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izzy's playlists!
I'd rather be in outer space šø
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hello vonnie
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@warmcupsofcoffee
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thIS IS THE BEST PUN EVER AND IF YOU DONāT AGREE GET OUT
honestly i didnāt realise that was a pun st first bc English Officers in the first world war were just Like That
Persephone, trying to flirt: so⦠do you come here often?
Hades: ā¦This is my house.
journal entry: itās now november
what a summer! I mean itās November now which means autumn is basically over as well but here we are. this blog always feels like a bit of an afterthought but I feel like itās still important. A few updates: I turned 23 (which is just so odd), I moved again, I adopted two kitties (Jane and Lizzie, loves of my life), I joined a regular game night, I joined a D&D group and for the first time really since graduating Iāve found a community. The hardest part about post-grad life is that after having your closest friends within walking distance, suddenly youāre all spread out and even the ones who donāt live far are hard to spend time with due to work schedules and travel schedules and maybe itās just my group of friends but itās no longer odd to see my closest friends only a few times a year.
Let me tell you about the incredible thing that has made all of that so much easier: the phone. I still text and snapchat and message my friends a lot. Itās a great way to send things and make plans and share memes, but I also have a core group of friends I can call up and talk to. Itās like hanging out except I canāt hug them. My best friend erin and I call each other so much that her phone now suggests it at 5 PM when I normally get off work. I feel like itās such an underrated thing for our generation but itās such a simple way to connect. I have a lot of friends with phone anxiety and who donāt really like it, and thatās cool, thatās there thing, but the ease of being able to have a friendly voice on the other end is so comforting. I think we should bring it back.
Having regular meetings with friends is also great. My standing game night and d&d group has brought stability to my social interactions and I can now count on seeing friends twice a week without having to plan something. Gosh, planning things is about as hard as actually socially interacting.
So in many ways Iām so so happy. I have two poems being published next year. I have a good job, Igreat friends, a loving family, two adorable kitties⦠my life is actually kind of stable.
But I donāt know where itās headed. For the first time since I was six, I donāt know what I want out of life. And thatās left me kind of floating when I want to be swimming. I have plans to talk through it with my mentors and friends, so Iām hoping that will help, but itās also about accepting that taking it one day at a time is okay for right now. The days are pretty good. College feels so close now and yet so far. Itās hard to believe itās been a year and a half. Iām so grateful for everything Washington College gave me and continues to do, and I think Iām ready to move forward.
journal entry: looking ahead
itās been almost a year since graduation. in ten days iāll be going back to chestertown to watch as friends graduate and indulge in some of my favourite chestertown treats. itās been a whirlwind of a year since graduating. iāve lived in two different places, had three roommates, two jobs, and thankfully i live close enough to my family that i had a support network that carried me through.
against my better judgement, i deleted my last update post. i could go into the reasons why, but it essentially boiled down to bureaucratic tape that i am no longer tangled up in. it was a great first job, i learned a lot in eight months about offices, about process, and about myself. the most important thing i learned was how necessary it is for me to be a part of a community. small companies are great when youāre in the industry, but as an admin, it was important for me to find a team of people i could learn from, people who would support me, people who would appreciate me.
and i found it! iām on a team of five core admins, all women, all empowering, and all so much fun to be around. i can tell that the staff we support appreciates us and all we do and even on days where i just want to go back to bed because itās so warm and comfy and iām so sleepy, i donāt. because i have things to do. itās weird sometimes that you donāt know how much youāre missing until you have it.
for those getting ready to graduate i want to emphasize important looking at the culture of a company is when looking at jobs. you can be doing exactly what youāve always wanted at the company of your dreams, but if the people around you arenāt your people, itās not worth it.
for those getting ready to graduate with arts degrees, read this article. Ā donāt let anyone make you feel guilty for taking a job to pay the bills. it may benefit you more than you imagine.
from this point on, you and your peers will be at varying places in your life. some of you will be getting married, some will be working high powered jobs, some will be living at home, some will be travelling the world, some will be having kids, some will be doing things you canāt possibly imagine doing but thatās okay. life moves differently for everyone. the kindest thing you can do is refuse to compare yourself to other people and support your friends at whatever place theyāre at.
a lot of people talk about missing college; that youāre leaving some of your best days behind you, but thatās not the whole story. i miss college for its seemingly endless resources and free events, for its proximity to friends, and for the things i got to learn every day. but i donāt miss papers. i donāt miss the 24/7 anxiety that iām not doing something i should. i donāt miss the rollercoaster of emotions that come when you combine stress, no sleep, mediocre food, and a thousand other kids feeling the exact same way. college was great, but there are also great things ahead.
āthe thing about mental illness is sometimes I try to find the bottom turtle, but that doesnāt work because itās turtles all the way down
from Zig-Zag Girl, Brenna Twohy
journal entry: the first weekend
summer is almost over and this is the first time in four years I wonāt be at washington college in the last week ofĀ august.
this weekend all my friends who are still at wacĀ finish moving into their dorms, though most of them are there already. this weekend I move into my first townhome. it feels like a much bigger step than the 3 month lease on the dingy apartment I signed back in may. it feels much more... adult. my stuff will be out of storage for the first time in almost three years. and all of my belongings will be in one place. no choosing what to leave at home, what to leave in storage, and what to bring with me. my books are all together. I have various utilities in my name and rent to pay. itās a new beginning.
and I miss washingtonĀ college so much. those first couple weekends are always my favourite. you get to see friends you havenāt seen all summer, throw get togethers, attend start of semester activities like club fair and campus picnic. and the campus is so beautiful in the late summer early fall. all my best memories happen around then. that part of my life is over and thatās still hard to think about. I can go back and visit, sure, but itās not the same.
donāt get me wrong, Iām super excited about this chapter in my life, but itās also hard and scary and a little lonely at times. thereās something about your friends living so close thatās easy to get used to and hard to leave behind.Ā
happy moving to all the students! take advantage of everything washington college has to offer you because believe me, you wonāt regret it.
best, olivia
A story that may have relevance for others, or then again, maybe not:
When I was in college, about ten or so years ago, I was a history major. I wanted to learn to dance, so I joined a swing dance club on campus. To my surprise, this club had about twice as many men as women (in high school, the last time Iād tried dancing, the ratio had gone the other wayālots of girls, and boys only that you could drag by their ears).
But apparently, there had been some kind of word spread specifically to the STEM guys that dance was a way that they could meet girls.
So anyway. I joined the swing dance club, and met a few guys. And at one point, when socializing with the guys outside of dance class, one of them asked me what my research was on. (I had already established that I was an honors history student doing a thesis, just as he had established that he was an honors⦠Iām not sure if he was CS or Math, but it was one of those.)
So I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my research. Now, to be clear, an honors senior thesis, while nothing like what a graduate student would do, was still fairly in-depth. I had to translate primary sources from the original late-Classical Latin. (My professor said, basically, that while there were plenty of translations of my source material, that Iād only be able to comfortably trust them if I had at least made a stab at a translation of my own. And he was right.) And there was so much secondary material, often contradictory, that I had been carefully sorting through.
But I was able to sift it into a three-sentence summary of my senior thesis work, you know, as one does.
So I gave him that summary, and then askedāsince he was also an undergraduate senior doing an honors thesisāwhat his research was on.
āOh,ā he said, āyou wouldnāt understand it.ā
Reader, I went home in a frothing rage. Because I had thought we were playing one gameāa game of āletās talk about what weāre passionate about!āā and he had been playing another game, which was, one-upsmanship. I had done my best to give a basically understandable brief of my researchāand he had used that against me. As if my research, my painstaking translation, my digging through archives and ILLs of esoteric works, my reading of ten thousand articles in Speculum (yes, the pre-eminent medievalist journal in North America is called Speculum, Iām sorry, itās hilarious/sad but also true), and then my effort to sum it up for him, was nothing. Because his research into some kind of algorithm or other was just too complex for my tiny brain to conceive of. Because I just couldnāt possibly understand his work.
Now, the important note here is that the person I went home to was my senior year roommate. She was a graduate studentānormally undergrads and graduate students couldnāt be roommates, but weād been friends for years, and the tenured faculty-in-residence used his powers for good and permitted us to be roommates that year. Anyway. My senior year roommate was basically⦠in retrospect I think possibly an avatar of Athena. She was six feet tall, blonde, attractive in a muscular athletic way, a rock climber and racquetball player, sweet but sharp, extremely socially awkward, exceptionally kind even when it cost her to be kind, and an incredibly brilliant computer science major who spent most of her time working on extremely complicated mathematical algorithms. (Yes, I was a little in love with her, why do you ask? But she was as straight as a length of rope, and is now happily married, and so am I, so it worked out.)
(Still, yes, she is my mental image of Athena, to this day.)
Anyway, I came home in a frothing rage to my roommate, the Athena avatar. And I said, āHe made me feel like such an idiot, that I could sum up my research to him but his research was just too smart for stupid little me.ā
And she shut her book, and smiled at me, with her dark eyes and her high cheekbones and her bright hair, and said, āIf he canāt explain his research to you, then heās not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.ā
Now I hesitated, because Iād be in college long enough to have sort of bought into the ridiculous idea that if you couldnāt dazzle them with your brilliance, you should baffle them with your bullshit. But she said, āLook, Iāve been doing work on computer science algorithms that have significantly complicated mathematical underpinnings. What do I do?ā
And I said, āGenetic algorithmsāthat is, self-optimizing algorithmsāfor prioritization, specifically for scheduling.ā
āRight,ā she said. āYou couldnāt code them because youāre not a computer scientist or a mathematician. But you can understand what I do. If someone canāt explain it like that, it isnāt a problem with you as a person. Itās a problem with them. They either donāt understand it as well as they think they doāor they want to make you feel inferior. And neither is a positive thing.ā
So. There.
If you are looking into something and have a question, and someone treats you like an idiot for not understanding right away⦠here is what I have to say: maybe it isnāt you who is the idiot.
this gets funnier when you see the time stamp
For any high school students out there wondering what college professors are like
no offense but money would solve literally every single one of my problems. like all of them. i dont have a single problem that money wouldnt immediately solve
I, for one, like Roman numerals.
journal entry: thoughts on graduation
its been a little over a week since I graduated from washington college. that feels really weird to say, especially on this blog. I donāt think any of you have been following from the beginning, back when I got accepted, back when I was posting my thoughts on graduating high school... and here I am, four years later and so much has changed.
I owe so much to washington college. I learned so much both inside the classroom and outside it. I have friends I already miss. I have professors Iām excited to keep in touch with. I have a degree that I know has prepared me for the world outside a place I called home.Ā
four years ago, I didnāt cry at graduation. honestly, I was glad to be rid of high school. I had a lot of social problems and lacked a passion for the kinds of things I was learning. I felt kind of lost. the difference between then and now is astounding. I had to hold myself together as I walked up the steps on the green. if Iām being honest, Iām still not sure itās entirely hit me that I donāt get to go back in august. Iām looking for jobs still, but I have my own apartment (that I share with another wac alum) and Iām making my way in the real world and Iām not as scared because of washington college. our commencement speaker talked a lot about how itās okay to not entirely know what youāre doing right now, that things will work out. Iāve got a great community of family and friends and most of them are part of goose nation.
thanks wac, for everything. especially this blog.Ā which, by the way, isnāt going away just because Iāve graduated. I want to post more of the things I didnāt have time to say, and the things that have yet to come.
cheers! olivia
When you take a 10 minute writing break and it accidentally lasts six months