I didn’t know what I had.”
Good to know you're still alive, sir. (skip to 3:10)
He doesn't play trumpet as well as he conducts. Maybe I just have an overriding preference for classical, and nothing so for jazz. Maybe the video sound quality is just really crappy.
That aside, I'm TERRIBLY HAPPY TO SEE YOU AGAIN. <3
Oh goodness so I just got back from the grocery store and on the way to the dorm I passed Robert (my physics TA) and Kent Shirer and Robert waved at me and I said ".........HI ROBERT" and pedalled terrifically fast away.
guys can still be really really hot even if they have girlfriends
I fail to see why band kids throw parties. We act exactly the same drunk as we do sober, except that some of us are really adorable drunks.
Cal Poly SLO's band
has a baton twirler and auxiliary
plays high-school-reminiscent arrangements of concert band music
there is yet hope for your male population. Biologist modus operandi (the hopeful version, not the pessimistic-realist one) says that if there is one sample of an organism thought to be extinct (or endangered, at least), then there should be more!
No, that didn't make much logical sense.
KENT THE GRAD STUDENT. ^^ His name is Kent, as opposed to the "Kevin" I'd been calling him the entire class.
But first! Background story! Our 2.5-hour physics discussion/lab is taught by a TA. Robert is the one assigned to our section, but he was out of town last week. Being a responsible (albeit irksome) TA, he arranged for two replacement TAs, one for each day he would be missing. We got Kent on Thursday and Chris today (supposed to get Chris, at least -- he never showed up and the class left after fifteen minutes of waiting outside).
So KENT. He's not dorky-cute like Matt "Chalk-Pants" Rodrigues (the calculus TA), but hot. Hot like Koji Mori, but with more jalapenos. Or whatever Italian people eat, because I'm pretty sure he's Italian, too! He fences! He graduated from Northwestern!
(He probably has a girlfriend!) (shut up shut up shut up)
Shorter than me by like an inch but WHATEVER. Going to go look up the fencing team's schedule now!
UPDATES
After an hour of Google stalking careful research, it looks like
1) Mr Shirer is disgustingly smart (hence the BA from Northwestern, duhhh). His senior thesis on "Aerogel Growth and Something Something Something" only cemented my conviction that advanced, comprehensive physics is not in my future.
2) He was a Siemens Competition semifinalist in his senior year at Lincoln High, NEBRASKA.
I don't know where Nebraska is.
3) He has a girlfriend. Her name is Kari.
4) He was "the top kid from Northwestern" when he fenced there on a foil, but he's not continuing at Davis because the fencing here is only a sport club and that's not legitimate enough for his hardcore fencing tastes.
By all definitions, I'm still a teenager, but I don't feel like a teenager. I feel like an adult. I want to be back there, but I'm up here.
Roommate is being noisy in the other room with two friends, talking about seduction and sluts and sex and Greek and partying and drinking and appearances.
Constant exposure to profanity results in inurement and, eventually, adoption.
Stories of band kids and band parties are no lies. 2009 Crusaders has it.
Thank you for the postcard, Jay. Recompense will come soon (I've already posted a letter, but that was before receipt of the postcard).
Frustration manifests itself in the physics workload.
The awesome: 95% on the first Biodiversity term paper, with "one of the best term papers from this class" and "a pleasure to read."
--- Situational less awesomes: Deductions for a) citation errors that could have been avoided had it been finished early enough to be submitted as a draft for revision and b) a stylistic blunder that was writing BS thrown out in desperation to meet the minimum word count. Take, also, that the paper was submitted four minutes before the deadline (hence BS).
Picture positives.
Downtown Davis. Ridiculously small blocks easily traversed under a minute, but leaking small-community college-town feel from the cobblestones (of which there are many).
Frozen yoghurt, at an inflated $0.39/ounce from Yoghurtland's $0.30/ounce, but with a greater variety of toppings.
Greater variety of toppings drowned in hot fudge.
Supporting the equestrian team with pizza, one-half pesto/tomato, one-half Mediterranean.
Things ordered online arrive in the mail, missing the monsoon by three days but still green and wonderful.
The sky went wonky. Look, Homecoming also. But no dances; only a slew of parties.
The free food is absolutely disgusting in retrospect, but delicious when you're fatigued and starving and in uniform.
Maybe I just have an overriding preference for classical, and nothing so for jazz. Maybe the video sound quality is just really crappy. 
