school daze

it's new student orientation this week. hard to believe that it's already been a year since i moved up here. time passes strangely.

i have negative motivation to finish my last two papers. not just zero motivation, but negative. i also have little motivation to do the small talk circuit with the new people. the first 2 months are such a whirlwind of adjustments, it takes time to settle down. and thus you have the same conversation over and over again.
top five small talk questions, after "what's your name?"
1. where are you from?
2. what are you studying?
3. what did you do before you came here?
4. where are you living? which leads to,
5. do you have any roommates?

when i tell people i live alone, they seem to take this as a bad thing. or a sad thing. they pause and say, "oh. well" and kind of trail off, like "oh, poor you." or perhaps thinking i'm some kind of psycho. it's kind of irritating. i've lived alone for the past year, and it's rather grown on me. i'm continuing to live alone this year too. by choice - i did have options to live other places, but my indecisiveness led me to just stay put. why mess with a good thing? good location, nice landlords, friends in the neighborhood. i do get lonely sometimes, but have friends to a short phone call or walk away. people ought to try living alone more often - you get to know yourself better.

anyway, i know the small talk is a necessary evil. once you get past that then you can move on to getting to know someone. it's just the repetition that gets to me. and then you start to mix everyone up.

the best introductory conversation (incidentally the only one that i can remember - which i guess makes it the bestthen) i had when i got here was when i met my friend rochelle. i was up for a summer class, and we struck up a conversation at the tail end of a beach bbq. she asked me what my story was, and i said that i was going to be starting at regent in the fall. to which she responded, "oh good, then i can invest in you." i am all about investing in people, and this was the first non-rote comment i'd gotten in two weeks of school. some people may have been thrown off by this first comment, as rochelle has a way of doing that to people. then she asked me what my deepest passion was - this is what threw me. as i stammered out an abbreviated answer, i realized that i was enjoying myself because it was a real question, and she really seemed to want to know the answer. in the meantime, her friend (later to become my friend also) margo was trying to tell rochelle to back off of me. afterward, they went home and laughed, convinced that they had scared me and i'd never talk to them again - this is what they told me. i went home thinking that they were hilarious and that i wanted to meet up with them in the fall. funny things, first impressions. rochelle and i hung out almost everyday this summer, and now play on the same city league soccer team.

she is suffering from being in a transitory position in life, trying to find a job and all that grown up stuff after grad school - i've been in a similar position and there's no getting around the fact that it sucks. several of my other friends are slogging along through various tough stages, ranging from relationship stuff to personal things to academic things and i'm in the thick of things myself too. we all help each other along. that's life i suppose - lots of good things, along with lots of hard things. but the hard things are somehow good too. we try to avoid the hard stuff because we think it's bad or that we shouldn't feel the accompanying feelings like anger, sadness, frustration and so on; but it's only in going through those hard things that our feelings change, that we grow and find healing. it sure ain't easy, but i'm discovering that's there's a lot more depth and goodness to be found in the experience. kind of like after you get through the awkward small talk and on to the good stuff.