wasted days

It’s so cold; it disorients me. The air smells and feels like autumn, but the light is all wrong. Green and blue and too-bright sunlight stream across my retina, but my skin crawls. This is the kind of air that hardens me; it’s the kind of air that kills things. I think it’s fall again, and I play Placebo and crack the windows and drive too fast because it evokes in me a reckless determination to survive, viciously. It’s been too hot and too cold, where did spring go?

background noise: “you don’t care about us” placebo

The pond behind my house is steaming. The rain keeps coming down but these evanescent shapes keep blowing off the surface of the water, rising up the banks like little ghosts fleeing from a rift in the earth. It’s pretty.

Yay three day weekend, yay not too much to do, not yay for a return to restlessness. But I bet I can keep myself occupied. It will be a test of willpower. And Kimmy is back, so maybe I’ll have someone to play with. Maybe.

I am gathering momentum. Before I know it I will be rocketed forward into summer without a shred of something to hold on to and I will explode. So I make plans. I got a job lined up, and next I should figure out travel arrangements. I want to bring people to New Jersey, but it’s hard to import Midwesterners. Plane tickets are expensive, the drive is tiresome. But I’d rather be among some other people than just in my usual summer beachtime funk. It’s good to relax, but again, I get restless.

background noise: “come home” placebo

The first sunburn of the year, hot days, beautiful nights, and a brief indulgence in some old habits. This was a good weekend. My arms are killing me, though - they’re bright pink, and every time I scratch they start to burn, burn, burn. But I got to spend a lot of time doing CUWiN stuff, which is good. And I got a job. And Books for Prisoners can wait until next weekend. The long next weekend, with a day and a half off. It’s a beautiful thing.

I find myself increasingly engrossed in Uni events, but wishing people who have left would come back. I did get to spend some totally unexpected time with Ice and Donkz, though. It was fun.

My Stud Prod play won this award from a studio in Florida. They accept student-written plays and pick a few from each age range to produce. When they said, “produce” I assumed that meant they were actually going to perform it, but they actually just do a reading. Which is not nearly as exciting. So now I have to decide whether or not to go down to Sarasota to see this happen. It would definitely be worth it if they were really doing the play, because it would be fascinating to see someone else’s interpretation of my work and to see something I had written be so seriously considered. But their festival is the same day as the SAT II’s and prom, neither of which I’m terribly inclined to want to go to but both sort of a hassle to miss. I can move the SAT’s and just skip prom, but it’s not necessarily worth it just for a reading…

So now I’ve got to decide what to do, and fast - plane tickets must be bought or not, prom tickets are only available for another three days, and I don’t even know when the deadline to move the SAT’s is.

If nothing else it’s exciting to have won something. People always like plays at school because they are familiar with the people in the productions. Having something evaluated by an external arbiter (Theaterfest, for example, was a satisfying experience) somehow legitimizes the congratulations you received for originally doing the show.

This past weekend Zuke and I flew down to Houston to explore Rice. He’s been accepted there and at Reed, so he must decide between the two. You would think, “Well, Rice is in Texas - the choice is clear,” but it’s really not so obvious. While, yes, it is in the South, you wouldn’t actually even realize you were in Texas. Half the student body is from in-state, but there aren’t really accents or guns or even too many evangelical republicans (that I ran across, at least - the campus is fairly politically neutral or even apolitical).

This is a good thing, I suppose, because the alternative is almost certainly rampant conservativism. But it’s a double-edged sword - the neutrality of the campus leads to a sense of uninvolvement. I didn’t get the feeling students were active and engaged in life.

To be fair, I think this was largely caused by two things: We had come on the Monday after the biggest week-long celebration of the year, and our dorm hosts were anything but vehement party types. So that must be taken into consideration.

Rice has an interesting dorm system - you break up into colleges that are purely residential, and you live with that college (i.e. dorm building) all the time you live on campus. So you get a sort of college rivalry going on. The college we saw was nice: of decent quality, although not as nice as, say, Amherst’s, and the rooms were spacious (a big plus). Our dorm host’s was on the eighth floor, and he had a view of the campus and a straight shot to the skyscrapers of Houston three or four miles away. It was gorgeous.

The entire campus is quite pretty. They claim there are as many trees as students, and I’m tempted to believe them; there’s green space everywhere. The buildings are fairly spread out, so somehow the campus feels bigger than it’s undergraduate population of about 2,000 students would warrant. Things are green all year round, and while it does get ungodly hot in the summer time, the average student goes home in the summer anyway. The architecture is beautiful, and coherent. A lot of red tile roofs and brick buildings, arranged in big courtyards. The green next to the main entrance is unreal - these tall trees that look sort of like cypress or some sort of tall, thin pine in rows along the edge of a sidewalk that goes down the middle of this absolutely beautiful, stunningly green area between pretty buildings.

We visited a couple of classes as well, both of which were all right. The computer programming class had a professor that seemed very interested and engaged, and the introductory physics with calculus class was both well attended and fairly well taught. No one asked any questions in the latter class, so either they all understood it or that isn’t the way it works. The CS class, which was 200 level, was more interactive, and smaller (8 people instead of 30).

With strong academics, nice weather, a pretty campus, decent dorms, and decent (but not extraordinary) food, and relatively low tuition costs, Rice certainly does look attractive. I’m still having a little bit of trouble actually seeing myself there, but I think for no reason other than I didn’t know much about it before a few weeks ago. Now that I have a good idea of what it’s like it may creep into my consciousness yet.