70s Feminism, sunsets in the summer time painting the sky miraculously, a thin line between freedom and slavery, friendship, the struggles of writing, a podcast that takes you to another world, art and reality side by side, and the thinker of tender thoughts
I’d like to explore downtown more, and I don’t have a car. So I need to get friends together to use the CODA buses together.
I’d like to eat healthier, and I’m usually in a rush and eat what’s easiest. So I need to buy more healthy snack foods and fruit.
I’d like to exercise more, and the RPAC is far away from Baker East. So I need to make a gym bag for the times when I am close to the RPAC, such as after Spanish.
I’d like to clean my room more, and when I’m in my room I’m not motivated to do anything but to relax. So I need to put on cafe music and make cleaning be my wind down activity.
I’d like to get more help on my physics work, and I’m nervous to approach my professor. So I need to find the hours of different physics tutors in Smith Lab who can help me.
“Sometimes it’s easy as an archaeologist… It’s our job to go back and go, ‘Well, that was coming!’ It’s easy to look back retrace the steps and say, ‘Rome was destined to fall.’ Or, predestined to fall. You go back and it’s just so clear, it’s so crystal clear what was going to happen. Talking about fate in that context is perfect. But while you’re living through it? It’s not clear, because at any point in time someone could have done something differently.”
Margaret Rose Downing, Adviser.
Downing is an agnostic, but was raised as a Catholic for most of her formative years. She noted that it is very easy to believe in a higher power or plan within the context of science, as Catholicism in itself is somewhat pagan. Because no matter how far back you go, especially with archaeology, there are still holes that are left in time. Besides, Downing mused, it’s hard to believe that every civilization in history was wrong in believing in something more.
The best way to begin again is to have a completely fresh start. Making yourself a world that is completely and truly yours, without allowing yourself to be trapped in the past.
This is essentially what I told my mother when I was trying to convince her to let me organize my room by myself on OWL move in day.
We moved in on the 18th of August. Our three-generation two-car caravan filled to the brim with snacks and supplies traveled five hours in order to settle me into my new home. This was my first taste of independence: my mother taking things out of my hands to put them where she thought they ought to go. It didn’t taste right, if this small room was going to be my own, it had to be my own from the beginning. Thankfully, my stepfather and grandparents ushered my mother out before she could make too much of an indent, and suddenly, the space was mine. I missed home, I missed my parents, but this place was mine.
It didn’t feel real during the OWL program. With the pep rallies, the strict schedule, the group dinners, it felt an awful lot more like camp than adulthood. So in my head, my parents weren’t that far away. Even during move in, when I was helping other people in my building take out their printers and blankets, running up and down the hallways to early 2000s music, it was all a game still.
Of course I made friends, a few GroupMe chats and an always open door does that for you. It was a bit harder for me, in a single dorm, not having one person to go out with when in need. But that was okay, I like having dinner on my own, I like a chance for relationships to grow organically and not out of proximity. I want the people who spend time with me to actually aspire to friendship, not simply settle next to me out of ease. That’s why it was so interesting seeing people in my dorm outside of Baker East, it felt like meeting for the first time. Running into each other at dinner, laughing at clubs, brainstorming in the library, it all was so much more real outside, and we eventually brought it home with us.
Then classes began: 9am Calculus lectures followed by 2 hours of studying inside of a spaceship or 11 floors up, then back for Physics and running to Spanish, with varying electives and surveys scattered throughout the week. It’s daunting and exhilarating to be quite so busy in a new city, a new state, a new region. It’s like swimming in the ocean. Kicking with all your might, knowing full well that one bad wave could drag you under, and yet the rocking of the waves still makes you feel comforted and free.
My first week at OSU was a fresh start.