Look with your eyes, not with your hands.


Such a minute fraction of this life do we live: so much is sleep, tooth-brushing, waiting for mail, for metamorphosis, for those sudden moments of incandescence: unexpected, but once one knows them, one can live life in the light of their past and the hope of their future.



A grad student muses on her life, film, friends, politics, reality televizzle, and music.

 
For as much griping as I have done this semester (particularily this month) and despite the fact that some higher power has activated by "get the hell out of here right now" gene, I had a moment of quiet today when I realized how much I'll miss about being here at Midd, or being < 22 and in a place like this, or right now singluarly focused on a single exam in a beautiful ski chalet like lounge. Trust me, I've tried, there is no where one can go for free internet access, peace, quiet, and solitary company at 10:32pm anywhere in this world. There is no diner, no library, no kitchen table that provides everything as perfectly and easily as this place does. Since these spaces exist, we ought to take them up on their invitation more often, come here with books and self and stay up late remembering all those fond things and statistics that have gone forgotten. I guess the other thing I was forced to reconcile this weekend at MIT was how dramatically my quality of life is going to change - no more Club Midd, no more new and neatly manicured everything... it's true of every grad schools to which I am applying, nothing else looks like a private boarding school and nowhere else is going to cowtow to the students with the same graciousness. There is also another big difference between undergrad and grad school - you are encouraged to pick an undergrad that will increase your quality of life, massage your social nerve, help supplement your moral and character growth. All of these variables factor in secondarily into the grad school equation. Grad school is about faculty, program interests, funding... not, as one wise person pointed out to me recently, about making friends. It's just an especially hard transition for an undergrad to make.

Just approaching my last month - literally hurrying through what stands between me and my 8th semester grades - as what will unquestionably go down as one of the best four years of my life. Can't predict too far into the future because basic questions like time zone and work / play aren't even in place. It just seems as impossible to conceive of myself as anything but a student, it's impossible to conceive of home being anywhere but here. It's too surreal to think that the paths I walk everyday, numbly, the sidewalks I know with closed eyes, the same ritualistic meals and rites - it's just too disconcerting to accept a paradigm change of that magnitude without a hint of sadness or at least a full on, terrified displacement. I am obviously waxing a little too poetic to turn my full attention to the President's ability to set the national agenda at this moment, but I suppose I go into this with a hint of disbelief, that I am not really leaving, that this is not really the end (save the encore), and that this world doesn't exist solely for my adventures and amusements. You get wrapped up in your own weird religion of nostalgia and Thomas Wolfe's "you can never go home again" dogma - and its weird when you stare into the face of something you are quite certain, as certain as you've ever been about anything before, that this four years was bigger, badder, and better than anything you ever dreamed. I don't know what I'd say to the me of four years ago because always being headstrong, I probably wouldn't listen and do it all the same. But by the same token, I never really envisioned me here at this moment doing this. Perhaps the oddest thing is how things seem to fall together and all the things you labor over and all the things that crumble synthesize and produce a set of outcomes. There's so much you can't determine and there's too much to ever hold down. When it really comes down to it, you can't manage any more than the everyday and there's this huge macroworld out there just the same. I don't know how I get from place to place. I don't know what happens next. I just get there, and it'll just happen. "We only stay in orbit, for a moment of time." I am okay with that, it's time to go, but I will not go gently.

On my sister's suggestion, I've taken to reading Adam Duritz's webblog and for the most part it's pretty whiney and complainy and not really worthy of, even a lousy Counting Crows' song. Just the same, I'll give him props on having a wonderful little verse isolated above an entry: Wait for everyone to go away / and in a dimly lit room where you got nothing to hide / say your goodbyes.

After all this soulful rambling, I wish something really important would happen right now and mark this unmomentous occassion as somehow being worthy and memorable. Or, like that piece of cinematic genius "LA Story" Enya should just start playing for no reason.
posted by lmjasinski at 9:52 PM