Sunrise from the lab balcony
It’s 7 a.m., and I’ve been on campus all night. I just finished what I was working on, and should really go home and sleep. But sleeping invariably means ditching my 9:30 class. Worse, sleeping means walking home in the cold, and I forgot my jacket today (yesterday?). It’ll have to wait.
Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what I should be writing, since I’ve been absent so long. Do I try to catch you up? Or assume whoever would still be reading this already knows me, and doesn’t need to hear a recap of the last 6 months?
Maybe it’d be best to forego the past and just tell you where I currently am. It’s two weeks into Spring Semester here at Cal, and more than ever, I’ve got no desire to think about classes. Partly because I put off all my terrible requirements til the very end, so now I’m sleepwalking through Freshman Engineering, reading Chicano/Femenist/lesbian poetry in Ethnic Studies, and pass/fail-ing a class on Heideggar. Or Wittgenstein. I’m enrolled in both, and haven’t decided which I’ll drop yet.
More importantly, though, it’s because I feel like I’m already done with all of this. I haven’t stressed about a class in ages, and my ditch rate has steadily increased since starting research. I ditched my finals last semester to go to a conference in Singapore. I’m ditching this semester’s to present at one in Shanghai (which, incidentally, is what I’ve been working on tonight). There’s a good chance I won’t even walk at graduation, if the plan to couch-surf Tokyo afterwards pans out. Grad school apps are long gone, and acceptance calls/letters are slowly trickling in. Right or wrong, it’s really hard to bring myself to care about that last 12 units.
It’s crazy to think of how I got here — roaming the empty engineering floor like a ghost, drinking my 5th cup of coffee of the night, looking out at the Golden Gate bridge while the sun finally rises, wondering what side of the country I’ll be spending the next 5-7 years of my life on. Just four years ago I was having the same inner-dialogue about going to Berkeley. Wondering if I’d go even if I got in, not being able to fathom what living away from home and friends would feel like.
Obviously I chose to leave, and I think it easily ranks among the best decisions of my life. In hindsight that was a no-brainer: I think I’d be an entirely different person if I’d stayed, and all the bad qualities aside, I mostly like the person I became. It made me branch out, learn to talk to people, and start coming to grips with who I am and what I want out of life. And though I can’t deny a mild case of impostor syndrome as a result, I’ve been given some once-in-a-lifetime opportunities here. I have no regrets about where I am.
But unlike that first decision, I don’t think this one will ever be fully regret-free — with or without the aid of hindsight. Regardless of where I go, there’ll always be a sense in which I missed out somewhere else, and for a pretty huge part of my life at that. If I stay in California, I missed out on the experience to really push myself somewhere new. But if I go somewhere new, I know for a fact there will be times I’d rather be home. If I go anywhere (and I will), I postpone “real life” for even longer, and I’m sure that will feel demoralizing sometimes. Loneliness sets in even here on occasion; where I’m happy, close to everyone, and 21 at a time when every other 21 year old is doing the same thing. As a 27-year- old working on his thesis 3 timezones away, I’m sure I’ll occasionally feel that same loneliness; but instead of being part of the requisite college experience that everyone my age is getting, it will be at a time when friends are settling into careers, getting married, potentially even having kids. But don’t get me wrong. I am incredibly excited about this time in my life; no cold feet here. I know it’s where I’m meant to be, and absolutely wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s just something I need to think out loud about.
As a side note, one thing that made me come back here was reading a few old posts, and realizing they don’t represent me quite as well as they used to. A little over a year ago, I wrote a fairly honest (if gimmicky) assessment of myself. Looking back I definitely still see traces of that in me, but I think it’s starting to evaporate. Cynicism just can’t sustain itself when real empathy is introduced, and I finally feel like I’m learning to balance the extremes. If I do come back here, I’ll probably write a followup to that and/or these (one, two), and tell you where I currently stand.
But not right now.
Does this mean I’m a bad friend for not knowing what you have been up to since the last post