journals of steph and strangers

Reading Steph's med school blog (in retrospect) has been like discovering another person. Hi Steph! I've been reading snippets here and there, and while the things in each entry represent things I already know of her, there's always something new. Not new in that I didn't already know she hates the fog and hills and loves her classmates and oncology. New in that I hadn't heard it expressed in these specific words, on that particular day. She mentioned in an early entry about how she's not drawn to strangers' blogs, but maybe that's changed a bit because we've been talking recently about how we read strangers' blogs. I love reading blogs, people I know and strangers likewise. I love seeing what people choose to say, because there is a great deal of choice and weeding out. I love the dynamic of connection and separation that happens between bloggers and readers. I love seeing my own feelings articulated by someone else; that is so much of what I love about fiction and here it is in real people's lives.

I like strangers' blogs because the process of getting to know someone has so much novelty and a refreshing quality, and it does weird things to me. I once spent a few days reading a person's entire archives, not because it was particularly interesting but because a lot of the way he talked and things he referenced reminded me of West Point and I just wanted to figure out whether he actually went there (he rarely used any actual names). I eventually discovered that he went to the Naval Academy (close, right?). I had momentarily become obsessed with seeing if I could figure out a basic fact of his life through his more intangible online thoughts, and isn't that such a reverse way to get to know someone? It's like characters, except not. And it's always a treat to find the thoughtful, well-written, funny, bittersweet ones. And to read about people leading lives completely different from yours. I also develop dislike for people through their blogs, which I continue to read. It would suffice it to say that if I have a reaction to your writing, good or bad, I'll keep reading it. People can say so much in narcissistic writing that just can't be said in a two way conversation.

Anyway. Steph, I love your poems and your growing love of San Francisco and your thoughts on medicine and how even your thoughts on the misery of college make me miss it.

I've wanted to switch to blogspot for a long time because of the ease of posting photographs and also because it seems more conducive to regular entries. But I've been reluctant to abandon the history of my livejournal because 1) the history and 2) I don't know if I should really write more regularly. I'd like to, I'd like to write about my reaction to a movie soon after watching it instead of piling it into a larger entry about how lost I am or some recurring theme. In some ways I'm scared it'd replace a personal journal, but honestly I've been too tired to write in my own journal this past year. And there's too much piecing together of real life to try to piece together a livejournal entry, sometimes. Maybe it'd be nice to put the fragments out there, instead of collecting and sorting.

coachella

A delayed flight to LA, a two-hour drive to Indio, the wait for our keys to the condo, a trip to the grocery store, the 90 minute drive or more into Coachella (I think it normally takes 30 minutes but we missed a turn and sometimes there was traffic into the parking lot), the 20 minute walk from the car to the entrance (that was the damn longest part). The heat made the walk pretty miserable, and the first thing I wanted to do upon entering was get water and go to the bathroom. I needed another water bottle after the first show. The porter potties are stifling (though cleaner than I expected) and during the first half hour I honestly wondered whether I'd make it through the first day, much less all three days. But that first hour of the hot dry blindingly bright late afternoon was always the hardest each day, and once you get past it and know you'll be fine, it is glorious.

There are five stages: the huge Coachella Stage with screens and a long expanse of grass in front of it; next to it is the smaller but still large Outdoor Stage that has some bleachers way in the back; perpendicular to these are three tented stages in a row, aptly named the Sahara, Gobi and Mojave. There were SO MANY people. Families with little kids, groups of friends, college kids, couples, teenyboppers, hipsters, hippies...music lovers. Music has that ineffable quality of being intensified and better by sharing, more so than a lot of other beautiful things, because it can be so accessible to so many at once. I remember hearing a song I liked playing across the Yard from someone's dorm room, through their open window to mine, and thinking of connections between strangers. And it's amazing to be able to go from dancing to a semi-raunchy girl band packed in the middle of a crowd, to standing hushed in the front row listening to just a voice and acoustic guitar. And to see how everything contributes to making each show distinct: the time of day and the light and temperature that goes along with that, where you are in the crowd, whether you stand or sit, and so on.

There were so many highlights: the energy and passion of Arcade Fire and how much we moved to their music, Lily Allen's band playing their trumpets in sync, Damien's riffs, Air's atmosphere reaching us in the bleachers, Regina Spektor's distinctive piano and voice and pale skin with red lips, being so close to Jose's lovely quiet music, the Decemberists playing the entire eight minutes of the Mariner's Revenge Song. And all the dancing, to CSS and Rapture and anything with a beat really. I didn't expect to dance that much. I think we ended up seeing twenty artists, maybe fifteen of whom were full sets, which is pretty awesome.

The one singular highlight though was Bjork, headlining on Friday night. I didn't listen to much of her music before that, aside from Vespertine and Dancer in the Dark, which I love, but I wasn't a huge fan of her or anything. But I fell in love. Her voice is so beautiful, I have no words. It soars and it moves in a way that makes you feel each note. We were far back so I couldn't see her well but I could see her petite self move across the stage, and I was amazed at the sound that came out of her, she looked like a fairy or pixie but was so much more powerful than that. And she's so incredibly creative, all these strange sounds come together and you're surprised to find yourself immersed in them and loving them. Argh, I'm having that really frustrating moment of not doing something justice at all. Let's just say that if I had to choose fifty things that defined beauty for me, her music live would be one (fifty sounds like a lot, but it's not if you think about all the things you could name).

By the end of the each day, your lower back aches, there's dirt underneath your fingernails and dust in between your toes and blisters on the soles, your skin is a funky mixture of sweat and grass, your contacts feel like they have a little layer of fuzz atop them, and if you're me, your hair was messy to begin with. You feel like there's all this crap on you that you can't wait to shower off, but you're so happy because you've been filled up through your ears and feet and eyes with all this beautiful stuff.

books

I finished “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen the other night; it almost made me cry which puts it in the emotional vicinity of Atonement, Lolita and King Lear. Except that I can’t compare, in the way that every book is so uniquely itself. The contemporary humor and bluntness and surface pessimism of “The Corrections” are unlike what moves me about the other books. Some feelings it evoked were similar to past ones I’ve had, but this isn’t to say that my response was the same at all. My favorite books have a lot in common; they make me a little (or very) sad, contain clear moments of happiness to cling to, articulate feelings or thoughts I’ve had that I haven’t described, or haven’t described well, or haven’t recognized. I usually finish them quickly. These qualities being general, the books that embody them are pretty different and I have a different relationship with each of them. I thought maybe I should start writing more about them (and writing more in general), to avoid the consuming inwardness that having a “relationship” with your books fosters, to think more about what I want to do with what the books give.

I went into the book without really knowing too much about it, though it’s well-known. The title made me think of journalism and for whatever reason that stopped me from starting it for awhile. “Corrections” turns out to be about many kinds of corrections; there are physical, concrete ones but also of course the personal, emotional ones. It’s a dysfunctional family story about parents and children and siblings and significant others trying to prevent, deny, and compensate for each other’s mistakes and flaws. It’s long and about a lot of things, but really it’s about this one thing—how screwed up we become by trying so hard not to screw up, by trying to correct ourselves into better versions of the flawed people around us.

I liked:

“When the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before?”...In typing this quote, I find that it reminds me a little of how I might think/write about something like that. Things for me are all about how I internalize them. While concrete events or singular experiences have an immediate impact on me, it’s the way they linger, build up, flow back in mind and heart over time that really changes me. We’ll see how that pans out in the future, because I’m sure I’ve only seen a tiny bit of what can change you through a life.

“He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.”...Maybe the character believes in this line, but I don’t think the writer does. I believe in intentions, even as I feel they only go so far and am often disappointed in lack of actions (largely in myself and a small number of others from whom I expect a lot). I think what you want is a huge part of who you are, even if it’s not something you can be or do. Honestly, it’s what I fall back on when I need encouragement. I remember Mr. Floyd, our high school history teacher, asking us what categories he should grade our projects by—and I suggested effort. I remember Anna B. scoffing at this notion, and then Mr. Floyd said, effort would show in the quality of the work, so it doesn’t need quantification. Personally I think the correlation between effort and quality differs among people, and god, it’s hard to always be your best, so whatever, I’m making effort its own category.

So it’s easy to see how everyone’s felt a lost sense of self because they don’t know what they want. But maybe the things that lead you to uncertainty are just as much who you are, and maybe they’re the same things that lead you back. The book made me feel anew these cliches, of a self that stays in tact in the midst of lives falling apart and so much mess.

It scared me a little, as each day I both recognize and avoid more the reality that life will be imperfect—and not just imperfect in the romanticized way I look at flaws, mistakes, mishaps, difficult love, second choices…but imperfect in that gut-wrenchingly painful, that-was-not-for-the-best, damn-this-is-hard way. Yet, it’s easier to look back on pain in retrospect and see what each one meant and how important it was, when so much passing of time and life happens in a book...instead of trudging through it in real life. I think we develop a lot of expectations of how we’re going to feel during certain phases of our lives and through certain events, through stories—books and movies. I worry about being overprepared, because I expect certain emotions and events that I see in these fictional lives and maybe this will keep me from experiencing things I hadn’t foreseen. I worry about being underprepared, because I might think that life can be as neat of a mess as fiction is, and life will prove me wrong and it will hurt. I’m getting so confused writing this, but I also realize now I don’t have to worry about these things.

I wonder how people foresaw their futures before there was such widespread, accessible stories of fictional people, created by real people. Maybe people just absorbed things as they came, without knowing too much beforehand, without too many expectations based on what’s supposed to happen in a life. I like this idea, and believe that it still applies to us, as awash in other people’s stories as we are. Things are new and yours when they happen to you; your story is going to be the one you feel most, and most genuinely, and there will be surprises still, and you’ll be hurt and you’ll be fine.

And okay, since I mentioned it and because I came across a We-Hate-Atonement facebook group today that made me hostile and impulsive—I need to passively-aggressively defend this book. Not against people who have judged the book in its entirety and still don’t like it, but against the people who haven’t given it enough consideration to justify what they say. Not that I know the book, or any book, in its entirety but I do think there are things Atonement-critics overlook. Maybe I’m not as irritated by Briony, the protagonist, because I see a lot of myself in her, but I do see why she would annoy people. What I don’t get is how people focus on the fact that she’s to blame for everything. Yes, the book is about her crime and guilt, but it’s also clear that it’s really about atonement—which is different from forgiveness, which she isn’t asking for, or repentance, which she already obviously feels.

What’s more—people who bash the ending: the twist is not everything, and it’s more complicated than you give it credit. If you consider the implications of her self-representation, the notion of her fiction, then you see that the Briony you dislike is one that she’s created for you, and for herself. It takes a lot of courage to be honest about yourself, more so to (possibly) distort things to make your own flaws all the more apparent. Besides that, the ending isn’t clearcut. Maybe the twist is fictional, too, maybe it’s more self-inflicted punishment. Who really knows? But you just can’t hate on the novel’s premise without first considering how the ending changes not just the final parts but the entire book, without thinking of how it opens up endless perspectives on her character and the plot and atonement. If you give it at least that, you can then hate all you want. I’m mostly accepting of differences of opinion, though I have a lot of natural defensiveness that I’m trying to decrease; I just hold things I love very, irrationally close.

huh

I was reading old entries and almost two years ago I alluded to that King Lear line about "Reason not the need" when I was writing about Walden Pond. That didn't even register when I wrote about it again, awhile ago (and coming to a similar conclusion both times). In fact, realizing that I wrote about it two years ago made me remember that it was Professor Greenblatt, not Parker, who lectured on it and who I was referring to in the more recent entry...but I'd mixed them up since I took Shakespeare with both, and I mistakenly wrote that Professor Parker had talked about that line. My memory being something I value, this was a little disconcerting even as I know it's normal to mix up details even for those with the best memories.

I almost went back and corrected my entry, from Parker to Greenblatt, but I didn't.

I'm glad I wrote the few times that I did over the past years, because these entries feels both close and distant. Sometimes I write a phrase and feel like I must've written the same thing at another time. Then there are things I don't remember at all. Not that I don't remember the events, but the same feelings aren't so close at hand. Not that the feelings in which I was so endrenched are surprising when I re-read them, but some of them feel new rather than lived-in, while others are precursors of current thoughts and thus feel near, but not quite. It's very bittersweet.

highlights

I usually write about happy things when they're making me happy, but I think I can learn from my friends who practice focusing on blessings when they're down. I've been really happy lately and I should draw upon that to get past this momentary slump.

books movies music
There are some good bookstores on Irving/Judah. I miss Harvard libraries, even though I rarely checked anything out for pleasure since I always had plenty of good/bad reading for class. "The Namesake" started me out on a steady streak because it was so good. Stephen and I read it around the same time and he thought it was just like any other immigrant story and maybe in narrative terms it was, but the writing was so nuanced and beautiful. I remember picking up "Interpreter of Maladies" at the bookstore and reading the first story in one go because the language was so compelling, and that surprised me a little because contemporary fiction doesn't do that often for me. I think raising students on the classics makes them (or just me) think that a certain foreign-ness of language adds to beauty and depth, but lately I find the same in current language and I'm glad I've recognized that finally. Maybe it's a combination of the language and detail, and this phase in my life, but I connected to Namesake more than with any other immigrant story I've read (most of which have been more closely tied to my own background). It actually pushed me to talk to my parents about their stories, and made my recent desire to see Vietnam, in a personal way and not as just another place, more substantial.

"The Things They Carried," (a series of bitingly personal stories of Americans in the Vietnam War) which Andrew sent to me back in January, was my next choice. That sequence made me think of Aud's idea of things being interconnected, and I wonder if I consciously chose "Things" because "Namesake" made me think about Vietnam and my family's past and where I fit in or whether it just happened that way, fittingly without my notice. A bit of both, probably. In any case, the core of "Things" is about stories, and it went by fast and made me think that masterpieces are rare and require some ineffable talent but a touching book can just be about experience and sensitivity, and that that's all I aspire to achieve in life. Again making my own patterns out of the unrelated, my next read, "The World According to Garp" was also full of stories and about the process of making up stories. How I feel about all that, stories, is for another time.

Movies are for those times when I want to be overdosed--isn't it weird how people and worlds can be packed into two hours? Watching "Fallen Angels" and "Days of Being Wild" got me to re-watch my favorite Wong Kar Wai, "In the Mood for Love." I don't think any other moviemaker gets feeling like he does. I love that he captures how emotion can arise from anything, from sounds and colors and looks and a word said a certain way--that plot has so little to do with our longings. And he's obsessed with time, and as much sadness and pain that comes from understanding this concept, he knows how much beauty it gives everything. And nothing beats his lush lush images. Another highlight was Zhang Yimou's "Not One Less" which is such a simple, moving story about a 13-year-old substitute teacher in rural China on an insanely stubborn quest to find one of her students in the city and return him home. Another recommendation for anyone remotely interested, and a non-Asian movie, is "All the Real Girls," a sort of coming-of-age indie except it's the coming-of-age of people who are supposed to be past the time for that. The movie's told in vignettes that tell a linear story but also capture side moments, and everything's very warm and real at the same time. And it's funny, slightly quirky and a little melancholy. Ooph, and Duy and I started watching "The Best of Youth," a six hour Italian movie, without knowing how long it was or what it was about, and that was the best way to see it. It was like reading a book, the events and whole lives unfolding. I'm not doing any of these justice; that's what I get for saving them all up for one entry. I've also watched a slew of really bad movies.

As for music, Snow Patrol was good, especially Chocolate, Set the Fire and Chasing Cars (which I don't even like as much as most people, I rarely listen to it--but it was very full, sung live) but I have to admit that I let the experience be tainted by the obnoxious teenyboppers. I think Duy enjoyed it though, and it was his Christmas present after all. I can't wait for Coachella in a few weeks: Regina Spektor, Jose Gonzalez, RHCP, Tilly & the Wall, Sparklehorse, Arcade Fire and of course my best friend. A few days ago I was most excited for Damien but now I barely focus on that because Jackie & I will be front row center in a solo Damien concert! Eeeeeee!

family/home
The frustrations I felt toward my family for the first half year I came back to California have subsided, not completely gone but the dominating feeling is appreciation. I've grown to know that I don't have to convince them of who I am--they'll draw upon what they've known and maybe in some rare moments see something new. I don't get so frustrated with the fact that they'll be somewhat detached from my present and my future, because they do have my past and that's as much of me as anything else. And for all the things that should make me resentful or annoyed--they are also the reason that in the end, I'm not resentful, because they've been so good to me that I can be a person who sees that over anything else. I really hope that someday I can see my parents' home with them.

cooking
It's pathetic how proud I get over making simple things. But the one new year's resolution I've faithfully kept is the one new recipe a week one. Since then I've successfully made spinach lasagna with prosciutto, sausage & eggplant pasta shells, chicken piccata, breaded and smothered pork chops, quiche (mushroom/bacon/spinach), honey mustard glazed salmon, lemon spaghetti, steamed catfish, chicken/tuna noodle casserole, lemon-lime halibut (actually that one wasn't so successful).

las vegas
What a perfect trip/blockmate reunion! I'm so happy that things went well and that everyone had a good time and that we were all in one place. I'm so grateful to know people who think about things and who get and give all the more because of it. Oh the food, the dancing, the laughs, the carefreeness of happy people in a fake city in a desert.

I used to think friendship was defined by perfect connection, and I think it made me disappointed in the ability to do that. But I feel (rather than just know) now that it's imperfect, it's the unstraightforward ways of reaching out and relating, the differences, the way we balance each other out, the way we love across disconnections, and it's about the surprise, not the expectation, of connection.

california
Being here has been less coming back home and more getting to know a new place. I sit on our porch in our backyard to read, which I rarely did when I actually lived there. My parents keep nagging me about being in the sun when I'm so tan already, which is another thing I've long learned to ignore, and I'm so happy with the warmth. I can consciously feel the difference between this year and last--there was a period of time when each day I felt wonder at the fact that it has been continuously warm, and that there was no harsh winter to break it up. Duy and I took a day drive to Marin County and I saw my first West Coast lighthouse. We took my parents to Half Moon Bay and we read for hours, again in the sun but my parents didn't say anything to me about it this time. I found my new favorite clothing store in SF, on Fillmore Street--Crossroads, which combines pricey vintage pieces with really cheap used clothing sorted by color. I'm awaiting the Cherry Blossom festival in Japantown. Steph and I made our way through Golden Gate Park and walked almost all the way to Ocean Beach (grabbed the bus toward the end), which has very shiny water. The farmer's market at the Ferry Plaza is heaven, and I resisted buying anything for home because so much of the flavor comes from having small bites on the street. I remember A. and I talking about all the different kinds of people who sold items at Haymarket in Boston and all the different kinds of people who come to buy them. Who doesn't love farmer's markets?

I'm going to miss California a lot more when I leave in the fall, than when I left for college. I know it has something to do with the different phases of our lives, how back then it was a home to go back to and now it's a place where I've grown and failed to grow/am still stuck in some ways, and that's not something you can quite go back to. I love my apartment so much, because I poured so much effort into settling--it didn't come immediately or completely naturally. But I'm trying hard not to envision an ideal "place" for myself next year because I want to be open to what comes. I know this is hard for me because I get so fixated on what's ideal.

I feel like amidst all these words I haven't really said anything at all, but that's a little like the way life has been...a flow of things that don't seem much but are everything.

weaknesses and messes

Over the course of an overload of conversations, feelings and observations, I've seen that the judgments we make about what's fair and honest become complicated when applied to romantic relationships. "Complicated" is a copout for a concept that's really too complicated for me to explain. I don't mean that the guidelines have changed, only that I seem to be much more forgiving when they're not followed, now that I've broken them too. We hurt people we care about, unintentionally but also when we know what we're doing even if hurting someone else isn't the purpose of our action. At first this seemed to be an excuse for what I've done--saying that it's an inherent weakness, and in some ways it probably still is an excuse. Yet, I also do believe that this is a part of how people are, and this recognition doesn't mean I'm giving in and will stop trying to be stronger than this weakness.

Growing up I was my brother Stephen's confidante. By the time I was in high school, just 14 which seems so young now, he would tell me about his girlfriends, who he pined for, how he saw love. For years since then I would listen and offer my idealistic views of how things should be: that if this girl was the one, she would love him too; that if that girl cared about him, she wouldn't be so self-centered; that if someone was in a relationship you shouldn't interfere; that if feelings were unrequited it's not meant to be; that if you truly care for someone you can be selfless without losing independence because love is good that way. Easy, unqualified comfort. And if you didn't follow these concepts, you must either not really love a person or you were being too selfish for it to work--something was wrong, in any case.

Now, having gone through certain things and seeing people close to me go through the same and more, I'm less able to harshly judge people's vulnerablities and weaknesses. I have the same sense of what's right, but can understand why people go the other way and I no longer think of them as too weak to do the better thing. Even without feeling all of the same exact things or without having been in the same exact situations, I can understand why a person would stay with someone who's unsure about their love and commitment, why a person wants to let go of something and still half-hang-on, why a person stays because of uncertainty or fear, why we hurt people when we want to be selfless. Feelings like these make you strong and weak in different areas.

I've spent a long time coming to terms with the guilt I felt over being weak about these different things. Part of why it's taken so long is because despite everything, I still have those clean, ideal visions of how things should be; I never expected it to be so messy and fragile. Over time I've become more forgiving to myself and to others. People hurt each other, sometimes because they don't know any better, other times because they thought what the other person might lose wouldn't be as great as what one person or both people gain. All of this is more complex than I could ever fully grasp, it's all such a mess--but the fact is even if we don't completely understand or anticipate, it's still our responsibility to deal with it.

What I really want to say and declare for myself is that even though I'm accepting my weakness, I'm no longer willing to just keep being that way. I can see and imagine the ways in which people hurt one another, and it makes me incredibly grateful for how he has treated me and I absolutely know that he deserves better. It has never been about putting myself down, because though I've learned much about my flaws, what I take away most is knowing what I can give and knowing what I don't know yet. I think I'm more ready now to try and overcome this weakness that seems to plague all of us when we feel. I don't know yet how capable I'll be, but I really want to give it an honest effort. I get scared and guilt returns when I remember that I'm not any better than anyone else, and that selfish desires are not so easily suppressed. But I want to stop dwelling in the middle because of my own needs, because of a need to control things, a need to sustain a closeness, a need to remedy the problem I started. I have to let go of these things, because deep down I still believe in all those things I told Stephen when I was a teenager. It's like I've told people in conversations about these things...when you care about someone there comes a point where you care about them outside of yourself, outside of how they are connected to you.

I still believe that love, in all its forms, can be selfless, and I'm going to try and stop looking to the world to prove it to me, to instead take it into my own hands. I think it'll be okay, and probably less melodramatic than this is making it seem.

what i learned in college

Since leaving college I've thought a lot about the places (Cambridge, Adams, Boston) and the people (blockmates, acquaintances, Adams residents). Everyone knows that's where the "real" education happens. I rarely actively think about the classes. But I came across some of my old essays this past weekend and I started to think about what I learned academically. Specifically, I read over an essay on the Attica Prison Revolt that I wrote for Social Protest, which I took for our Moral Reasoning core (why can't we call it philosophy like everyone else?). That class was hard because while I can be logical, I find it hard to be so rigid and theoretical. I remember being frustrated while writing the essays because we had to refer to so-and-so's framework and you can't make statements like, say, "Even though his life was shorter, it was fuller" the way you can in English. And even harder was the pressure to be original when it feels like every theory's been taken; the objective is so much more limited than the subjective. But as I was reading over the reasoning in the paper, I found myself appreciative of strict reasoning, and I was glad to be forced into taking a stand instead of relying on only instinctual feelings of right and wrong. Because even if I just reasoned my way back to what I initially felt instinctually, it made me better understand how I see things, and pushed me to defend my perspective.

All that made me think of John Parker's last Shakespeare lecture where he told us that he wasn't teaching us his interpretations but instead a way of thinking and reading. I can't even remember the phrase he used, but I recall the basic premise--that after we forget our scribbled notes and essay theses, he hopes we'll remember how to approach literature, how to study it and how to enjoy it. And to be honest, for all the classes I took, I would not for the life of me be able to describe to you every literary era or tell you the major themes of all the classics. I can't quote poetry off the top of my head and I can't remember all the names behind the pseudonyms. But English at college made language a real, living thing for me. I settled into loving a sentence like it was written for me, finding that the color green could make me inwardly ache because it described something both groteseque and heartbreaking, carrying a character around with me. And having the privilege of being around writers made me so aware of stories being imagined and observed and relayed--to hear Helen Vendler talk about why poetry is important, why James Wood simply liked a passage, Jamaica Kincaid introduce a grad whose thesis became a book, Stephen Greenblatt act out Othello, Zadie Smith give the stage to Dave Eggers, Nick Hornby. Swoon.

And then there's the science. A lot of it was awful but chemistry compensated for me. I hated chemistry in high school and it was hard to adjust in the beginning because I knew nothing when I took chem in college. But freshman chemistry is still one of my favorite classes. The problem sets were painful for their reliance on us manipulating otherwise straightforward calculations, but I liked the concepts of equilibrium and kinetics. After I accepted being bad at organic chemistry, I just let myself enjoy it, and it was easy to do that with Jacobsen, speed-chalk-writer and notorious Mr. Serious who despite the intimidation convinced me this was beautiful. Again, I wouldn't remember how to synthesize anything now and I barely remember the names of the groups but I still recall the premise of making bonds, seeking stability. I remember being fascinated by how on the smallest level, we just want to be stable, to be compatible with things around us, how we will always react a certain way in a certain situation. None of this appreciation helped me do particularly well in these classes but they made me think about science much differently, and I could see how one might equate this kind of structure with the existence of a higher form. And in the idea that maybe we make up this structure, I found myself back in literature--and I felt that everything's a story.

So I'm incredibly grateful to college for giving me so many forms of thought. There's more of course, the bits of art, history, math, sociology that I picked up along the way--none of it enough to think I know anything about any of it, especially since I remember very little, but it's nice to have peeks into how people who really know, might form their thoughts. On top of that, I'm grateful for the outside lectures, the diverse tutors in our houses, the clubs who brought the outside world into our campus.

I remember hearing Samantha Power talk about Darfur, and distinctly feeling that this was a privilege because I wasn't just learning about the issue, I was hearing about it from this amazing journalist/activist who I probably wouldn't have even heard of otherwise. And yet I'm probably still not as informed as I should/easily could be. And I thought of Henry and him always pushing us to ask what are the implications of our privilege, and what're we going to do with it. Understanding it has taken some time, but I do hope I'll have it in me to take the next step of using it. It's so very cliche and often for pomp more than substance but I do think of that Harvard Yard inscription--the one that tells you to "enter and grow in wisdom" as you come in and to "depart to better serve thy country and thy kind" as you leave.

I'm still somewhere in between grow and depart.