College Life And Girlfriend
Yeah, so college is pretty excellent.
My last two months, in sound bite version:
I went hiking in the Appalachians for two weeks with other freshmen who are entering Gordon. Some of them are already my new best friends.
I'm in an Old Testament History, Theology and Literature class with Dr. Wilson, a world-famous Biblical scholar who was the most prominent translator for two books of the NIV Bible, the largest translation project in the history of the world. He's a friggin' genius, and his class is fantastic. Right now I'm at the top of the class of 124 students, although this rank is only based on a single grade so I don't expect it to stay this way.
I'm taking Calculus I to fulfill my Natural World core thematic requirement. I'm considering a math minor, but I had my first exam today and didn't do particularly well. I knew most of the material, but had to rush through everything and didn't have time to answer two questions. Since you can't get much more basic than Calc I, I'm starting to wonder whether I'm equipped to get through 20 credits of collegiate math while maintaining the 3.5 my scholarship holds me to.
I'm also taking The Great Conversation, a sort of blended English/philosophy course for honors students, and Intro to Language and Literature, which is required for all English majors. We all think the professor for Lang and Lit is a Marxist - borne out today by his lecture on Marxist criticism and his obsession with the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Boston movements - which makes the class much more interesting than I would otherwise expect.
I'm writing for the student newspaper, the Tartan, which appointed me to serve as a "beat reporter" for the student government after I turned in my first article. (I can only assume that this is a promotion of sorts.) This is probably the perfect job for me, since it lets me combine my English and political science aptitudes whenever I set finger to keyboard. I also get paid $10 per article, which seems like a pittance these days, though it's definitely better than nothing.
I'm working as a member of the Idiom staff, which is the more informal student literary magazine. This lets me critique literature every Thursday night, which is a convenient way to keep my writing skills sharp-ish. For an English major, I don't seem to be doing much writing these days, and I think it shows.
Oh yeah, and I have a girlfriend. :o
It's surprising how things happen sometimes. For years I was obsessed with Gaia or trying to get over her, and it was difficult to get past the enormity of my inability to be with the girl I liked so much. I'm don't think I'll ever lose my soft spot for her. But suddenly I came to college and sat next to a girl in calculus and... well, everything changed. We go on dates. I take her to dances (well, not anymore - we both acknowledged that we don't really like dancing with another person). We eat dinner together and do calc homework together. We talk. We listen.
It's so strange. I still can't quite take it in.
For future blogging reference (in case I continue to post here), I'll call her Irene (in honor of the hurricane, I guess). She's majoring in economics and classics and she's fantastic at Latin. She has a sister three years younger than her. She lives in New Hampshire. She's a Republican. She has long dark brown wavy hair and likes wearing long, colorful, super-decorative dresses. We both go to Idiom meetings. She loves Owl City even more than I do and doesn't think that I'm gay for liking Adam Young's music. We sing Owl City songs together in her dorm (or in mine, sometimes). She plans to become a professor of economics and/or classics. I don't know how doable this is, but we haven't discussed it that much. I don't want to worry her. She worries a lot. I find her worrying strangely comforting.
I don't know how I feel about the relationship. I enjoy spending time with her and I like and respect her. I'm not attracted to her, and this makes me feel clumsy and somewhat dishonest. She initiated everything about the relationship except its "Facebook official" status, which I had the balls to suggest. (If a ring makes an engagement formal, Facebook seems to be its equivalent for a "mere" relationship.) Often I wonder whether I'm doing the right thing by pretending to be romantically enamored. Everything I do is out of admiration, respect, friendship or duty rather than love or lust. This can't be right. At the same time, I'm not going to dump her like a dirtbag just because I don't think she's a "smokin' hot babe." At the very least, we're both getting valuable experience about what to do and what not to do. And we certainly have a lot of the elements of a good match. My RA (resident advisor, the upperclassman who's in charge of my dorm) fancies himself a matchmaker, and he says that he thought we would be a good match before he even knew we were going to the ball together. He believes strongly that lying is a sin. I believe him.
Still, I feel a bit lost. I took Irene to an Indian restaurant tonight, and after we'd gotten back and I'd dropped her off at the dorm and spent half an hour listening to Owl City with her before meeting her father, I couldn't stop thinking about how lost I was in the relationship, and how unready I am for the real world. This is college, the Twilight Zone. You can't win and you can't lose. I can't understand a world like this. Maybe Irene can.
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