In which Daniel looks back at this year from the three-quarters mark.<\/i><\/p>\n
If college was marketed to me as anything growing up, it was as a life-changing experience \u2013 not necessarily in a way that meant a single moment blatantly and dramatically altered the course of one\u2019s life, but rather in a way that meant that the act of going through this educational system more or less independently would change the way one approaches work and life.\u00a0 Yet as I consider life thus far, I am debating the validity of that statement.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think that it\u2019s necessarily true or false across the board, but that it may be true for me only to a degree.<\/p>\n
Let us consider the changes in my life since my first blog post that was posted on the twin side of last semester \u2013 during the fall break that divides the fall semester in half.\u00a0 Once again, the time is immediately after midterms (although then the fall semester, and now the spring), and once again, I am sitting in a Starbucks as I write this (although it is now the Starbucks on 6th<\/sup> Avenue, rather than the one on Proctor).\u00a0 Once again, I am listening to Katy Perry (although then I was listening to my favorites from her Teenage Dream album, and now I listen to my favorites from Prism), and I am still wondering what on earth I am doing writing about my life (as if it is of interest to anybody).\u00ad I still spend almost all my time in the music building, and am taking almost the exact same classes, just increased in level and subsequent difficulty, and am involved in the same extracurriculars and student activities.<\/p>\n Yet a great many things have also changed.\u00a0 My house, Rat Sking Thong (see Blog Post #1 if you are confused by this title), lost Isabel Chae as a housemate due to her decision to withdraw from school.\u00a0 I became a codirector of Underground Sound, my a capella group, alongside my good friend Lisa Hawkins, and became the chorister (director of musical activities) of my fraternity, Beta Theta Pi.\u00a0 I helped the Residential Student Association change our Director of Sustainability position to that of Director of Publicity. My family moved from one house in Raleigh, North Carolina, to another, larger and more wooded one, and my dog had her 10th<\/sup> birthday.\u00a0 And I did not sleep through a single midterm!<\/p>\n It\u2019s funny that people can so easily live in circles.\u00a0 Maybe they\u2019re just easy to become comfortable in, or maybe it\u2019s easy to forget that you live in a circle at all \u2013 not that living in circles is necessarily a bad thing.\u00a0 But I feel as if I keep coming back to writing about me writing.\u00a0 Is my life really that uninteresting?\u00a0 (I\u2019ll give you a hint: The answer is yes.)\u00a0 Every time I\u2019ve watched a Puget Sound theatrical production, I feel as if I focus on the gender studies related aspects of it.\u00a0 And I keep listening on other people\u2019s conversations as I write these posts, as I am always in public places, just as I am listening to a woman I don\u2019t know describing her friend\u2019s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter comforting her in times of stress.\u00a0 Even my mood and temperament seem to repeat across the year, as they have done every year \u2013 beginning with confident optimism in summer, increasing desperation in fall, exhaustion and despair in winter, and an almost inexplicably powerful, sentimental hope in spring. Maybe it\u2019s the fact that school years have such a similar format each time, or I am just deeply affected by the weather.<\/p>\n Still, I wonder if things ever really, really change.\u00a0 Probably.\u00a0 Who am I asking?\u00a0 Does anyone even read these blog posts?\u00a0 I genuinely have no idea.<\/p>\n In our last chapter meeting, the pledges of Beta Theta Pi were discussing one of our core principles, intellectual growth.\u00a0 We debated and analyzed the statement \u201cBetas are devoted to continually cultivating their minds, including high standards of academic achievement\u201d, considering the parallels between cultivating a garden and cultivating a mind \u2013 the necessary work, the continual labor, the necessity of love for that which is being cultivated, and the joy in the fruits of one\u2019s labor.\u00a0 But what struck me most about the chapter meeting was when the person responsible for education played a video of David Foster Wallace\u2019s 2005 graduation speech to Kenyon College, entitled \u201cThis Is Water\u201d, which can be found here: http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=TzFNh2_dSBg<\/a><\/p>\n Fish, he jokes, go through life ignorant enough to not even consider what water is.\u00a0 This, he goes on to say, is not so unlike adults that go through the daily, boring, frustrating grind of daily life without considering the attitudes with which they perceive the world.\u00a0 If we think beyond our automatically selfish attitudes, he says, if we have the imagination to see the world as an expanding place of possibility and the empathy to consider the hardship and kindred spirit we share with others, we are free to choose how to see the world.\u00a0 We are free to decide whether to say that the world is a good place.\u00a0 This, he says, is water.<\/p>\n I will say this about living in circles: I have done it for what seems like every year since middle school began, and it, in and of itself, is not what I am unhappy about.\u00a0 I am unhappy that it is not my choice.<\/p>\n Maybe that\u2019s what being an adult is supposed to be about.\u00a0 Maybe I\u2019m supposed to choose what circles I live in, and how expansive my world is, and how I connect with others.\u00a0 But I\u2019m just a college student three quarters of the way through his sophomore year of college.\u00a0 What would I know, anyway?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In which Daniel looks back at this year from the three-quarters mark. If college was marketed to me as anything growing up, it was as a life-changing experience \u2013 not necessarily in a way that meant a single moment blatantly … Continue reading