| | I had a rather rude awakening on Saturday - Christine came into the room frantically telling me that the sink was overflowing and that nasty black water was about to spill all over the kitchen floor... was now spilling all the kitchen floor... DO SOMETHING!!! I could hear a lot of bumping and grinding upstairs that sounded like plumbing work being done, so I groggily threw on some clothes (don't feel too sorry for me, it was like 11 AM) and went up to bang on our upstairs neighbors' door. It took three insistent tries before someone finally opened it. The guy working on the plumbing was cool enough to take responsibility for his unclogging of the upstairs pipes cause the clogging of ours, and he came down and snaked out pipes and mopped our floor for us. But man, those dishes were NASTY after that. And it STUNK. I didn't want to go into the kitchen for most of the day after that. Thankfully it was nothing a little Lysol couldn't fix.
Thankfully, plumbing woes were not the highlight of our weekend. Saturday was my 10th year college reunion. Somehow it didn't carry the same excitement with it that the 5-year reunion did back in 2004... maybe it had something to do with the fact that the people I was most looking forward to seeing, I had seen throughout the years anyway. Lina and Cathy had both contacted me before the reunion to see if I'd be coming, since knowing for sure two good friends would be there gave them more incentive to come. It wasn't like none of us knew anyone else there. I actually got a tour of the brand new dorm that had just gone up last year (which is practically a hotel... microwaves and fridges in the rooms? Private bathrooms? Where's the shared suffering we all had to go through?), and saw some people I hadn't talked to in years (one only sporadically since the last reunion despite us both having each others' Email addresses, another since 2001!), and I really enjoyed catching up with them. But it was brief, because I just sort of "crashed" the thing without signing up, so I couldn't follow those folks to the expensive dinner that they had all paid for. (Cathy signed up for it and then Lina and I both saw the price and balked. What could we do? We both had significant others to consider, so the dinner would have run us over 100 bucks! What was Oxy thinking? Thankfully Cathy knew other folks from our class at the dinner, so she didn't pay 50 bucks just to eat by herself.) I wish now that I had taken more initiative to get contact info from some of those folks. Hopefully it won't be another five years until I get another chance. I need to get in touch with the person who tracks our class notes for the Oxy magazine and see if I can persuade her to pass my Email address along to a few folks.
One of the activities that I didn't attend this weekend was dedicated to a man who, during his freshman year at Oxy, had gone by "Barry" until convinced by one of his friends to take pride in his given name. Most of the world knows this man as Barack Obama, and of course Oxy's going to milk the fact that he spent half of college there for all it's worth. So they had a "Barack Walk", apparently an exploration of campus intended to visit the places where he had spent time as a student. I could only think, "What is this, a pilgrimage? For crying out loud, these are dorms and dining halls we're talking about." Sometimes I just have to laugh at how people seem to have trouble differentiating between Obama the man, and Obama the religion. But then again, I can see the novelty value in relating the college experiences of a man who is now President of the United States to our own. I didn't go to an Ivy league school, so in the past, the chance of me having lived in a place where a U.S. President spent part of his formative years would have been about nil. There's something cool about thinking, "Hmmm, this dude was once an awkward freshman like me, living off of bad cafeteria food and writing papers at 3 A.M. and struggling to sleep through the hubbub that the paper-thin dorm walls did little to conceal." It makes the journey from those humble college beginnings to doing some "grown-up thing that matters" seem a little more attainable. (I joked that there was also a "McCain Walk", but that it required an actual cane. This only invited comments from my college friends about how they haven't missed hearing those dumb comments every day since graduation.)
Five years ago, when I came back for my first reunion, I was heavy into freshman year nostalgia. I wanted to be a "fly on the wall" and watch it all unfold again. This year, I felt farther removed from it. I didn't feel like looking back - not that I hated my old self or anything, but just that I felt I'd spent enough time on nostalgia already. As I ran into folks who had lived up in Stewie with me my freshman year and excitedly greeted me, "Divad!", I remembered that I was once an unsure kid who went by a nickname because something about his real name made him uncomfortable, too. (I thought going by the all-too-common "David" would lead to people calling me "Dave" for short. I hated "Dave". So I went by my "aspiring writer" pseuodnym. I dropped that backwards nom de plume at somewhere around the point that I realized I sucked at creative writing. But it lives on in my "Soundtracks", I guess.) Now I barely know that socially awkward person who spent the entirety of college figuring out how not to piss off the people he called his friends. And while there are people who recognize the "Divad" character and perhaps get some fond rememberance of dumb jokes that I told or otherwise goofy things that I did in college, it's the people who have really kept up with me and remained close friends all this years that I am most amazed by. I think back to college, and I can't imagine why they stuck with me. I was kind of a jerk!
I was recently watching an episode of Quantum Leap in which, Al, the holographic observer, remarked that "college is wasted on the young". I realize now how true this is. Maybe last time around, I wasn't far enough removed from my college years to see how painfully in need of maturity I was. I still cherish those years, because I honestly had a blast and there's really never another time in life that's gonna be quite like it. But I no longer wish I could find another time in my life that is like it. I'm comfortable moving on to the next phase, despite the responsibilities it entails and the fact that I'm not meant to spend any more years of my life just learning neat things at a distance while someone else worries about cooking my food and paying my bills. Sure, that would be fun, but I think it was really the couple of years after college, when I went through the trial by fire of getting a real job and having a long-term relationship unravel so that I could eventually meet my wife, that forced me to truly grow up a bit. Those who knew me from before those years have extended a special form of grace, in a way - they know who I am at my most impatient, most ignorant, and most selfish, and they still stuck with me. (Though they are probably now painfully aware of their own ignorance at the time and how they've grown since then.) There's a facet of God in that closest circle of friends from college - they've seen the underside, and yet still they love.
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| | Posted 6/18/2009 12:04 AM - 2 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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