Two Years Above Broadway: January 2006

A New Year

Well, it’s been awhile, hasn’t it? New Year’s is a good time to brush up on things, set stuff in order, get a fresh start. I was lazy about updating my blog last semester, so I’ve given it some exciting new content (pictures!) and my intent is to update this semester more regularly, I’m going to shoot for once a month at least.
When last I’d left off, it was early December, just before finals. I finished my tests, and a few hours after my last one, started my journey back to Seattle in the midst of the Transit Strike here in the city. Which actually didn’t affect me too much; I took a taxi from my apartment down to Penn Station and was fine. What was a problem was that I had to fly out of Islip on Southwest. Islip is out on Long Island. Islip is not LaGuardia or JFK. Two enormous airports in one of the largest cities in the world … and SW doesn’t service them. Go figure. But I made it ok in the end, after a full day of flying.
My time back in Seattle was good, but it didn’t quite go as I’d planned. I unintentionally did something that badly upset a group of people who have come to mean more to me than I can adequately express, and I had to leave the city before things had gotten totally straightened out. This group had done nothing but show me extraordinary generosity in all the time I’d known them, and they will never completely know just how badly I felt knowing they were hurt. Being an analytic and a problem solver by nature, it’s an astonishing thing to find that sometimes things happen that you can’t quite fix. You’d always like to think if you try hard enough or just apply enough diligence you can straighten it out, but that’s not always so, especially when it comes to relationships. But … I can be grateful that everyone in this group is held and bound together by Someone who CAN ‘unbend’ things. And my hope remains that he will. If anyone from that group of people happens to read this (and one person in particular), just know that I’m sorry, that I miss you all, and that I pray for you all every time you’re in my thoughts.
When I arrived back in NYC, I was only registered for 2 of the 5 classes that I needed. My grades had come in from the winter term, and somehow I’d managed to survive Calculus III, which meant that my life would go on. And, by some additional miracle, I managed to get into the other three sections that I needed for this term, which means my schedule is: Statistics, Microeconomics, Chinese II, Music Humanities, and a really interesting course called Frontiers of Science, in which they have leading researchers from a number of different fields come in and share what’s going on in their work. Now that the bane of Calculus is over, I think this semester should be much more enjoyable.
A few brief lessons from the last term. 1) Don’t ever take mathematics here, if you can help it. If you’re transferring in, take all the math you need BEFORE you come. It’s hard here. Really hard. (Honestly in some ways I think harder than it needs to be, though there were some students who did well in the class, so maybe it’s just me). 2) Register early. 3) Bring a laptop, otherwise you’ll be chained to studying in your dorm room. 4) Get out a little more. That one I’m still working on myself. Honestly, this school is a lot of work. I kept hearing that it would be, but I wasn’t totally buying it, until I got here. It is. Believe it.
This semester I think is going to be very much about personal growth. Which, as I’m learning, is often very painful. The things that happened in Seattle were really hard for me, but it highlighted some issues that need to get straightened out with me, and probably have for some time. I’ve turned the page on a new chapter in more than one way, so I’m … curious, to see what this year ends up looking like. Sometimes, in order to find your way, you have to let go of a preconceived idea about the destination. You have to stop fighting with the tides, railing at the storms, or breaking out the oars. Sometimes all that you can do is set your sail, and let the Wind take you where it’s going. But I think sometimes it is in that way that you end up in exactly the place you needed to be, all along.
The pictures are all downloadable; I’ve started off with some shots I took back in September around campus and there will be more to follow. I was planning to set some snow shots, but its only snowed here once this season, and most of it had melted off by the time I was ready to take them. We’ve been having a really very mild winter, but I’ll take some if it snows again. The odd-looking blue-green picture is from the doorway to the cathedral of St. John the Divine, which is just down the street from here; there’s a whole set of panels on the door that depict the creation from Genesis. And as I noted in my new profile, no, those guys aren’t me. I had a great shot I was planning to post, but Blogger has a 50K size limit, and I haven’t figured out how to shrink any of the shots I’ve already taken. Finding a small enough pic was actually very hard, so you work with what you’ve got. Oh, and I’m really not digging the sort of aquamarine border around the picture, have to work on that …