October 25, 2006
Posted by thomas in : xanga , add a comment The Alumni ReportAll of a sudden you find the trees throwing a red and gold ticker tape parade for the passing of summer and early morning passersby bundled up in coats and scarves, their breath pouring out in white puffs of smoke: autumn has arrived. Yet, as an alumni, you find no deadlines, no midterms, no dormitory induced respiratory illnesses - things that usually mark the onset of the fall season. Instead you discover that autumn is remarkably like summer only colder and more colorful; in fact you begin to suspect that winter will be remarkably similar to both autumn and summer only colder still. And there will still be Christmas. Or at least we hope.
Time, you see, is relative. Physics 210 taught me that (awesome class, highly recommend it to all TWUers). However, landscaping has only reinforced the lesson: weeding a flowerbed in the rain on a Monday afternoon I have observed time slow to the point where I was afraid it had stopped. In the same way I have seen time disappear despite my attempts to grasp hold of it and slow its progress on weekends in Seattle spent with my girlfriend.
Time stretches, it speeds and slows, dissolves and grows; but as an alumni time becomes most distinctive in its sameness. Your life tends to melt together much more easily into a big shapeless mass of memories. Was it today that I woke up with my usual routine of frantic thrashing at my alarm clock before stumbling out of bed to get ready for work or was it yesterday, or the day before that, or the day before that one, or the day before that one or?has it really been seven months already?
Granted, this isn?t the case for all alumni. Some live the exciting, adventurous lives you dream of as an undergrad: traveling to far off places, saving Africa ? that sort of thing. Many of us, when we were students, found ourselves lamenting our lack of time. If only we had more time, if only we were free of papers and midterms and textbooks, then we would?then we would what? It is maybe not the easiest question to answer. Even when we manage to break free of the tyrannies of school deadlines one usually finds that there are other things that demand portions of our free time. For example, a little known fact about being an alumni is that, just as when you were a student, you must find a way to eat, clothe yourself, and procure shelter from the elements. Pretty basic things that demand big chunks of all that freedom you were crying for while sitting in your dorm at three am eating Oreos and watching Star Trek all the while unperturbed by your late night revelry since you could just skip your eight o?clock class and sleep in until eleven.
There are other things that grab at your freedom too: expectations, doubts, uncertainties, confusion, pressure. Time can grow into this huge murky mass called ?THE FUTURE? which tends to sit poised like a mass of storm clouds on the horizon, and sometimes we get so consumed with the clouds we get lost in the fog and miss the present we?re currently engaged with. Which illustrates something else about time: it?s fleeting. Days and months and years can pass you by and all of a sudden it?s not just a season that has disappeared but it?s a whole chunk of your life.
So while I sometimes look at the past few months and all I see is that routine of alarm clock bashing and early morning wake-ups and days spent wading through dog poo in the rain ? I hope and trust that there is more there too. And, of course, there is. And sometimes those memories from the past, the breaks in the sameness we sometimes get stuck in, serve well as an umbrella against the storm clouds of the future ? it is fall in BC after all and no matter what your student status it?s best to keep an umbrella within reach.
October 4, 2006
Posted by thomas in : xanga , 7 comments The Alumni ReportFor all of you still looking forward to graduation there are, in fact, a lot of good things about becoming an alumnus, despite what my initial foray into reflecting on my alumni status may have led you to believe. Even those of us who do not awake each morning to join the merry bluebirds in their song of joy and fulfillment have much to sing about, although we end up doing it with our own cracking voices in our 1980’s era automobiles on our way to mediocre jobs with no bluebird accompaniment.
For one thing, once you graduate, the money is a lot better. No, most of us are not diving into pools of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck. However, instead of paying out 68 cents a minute to listen to your Geography 102 professor talk about himself and a bus-load of his geography/geology loving buddies traveling for three days through the Rocky mountains (where they stopped often and saw a lot of…rocks), you instead find a job and actually see your bank balance increase every once in a while instead of watching it decline into the ever expanding oblivion of mounting debt.
For another thing, you can now introduce yourself to various people, such as coffee baristas, as: ?Hi, I am [Insert Name Here], BA.? Then you can yell something real cool at the guy over by the coffee machine like: ?I need a grande mocha with two pumps of hazelnut STAT!? You see, once you complete your BA you will have invariably become really addicted to coffee after those late-night-all-nighter papers, this coffee addiction may also make you really annoying to most coffee vendors. However, I have found the whole ?Nice to meet you, [handshake, head-nod] Thomas Cairns, BA? thing has not made me sound as professional or important as I had hoped.
There are other things too. You may have actually learned something in the past four years that has made you a better person; something that has shaped your intellect and character and given you something to reach for, hope for, or maybe just something that allows you to catch your balance as you take your first few steps in a world that may seem painfully indifferent to those same hopes. But more on hopes and dreams at a later date.
If nothing else the freedom of the alumni-ed life turns one?s gaze from oneself out onto the world. School can be a self-indulgent time, at least for someone like me. School can sometimes become a bit of a hot-dog eating contest for charity. Let’s say the charity was a house of starving orphans. If I was in a hot-dog eating contest I would probably do some practicing, you know, eating larger and larger amounts of hot-dogs everyday: different kinds of franks, different toppings, all washed down with buckets of lemonade. Yet, if I got so obsessed with the hot-dogs themselves and forgot about the charity event I would just end up all fat, ugly and struggling through some severe liver problems while the orphans I planned on raising money for would starve.
In school we are able to discover our passions, indulge those passions, develop them, but if those passions lead nowhere except to perpetuate our indulgence then we end up fat and ugly with liver problems. Some of our frustration with the post-graduate world has to be due not only to its to its pragmatism, its mundanity and monotony; but also to its refusal to bend to our own wills. We do not find ourselves awakened and fed like we were as students, the world does not serve us and our desires like our school life may have; instead we find that maybe it is time for us to try and do more feeding and serving of our own because the world we encounter is lacking. And I think this is a very good thing indeed.