I have newfound respect for the funny pages. Thank you Boondocks for giving me the motivation to open the “Life” section of the Hartford Courant and laugh again. You can now join FoxTrot, Non Sequitur, and Get Fuzzy as happy comical moments, as opposed to Cathy, Garfield, Rhymes with Orange, and Rose is Rose; which should be found on B8. That’s right. The obituaries.
What’s going on? Who am I? Where did THAT come from? Now where do I go from here? Can I keep it up? Is it going to happen? … Story of my life.
“After deliberation, the jury has decided that MySpace is just a Facebook wannabe for high school kiddos and old people trying to pretend they are 16 and get some ass.” - Anonymous
(Ah yeah, I deleted almost all of my comments in a moment of endearing stupidity. Whoops. My bad.)
So, I didn’t watch 24 tonight. Did that nuke kill a bunch of people? Yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought.
Wow.
That word sums up a lot. Shock, anger, surprise, happiness– yeah, it’s been a rollercoaster.
Exams. Linear Algebra = F. I’ve never been so sure about a terrible exam grade in my life. 1/5th of the test was on diagonalization, the one lecture I decided that golf was more important than. Fuck. I’m speechless. There are these feeling of anger deep down, and maybe that’s what I need to kick it into gear. Still, anything lower than a C- in the class will result in one of the worst first-year scenarios possible. I’ve always been at the top and it hurts to be slipping down the side of the mountain that I spent eighteen years climbing.
As for GOOD news on the exam front, I beat the mean in physics, and ended up with an “average” B-. I really hate grade deflation. Is ours the only fucking school that a GPA of 2.7 is AVERAGE? Whatever. Got a perfect score on the econ final. 28 questions up, 28 down. Nice. So long as he doesn’t curve down (which is a distinct possibility) I should A out in that class. EAS went alright, somewhere over a B- is expected for a final grade. My GPA will still take a hit this semester thanks to fucking matrices, but thanks to some education in 75% of my “education seminars,” I might survive slightly better than expected.
So then, it was over. Cornell. Year one. Finito. Kaput. I was far less emotional on moveout day than I figured, myself being a sentimental person and all. Goodbyes to the Gun Hill crowd were terse, because my mind has convinced me that summer vacation is just a slightly longer winter break. I’ll see them soon enough. As for the others, well maybe I just didn’t know people outside my circle well enough. We shared homework answers and drinks, but never anything beyond that. They are merely brief sentences in the story of my life. Nothing more, nothing less. Passing acquaintances that will likely fall by the wayside, never to be seen again. I wish them all luck.
Home has been nice. It’s weird because for the first time since last summer it feels like I never left. There was bowling in Bristol, there was golfing, there was watching Red Sox in familiar surroundings, there were my patented “drivebys,” there was TwinCo, there was P-Chops, there was my car; the driving, the same roads, the same buildings, the same instincts. I return to Merit Pools tomorrow. Everything is where I left it.
There are some changes though. Changes to my friends, their looks, their personalities. I don’t think any of them are quite the same anymore. Changes to me, and changes to my life. On the horizon? Who knows, but I have a funny feeling I might find out soon enough. I need to get my head on straight eventually, right?
2 exams down, 2 to go.
Today was the first nice day since September. Nice in the fact that it was mildly warm, leaves are on trees, and I got to throw for a bit. Not nice enough to retract my statement of “Four more days until I’m out of this pit which reeks of overachieving, secret handshakes, and Ben Franklin’s portrait getting wiped across people’s asses as toilet paper.”
So apparently they found a body in the gorges. Most likely Dan Pirfo. Not confirmed, but as I said before “how many people in Ithaca are missing right now?” That and the gorge the body was found in makes reasonable sense in proximity to campus that it’s a likely scenario.
For those of you who don’t know, Dan Pirfo is the kid from my residence hall who got really shitfaced a couple weeks ago and disappeared. It was in the news for a couple days, while they did some searches, etc. but since he was an adult, and no foul play was suspected, the searches never really moved past preliminary stages. Fliers were put up, a website was started, and hope was held out by many of his friends. I’ll be honest, I didn’t really know the kid, so I wasn’t directly involved in the efforts. If the body does indeed turn out to be his, I find it kinda heavy that I am one of the last people who saw him (briefly as I was leaving for my room at 3:30 am because I had work at 9–) alive. He was trying to drink enough to blow a .40 in the breathalyzer a friend of mine has or something to that effect. So anyhoo, the details are sketchy, and massively conflicting. From what I can discern, if he truly was not seen after 4 am like confirmed police records show, than it’s quite possible that in a stupor he jumped/fell from a bridge here on campus. If the unconfirmed story of him being in Mews at 9 am is true, it is probably that this might have been a suicide.
Either way, still… yeah… wow… I really don’t know what to do or say. I feel horrible for his friends and parents, but unfortunately, I haven’t been holding much positive hope on his return like others– there were absolutely no signs that he would voluntarily leave without any of his belongings, on a Sunday morning, while drunk. Deep down, I knew it was coming, and it’s really a shame.
It just goes to show, that no matter how much I bitch and groan and whine about classes, I’m alive and get to go to an Ivy League school. Not too bad a situation to be in after all, huh?
EDIT: Yup, Pirfo. Sucks.
Well, my time spent typing updates from room 271D is drawing to a close; for better or for worse. Ten more days of exams, Mews, Appel, Ithaca, poker, vending machines, independence, and my living space acquaintances (not all friends, for some reason, I’m not the most likable person to everyone, but it’s at the point now where my “everyone must like me disorder” doesn’t really play). Torrington, Merit, Sky Top, Eastwoods, and to a sad extent, THS lie ahead.
I miss my car. I miss my pitchback. I miss my friends. I miss my family. I miss (dare I say it) my job. I miss my golf. I miss my basement TV. I miss the summer air. I miss Torrington. OK, so this is not a fair assumption based on my situation. I’m a student who rarely has wandered off campus, never got a feel for using the bus system, and doesn’t leave an area of a mile radius around my building. But it’s really odd; at this time last year, all I hoped for was to get out of Torrington, go somewhere fresh and exciting. Well, here I am. And maybe I’ve become jaded, or maybe it’s because I spent 17/18ths of my life there so far, but Torrington really does have a leg up on Ithaca.
But the other day, I was walking past the commons down to Bowl-o-Drome on Third Street. It was weird, because I walked through ITHACA. Not Cornell; Ithaca. There were kids outside, old people sitting in a park, there was an Aldi’s and a diner and an auto repair shop. It was normal. It was quiet. It was… average.
Maybe that’s what I really want. Average. So while I can’t wait to leave now, maybe next year will be better. Because I’ll have a life; well, at least a life OTHER than Cornell. Everything so far has been Cornell classes, Cornell food, Cornell work, Cornell productions, Cornell parties, Cornell housing, Cornell bowling, Cornell golf, Cornell everything. I’m on overload. I like life, but I think I can’t handle too much of one thing. I miss the old people, I miss the young people. I miss the diversity. So maybe it’s not Torrington I miss, it’s just my surroundings. So did I make the right choice?
So then I wonder. Would I have been better off at Tufts or BU or RPI or Amherst? Who really knows. Maybe I turned my Cornell blinders on just a little too much. Then again, I think it’s unfair to judge based on limited experience. I wanted the small school, I know that. I wanted the small close-knit community. But I couldn’t turn down Cornell’s allure. That and Tufts shafted me financial wise.
Speaking of finances, it’s a shame that my life revolves around the capitalist system now. It’s almost too much pressure for me. I passed up a free ride at UConn, and an almost free ride at RPI and BU to spend $30,000 a year to sit on my ass here. Sometimes I don’t know what to do. God, there are so many times where I say, why the hell didn’t I go to UConn, where if I fuck up, I waste time. And time is valuable, but wasting time AND money is worse. I hate how the prospect of not going to grad school right out of here is messing with my head. Do I want to stay in the sciences? Journalism? Economics? Next year will tell. Mistakes made this year are freshman fuck-ups, but next year, I am going to have to be motivated. Which scares me, because I’ve never buckled down before. I see kids here spending 4-5 hours a day after going to every class on schoolwork, studying for big tests and sporting 4.0 GPAs. Maybe it’s Torrington High. Easy street might have caught up to me.
Everyone here falls into two categories. The kids who went to the exceptional private schools, who HAD to work their asses to stay ahead, and the publics, who got in here by being the top of the top of their class. Many of the publics had to fight to the top, but me, no. If I had a dime for every person that told me I could be at Harvard or MIT if I actually gave a damn, I’d have enough to buy an 88 Geo. Which isn’t a lot of dollars, but is a lot of dimes. So what I need to do is finally buckle down. I need to swim back to the top, and kick others down (while it’s not nice, it’s the way it has to be done).
But my question is, will I be able to do it? Can I be more than just merely average (I know being an average student by Cornell students still means I trump 98% of the country) or will I just sit on this level of mediocrity? If this doesn’t pan out, do I have then mental makeup to do it? I don’t know, honestly. I am far from a strong willed person. I cannot set goals and achieve them without some degree of difficulty. So where do I go from here?
Back to Ithaca. To Gun Hill, with friends. To try to start over again. Hope that I found my niche that Ithaca can be. I hate starting from scratch, but it looks like I’ll have to give it one more shot. For now, I won’t even bother thinking about what’ll happen if I fail. If it happens, sobeit. I’ll know why.
And never underestimate the pitchback. Sometimes an hour with a baseball on a warm day by myself is all I need to clear my head.
OK, so the Yankees have a pitcher named [Asian-hyphen-Asian] Wang (Pronunciation subject to debate of D-Rays announcers). You think it’s too easy to make fun of this guy. Like “A-Rod delighted to see Wang in clubhouse,” or “Joe Torre hopes for six strong from Wang.” But those are made-up. This is just fucking hilarious.
(D-Rays ON TOP of Yankees, WANG OUT, GROOM IN - D-Rays 5, Yankees 2)
… He gonna get it!!
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