So we arrived in Evanston today; move-in and the start of
Welcome Week, are tomorrow, which is insane. None of this feels real. Everyone
else has already been in college for what seems like forever, and though my
awkward limbo state for the past two weeks has been, well, awkward and limbo-y,
it felt familiar still – it was like summer hadn’t ended, like I was hanging
around the house waiting for friends to come back from vacation.
We’re staying at this hotel in downtown Evanston,
approximately six or seven blocks from my old house. It’s been 8 years since we
moved, but I’ve visited Evanston nearly every year since then – either being
dropped off or picked up from the buses for camp. Honestly, it feels wrong to
be here again, like I’m moving backward, regressing, instead of moving on. I
can’t help feeling like maybe I made a mistake, that I should’ve chosen a new
town for college. The weird combination of familiarity and strangeness is just
so disconcerting – I know this town, remember its streets, and yet I don’t
belong. It doesn’t feel like home, but I know it used to be. Besides which,
there isn’t nearly enough greenery – and I already miss the river.
I have this feeling I’ll be fine once I’m on campus; we
never actually spent much time in Northwestern, and unlike downtown, my
memories of it aren’t filled with awkwardness and a sense of non-belonging. Because
the thing is, because we’ve visited so much for camp, my memories of this place
aren’t the over-idealized childhood versions – they’re the awkward, middle
school and junior high, and even high school realities, the times when I was
just with my mom or my dad and we wandered around looking for a place to eat
dinner, and I was either itching to leave or unhappy to be back.
Maybe it’s just because I didn’t live here in junior high/high
school, which is when I really found my footing in terms of friends, but in my
memory, the people in Evanston are different from the people in St. Paul. Not
as nice, not as much like me, people I will always feel a little on edge
talking to. And I know, that’s not true, I just made a few bad friend choices
in elementary school, and the students at Northwestern aren’t necessarily like
the people from Evanston, and the reason I feel such a disconnect with some of
the people at camp is because they all know each other from high school and have
similar experiences they can bond over, but fears and feelings aren’t always
subject to logic or reason.
(I don’t really think this post makes that much sense, but
that’s okay. I feel better for having written it, putting my words on…well, not
paper, but you know. Down somewhere.)
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Rambulations
I keep getting the urge to make video blogs and I feel like this is indicative of the fact that I should write more real blogs, since really they're kind of the same thing in different mediums. Anything I would want to talk about in a video blog, it feels like, I should want to talk about in a normal blog, right? Right. Plus, I don't know how to edit things, and also my voice is sort of too loud for my recording device and I hate listening to myself talk.
The past few days have been weird. Now that the state fair is over, I have a completely open schedule, and nothing to fill it with but projects, packing, and reading. Many (i.e., all) of my friends who are going to college this year have already left, most other students (including my sister) have started school, and here I am, watching Netflix, trying to make a quilt, and deciding which sweaters I really need to bring to NU and which can stay here. It's like being in limbo; everyone else keeps talking about their roommates, and classes, and what they're doing, and I'm just biding my time.
It all feels unreal. I think if I still had friends here, it would seem like summer is still going on, and I would be distracted, but being all alone and waiting for college to start gives me plenty of time to think and reflect on how truly removed this all seems. I've been thinking about college for so long, imagining what it would be like, the classes I'd take and the people I'd meet - it still just seems like a daydream.
Sometimes, when I get in moods like these, I start to question who I am. What life is. Why it is I like what I like and don't like what I don't like and whether or not I'm actually alive and a person or if I'm not some pod-person imagining all this like in the Matrix - or maybe I'm in a dream like in Inception. There's this really great word that someone made up - sonder - which I always think of when I start to feel like this: "n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk." Or, in my own much-shorter-but-also-more-confusing way, the sudden understanding that every person feels their own life and their own them-ness in the same way that you feel your own you-ness. That to them, their actions and feelings are valid and reasonable, in the same way that you feel your own actions and feelings are reasonable. And it's related because along with that understanding comes the question of how real your own life is - if you can detach these other people from their own experiences and lives in your heads, who's to say your own experiences are valid? I'm not really effectively getting my point across here, I don't think.
I've been reading a little more lately, which quite honestly doesn't help with this whole thing. Somewhere in my head, the characters and things that happen in books have always seemed like they were in some way real. I know, on an intellectual level, that there is no Hogwats - but on an emotional level, especially when I'm actually reading the books, that universe isn't completely a fantasy. And when I start to believe in those fictional places and people, it makes my own life feel even less real.
Okay. I'm going to stop before I become completely nonsensical.
The past few days have been weird. Now that the state fair is over, I have a completely open schedule, and nothing to fill it with but projects, packing, and reading. Many (i.e., all) of my friends who are going to college this year have already left, most other students (including my sister) have started school, and here I am, watching Netflix, trying to make a quilt, and deciding which sweaters I really need to bring to NU and which can stay here. It's like being in limbo; everyone else keeps talking about their roommates, and classes, and what they're doing, and I'm just biding my time.
It all feels unreal. I think if I still had friends here, it would seem like summer is still going on, and I would be distracted, but being all alone and waiting for college to start gives me plenty of time to think and reflect on how truly removed this all seems. I've been thinking about college for so long, imagining what it would be like, the classes I'd take and the people I'd meet - it still just seems like a daydream.
Sometimes, when I get in moods like these, I start to question who I am. What life is. Why it is I like what I like and don't like what I don't like and whether or not I'm actually alive and a person or if I'm not some pod-person imagining all this like in the Matrix - or maybe I'm in a dream like in Inception. There's this really great word that someone made up - sonder - which I always think of when I start to feel like this: "n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk." Or, in my own much-shorter-but-also-more-confusing way, the sudden understanding that every person feels their own life and their own them-ness in the same way that you feel your own you-ness. That to them, their actions and feelings are valid and reasonable, in the same way that you feel your own actions and feelings are reasonable. And it's related because along with that understanding comes the question of how real your own life is - if you can detach these other people from their own experiences and lives in your heads, who's to say your own experiences are valid? I'm not really effectively getting my point across here, I don't think.
I've been reading a little more lately, which quite honestly doesn't help with this whole thing. Somewhere in my head, the characters and things that happen in books have always seemed like they were in some way real. I know, on an intellectual level, that there is no Hogwats - but on an emotional level, especially when I'm actually reading the books, that universe isn't completely a fantasy. And when I start to believe in those fictional places and people, it makes my own life feel even less real.
Okay. I'm going to stop before I become completely nonsensical.
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