For Once, I'm Not Afraid of the Dark

It's funny; I always assumed that once I got to college I would never want to leave. As a kid, college seemed like the be-all end-all--- I loved wandering around the Princeton University campus, pretending that I was a student, wandering empty halls that reeked of Ivy League glamor. Now that I'm actually in college, however, two things have become evident to me: 1. I never really took the time to think about what I'll be doing after college, and 2. I can't wait to get the hell out of here.

It's not that I'm not enjoying college; I am. I love my classes, I love the fact that I have 3-hour seminars where, when the professor gives us bathroom breaks, we stand in the hallway discussing sexual politics and Simone de Beauvoir and never actually get around to going to the bathroom or filling up our water bottles. I love the fact that for the next few years of my life, I have the supreme luxury of wallowing in my intellectual interests without having to worry about paying rent and getting a job. But at the end of the day, the fact that I'm (finally!) throws into light the fact that the next phase of my life ---the one after college, the one I never gave much thought to--- is coming up fast. I know that I'm only a Freshman, but the college years go by quickly and with my AP scores, I'm already on course to graduate early. And the thing is, that doesn't scare me. Rochester has a program called Take 5, in which students can take an extra year here, tuition-free, to study whatever they want. I think it's a pretty neat idea, but after talking to a bunch of classmates who plan on doing Take 5, I've realised that what many of them want is not so much the opportunity to delve deeper into a subject of interest, but rather to delay for one more year the perils of real-world existence.

For my part, I think I would go crazy if I had to spend more than four years as an undergraduate. I think a lot of this has to do with the time I spent outside of the academic arena last semester; seeing aspects of the real world that I had never before imagined was so inspiring that I cannot wait to get back out there. There are days when I am so frustrated with this cabin-fever feeling I have that I just think to myself, studying is just something you have to do in order for you to be really effective when you get back out there. I am chock-full of wanderlust, and as terrifying as it is that I'm a Creative Writing / Women's Studies / International Relations major who hasn't given much thought to her life beyond the place where she is now, I really can't wait for the next part.

This mantra may be radically different when I'm a senior researching job prospects in the out-of-work-feminist-writer field, but we'll see how it goes.

An Excursion

There's always this weird stigma to starting a new blog or journal. I always feel so obligated to share all the little stats about me--- I'm 5 foot 4 on a tall day, I'm from New Jersey, I am a Creative Writing major who finds it hard to study without red Swedish Fish. But as I'm writing these long-winded entries in which I desperately try to make myself look good to the harsh pages of a new blog, there's this little voice inside my head screaming "FOOL! Forget your identity and get down to business!"

This time, I've decided to listen to the little devil.

So. Ever since I got to campus, everyone's been telling me that as a burned-out city built on the Kodak Film empire, Rochester is not a safe place for a college student to wander. My roommate in particular enjoys telling stories of the black hole that is Rochester beyond the boundaries of campus security. As a result, I had not been off campus in a month until this morning. Finally, I snapped. I am a person who explores, who loves to get lost and find new things and meet new people, and hates hates hates tracing the same steps every day. So I put on my baggiest, warmest clothes, left all my valuables in my room, put on my helmet, and got on my bike.

I wandered the streets of Rochester for two hours, and I still couldn't find The Hood.

The Rochester I saw has all the charm of a slightly burned out city, complete with blocks of shabby yet tidy houses, winter-proofed cars coated with salt from the street, and little coffeeshops with cheesy names and faded paint. I saw lots of gas stations and auto repair shops, and a few people that I wouldn't want to meet in an alley at night, but for every one of those was a mother with a secondhand carriage, a church, and a house with wind chimes hanging off the porch roof. It was a blue-collar neighborhood, and reminded me of something Yoda and I noticed while we were touring in Pennsylvania: that every blue collar street, every burned-out city struggling to survive, and every corner with a gas station on one side of the street and a church on the other has the same vibe. There is more pride on a street with houses off of which all the paint is peeling than there is in a neighborhood with vast lawns and cookie-cutter homes. There isn't enough personality in a McMansion for any sense of pride to come through. Even in Gulfport and Biloxi, I remember seeing streets of ramshackle houses, brand-new or dilapidated but still standing, and no matter how depressed or exasperated or poor the inhabitants were, there was a sense of home there that I have just never felt in the Post-Levittown neighborhoods of Somerset County, NJ.

I ended up getting pretty lost. I crossed the river twice, flirted with the outskirts of a lovely, hilly park covered in snow and boulders that I would love to find again, huffed my way up hills and whizzed back down them, stopped to ask for directions from people who had no idea where the University is, and finally found myself at an intersection that I recognized, for it was the one that Yoda and I hit the night before I moved in, as we searched in vain to find campus and get a first glimpse of the place where I would be living for the next few years. In the end, I was able to wend my way back to campus, squinting against the wind to remember exactly where we drove that night, when the car was so packed with my stuff that Yoda had to sit in the back seat and his frantic directions from Google Maps did more to confuse me than anything else.

Ultimately, I hope to get to know Rochester better. I miss New York City bitterly, and don't think I'll survive up here if I can't do some urban exploring of my own. The other night, I saw L'Auberge Espagnole, a French film about a group of students studying abroad who share an apartment in Barcelona. At the opening of the film, the narrator meditates on how, when coming to a new place, it is odd to think that one day you will know it enough for it to become your home. I still don't feel like Rochester is my home, but I have to at least know it if I am to last up here in the cold winter of my discontent.