Letters from an Oddity

Small-town Texas wild child and poet

[fahrenheit-41]

[fahrenheit-41]

[fahrenheit-41]

With time, I lost myself in the illusion that you and I could still be "us."

ACH, An excerpt from an unfinished journal entry

[fahrenheit-41]

With a spirited hop, I leapt into the old lifted Jeep and pulled the loose door shut.  I tossed the keys onto the dashboard and popped open the glove box to pull out my phone.  With news so wonderful, you had to be the first to know -- you were the first I wanted to know.  There was a sudden pause while typing out the excited little paragraph.  Your name glowed in the blue-screen light, and so did the last time we spoke.  Months ago, and even longer since we last saw each other.  I leaned my head back against the faded cloth seat as tears rolled down my cheeks.  Lips quivering into a smile, I knew you were busy.  I knew you found a better someone to draw in the window fog with, and a better someone to walk beside.  Glancing once more at your name glowing in the blue-screen light, I deleted the joyful little paragraph.  Taking off my name tag I placed it in the passenger seat with my phone, and picked the keys up off the dashboard.  In the empty parking lot the old Jeep started up.  Headlights flicking on, it was time to head home.

An excerpt from an unfinished journal entry

[fahrenheit-41]

[fahrenheit-41]

The Lesson Learned from Another Dreaded Group Project

     There is a task in the life of a student that many seem to share a similar dread for.  A task that, unfortunately, will arise more than once in a student’s career.  This task is group work, or group project, or group whatever.  We roll our eyes when a professor simply mentions the word “group,” and we crack jokes of our group members lowering us into our grave.  While the lesson meant to be learned in group work seems to often end up lost in the disorganisation and chaos, maybe from the madness we can learn a different lesson -- commonness.

     A Wednesday during March, around quarter ‘til seven in the evening, I waited in the library.  The group I ended up in agreed to meet the first week after Spring Break to begin our final project.  The library seemed the most logical place to meet, being a group of mildly acquainted peers only knowing we sat near each other in lecture and having no problem with that being all we knew about one another.  Seven o’clock was our meeting time that day, and soon became a weekly Wednesday evening event.

     The other four slowly arrived as time closed in on the hour we scheduled, and all five of us looked thrilled to tears.  Who are these people?  Frankly, we didn’t care to have that question answered.  One job was on the agenda, and that was working out the foundation of our final project.  The five of us awkwardly starred at each other, confused eyes of every colour glancing from one stranger to the next.  Dead silence continued for several minutes before the unamused redhead, our supposed leader, finally said something.

     “Well...”

     Iconic, I know.  But, that utterance was all the rest of us needed to peek out of our shells.  In no time a conversation that was definitely not about our project began.  Simply seeing these strangers in class, we all seemed like normal people with our lives as figured out as a college student’s life can be.  Mate, I was wrong.  Within a few minutes of conversing and we had our first official agreement of our first meeting:  none of us knew what we were doing and none of us wanted to be there.  With our first official agreement, the five of us shared a laugh and were able to continue actually working on the project with an unrestrained sense of humour and a new found and unexpected motivation.

     The motivation we unearthed that first meeting remained alive, and grew, as the semester carried on.  We cracked countless mildly inappropriate jokes and regularly spoke in sarcasm, but we got the job done well and managed to get along.  After the project, when the presentation was long since done and the final proposal submitted, was when I began to think over the many Wednesday evenings the five of us shared in the library.  We were strangers, awkwardly seated on whatever surfaces we could find and anxiously glancing back and forth at one another.  And now?  Well, we’re still strangers.  Sort of, we’re strangers with inside jokes.  Acquaintances, maybe?  Who knows, I wont make that judgement call, but I learned a lesson from that first meeting we had back in March.  Everyone comes from a different background and holds a different personality, it’s called individuality, but common ground can be found with anyone.  Common ground doesn’t have to be something significant, the common ground we found was simply that none of us knew what we were doing and none of us wanted to be at the group meeting.  Finding the simplest similarity among a group of five strangers is what made all the difference between the group project being another miserable experience and the group project being something that we all secretly enjoyed.  The simplest, stupidest, similar dread was all we needed to work collaboratively and succeed, despite our ideas clashing and our group having personalities on every end of the spectrum (aside from being awkward, the five of us shared that characteristic).  We never argued and when a disagreement arose, we civilly discussed why we think one thing rather than the other, and managed compromises that everyone was pleased with.

     With the close of this semester, the lessons I learned were not the lessons taught in that class, but the lessons I learned from our group project.  First, find common ground with your team members.  Common ground doesn’t have to be something significant, something as simple as all of you stayed up late doing last minute studying the night before the exam, or you all like the same ice cream place, is perfect.  Along with finding common ground, go into things with an open mind.  We’re all different, we’re all weird, and none of us have exactly the same ideas, so if you go into something with a mental “Road Closed” sign, more likely than not someone is going to have a mental Jeep and simply drive around your barriers.

[princetonarchives]

In all ages it has been true, that when young people start to think for themselves they always cause pain to their elders.

Princeton  University president Harold Dodds, as quoted in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, April 23, 1954 (via princetonarchives)

[fahrenheit-41]

Another Chapter Begins

     Here begins another chapter.  Not necessarily a fresh one, as notes were left in the margins from a time not too long before, but there still remains plenty of space for new ideas.  While a clean slate is preferable, maybe these smudges from the past remain to allow new light shed to appear more clearly.

     From the time I was young they said I was to pursue the life of a physician.  Such a career was expected, alongside lacrosse games and New England estates.  They’d ramble on in fancy scientific words and snicker when one asked what “coelio-mesenteric” meant.  For every time you stepped through the door with a book on Shakespeare or Swift, they’d hand you seven studies on physiology and medical terminology.  There is no future in sonnets or plays, and the world needs more STEM people, or so they said.  After all, they had a single valid point: somewhere along the way there was a glitch in my software, making reading and comprehending speech difficult, so why waste my time meticulously picking through the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson when I could learn to understand images from x-rays?  So, for years I followed in their footsteps, unable to construct a valid argument in defense of devoting time to poetry and plays.

     Not until the first fall semester of university did I look off the dormitory balcony one cool evening, watching the clouds bleed with the sunset and colleagues in sherpa-fleece jackets leave the dining hall with Styrofoam to-go boxes, did I come to realise why I had a young passion for an activity I was terrible at.  You see, there is a single truly correct way to construct a body.  Modifications lead to consequences, whether those are scars, an intolerance of food or beverage, or a drastic weight loss, they are all ramifications for altering a body.  Information studied by those entering the medical field is all similar, and in most cases must be regurgitation the same fashion the information entered.  The body has a limit.  However, information studied by those in the English field may go in the same, but in some cases is not required to be regurgitated in the same manner.  While the physical body is limited, the mind is limited only when placed in a box.  With studying the written thoughts of others, there is some room for individual interpretation -- room for independent thought and creativity.  Rather than being placed in a box, you are placed in a puddle, allowing the opportunity to splash about freely rather than being confined to a neat space.

     After a year of thought and discontent, my mind made peace with closing the door to scientific pursuit and family expectations.  The problem faced was not with finding a new place, but rather with how is someone faced with reading and auditory difficulties supposed to open a door to literature?  If you are ready to take the jump, then I suggest climbing through the window instead.  The fall may be greater for some than others, and was intimidating in my case, but rest assured, there will be someone to catch you at the bottom.

     With a new light and an old book, I found a place where I am content.  So, they can enjoy their Maseratis, pristine lab coats, and M.D. degrees adorning their office space, but I found happiness between the walls of an old fixer-upper Cape Cod, a rusty blue Jeep, and falling in love with the works of Thomas Hardy.