Where Chalk-White Arrows Go

“There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.”

― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends


My high school graduation speech was titled "Where the Sidewalk Begins", inspired by my kindergarten days of listening to "Where the Sidewalk Ends". I stood up there, ready to end high school and take on college, not fully comprehending the sheer stress (pun intended) and challenges and sheer joy of experiences that were ahead. I began:

The path of our education has led up to this day.
That path might have been bumpy, winding, or a joyous ride, but I know it was very long.
Yet, as weary as the walk might have been, here we stand.
We made it.
...
Now we are ready to look both ways,
cross to the other side of the street,
and go make prints in the wet cement with our bare feet.

This is where sidewalk begins.

It's so cheesy...I know. It's even more cheesy now that I laugh at my high school self who hadn't a clear picture of what bumpy, winding, and weary meant. Or even joyous. But if I thought graduating high school was where the sidewalk began, does that mean college is where it ends?

Silverstein seems to think that it is not so. Or does he?

Colorado School of Mines has been the place where the grass grows soft and white. It has also been the place where the smoke blows black and the dark street winds and bends.

Maybe this is before the street begins? And when did my life take on so many road, path, street, or sidewalk metaphors?

Funny...in college I stopped looking both ways before crossing streets and also started jaywalking across them. And some of my favorite times in Golden have been walking with a walk that is measured and slow in the middle of the campus streets in the late hours of the night when no one else is awake and around to crash their car into me. 

What does that have to do with life and paths? 

I don't know. I'm just going to miss it.

Four of Four

I look up from my phone. There’s a British man scribbling in chalk at the bottom of the  auditorium, pushing Fourier transforms into our reluctant brains, which are mushy from waking up a mere  ten minutes beforehand. I am utterly bored, for I already have learned to make functions as a product of sines and cosines the year before. My brain turns off. I try to turn it back on. It turns off again. I turn it on. It wanders…

I can’t do this.

The southwest stairwell of the Green Center fills with the echoes of my sandals climbing the ugly stairs. So many times I have climbed those same stairs up. Year One, for freshman Calculus. Year Two, for field theory. Year Three, for everything geophysically imaginable. And now, Year Four. For the end.

The days and nights spent in the Green Center blend together now. So many times I have climbed not knowing when I’d see the light of day again. So many descents after those long hours, with my brain relieved, tired, or both, my eyes tired from squinting at my code, laughing, or both.

These years have been piecewise continuous. Each has its own flavor. The setting is mostly the same, the cast of characters slightly adjusting with time, but the story has only one more chapter left to be written.

Chapter Four of four.

The room on the northwest corner and second floor of the Green Center is frigid.  The geophysics seniors have gathered there for guidance on the capstone of our undergraduate career: senior design. “This course is filled with pitfalls,” our professor and department head begins.

I can’t do this.

But after we walk out of the frigid room, maybe we feel slightly more prepared for the future. Or at least senior design.

Still, the future seems like a cold and scary place, and sometimes I’d much rather stay in my bed than travel towards it. But then the future nudges me, “Hey, it’s time to wake up and get dressed. You should probably read those scientific papers for senior design. And put together a spreadsheet of potential grad school advisors.”

I can’t be a senior. I still sleep in a bunk bed. And to think next year I’ll be a grad student?

My eyes are still blurry as I stare at errors in my code at the Linux Lab. Indices are funny things, my coffee-deprived brain remembers.

Chapter 0 of N. Where N is the number of years I am in grad school and is equal to about five or six. Or possibly more. I don’t know the setting or the cast of characters. But Chapter 0—the searching and application process—has me excited.

Chapter Four of four.

They overlap. One story wraps up, another waits to begin, despite my simultaneous resentment and welcoming of it all. 

Dear Younger Self: Cliched Nonsense

Dear Younger Self,

So I'm going back and reading my older posts with the tag "Dear Younger Self". Two thoughts come to mind:
1. The advice I give my you, my  younger self (or rather students at certain points in college), are pretty cliched.
2. I guess I listened to myself.

The end of the year is always a time for looking back. There are Top 10 Lists of Things in 2013 everywhere. People are talking about the year that was and their resolutions and stuff. And I guess after another successful semester in the books, you're looking for more advice from me, because that's what a cliched end-of-the-year blog post holds.

I could ramble on about the follies of procrastination and how you've seemed to have figured out that you can't NOT procrastinate, that it's in your blood. I can always speak about how very quickly time seems to fly, and how you're nearing the end, so you'd better make it awesome. Or how valuable good friends are. I can give you a heads-up and say things like "can you learn to cook already?", "practice defensive eating during Field Methods", "don't give up on Dynamic Fields because you can make the greatest comeback in the history of ever or something". I could tell my sophomore self that "it gets better; Junior year won't kill you." I could blather about the lessons outside the classroom: about wise time investment, overcoming over-analyzation and over-reaction, learning to have fun by yourself, and letting go of the past (wow, the cliches are killing me).

I could ramble. Because the cliches would all be true, interestingly enough.

But you gotta figure it out without my cliched advice and live it on your own. And maybe, just maybe, after five action-packed semesters, you have figured it out. But most likely there are some curveballs headed your way (gotta throw in a baseball cliche). Still, I hope that Future Self will be writing about the good times that Spring 2014 and Field Session held. Or the crazy things that happened the summer between Junior and Senior Year and the first semester of Senior Year.

So yeah. [Insert cliche phrase that expresses an attitude that one holds when about to embark on a new year and adventures and the such like, that when the phrase is uttered it sends a chill of fear into the heart of the bad guys. Play heroic and inspiring music. Fade out.]

It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great. ~ A League of Their Own

P.S. For real though, it doesn't get easier. As far as material goes, it gets more impossible. Yet more doable.

Prelude

Summer has a song.
It's a song with no particular melody, but somehow it reminds me of my childhood.
There's crickets and junebugs, cars driving on the freeway, the wind rattling wind chimes.
Sometimes there's a radio on and the crack of a bat is heard.
Maybe a mosquito is zapped as someone pours another glass of iced tea.
Somewhere, kids are yelling.

And at one time, I was the kids yelling.
But now, it's different.

The days of mud pies and bike rides are waning.
Summer changes time signatures and tunes.
And it's not necessarily a bad thing.
I guess I'm just growing up.

So it became that in the summer between freshman and sophomore year:
I end up in a tower, with a job, making sure kids don't yell, along with more important things.

I realize I like talking about school.
I realize I keep my room much neater when I have a roommate.
I realize Weaver is filled with haunting noises (kidding).

But this isn't mostly about me.
I'm just a note on a sheet part of a book.
And Challenge is the prelude for 39 Class of 2016'ers.

They're mostly awesome kids.

They complete pre-calculus and chemistry homework.
Sometimes complain about how late they're up.
I smirk.
But they're hard workers.

They ask me to tell them a story.
I tell of my trippy EPICS teacher, all the D's I've received on exams including the most fateful one on my Earth final.
Why you should probably sleep the night before your Chem final.
Nights exploring the roof of Brown Building and creepy elevators in Maple Hall.

I listen to their story.
How Challenge is their gateway into Mines.
For some, a dream that looked bleak, but now has a chance.

Okay, they're pretty awesome kids.

They know how to have fun already, and are now acquainted with dorm pranks.
In four weeks, they form many inside jokes, sayings, and sounds, a quartet, and friendships.
They know how to decorate a suite window pretty well.
And do the Harvard Baseball dance to Call Me Maybe.
Within a couple weeks, I could tell they are all nerds at heart and belong here.

They learn a lot in four weeks, and more than academics.
And they got a bunch of pretty cool people to teach them all that stuff, if I do say so myself.

Scary to think it's already been a year since I was about to start Mines.
I kind of miss the feeling, the uncertainty.
The 'freshness'; the first-ness of everything.

I talk to them like I might have it figured out.
But I only have freshman year figured out.
Sophomore year will have it's own rises and falls.
And though last year I was scared and uncertain, and anxiously excited,
I'm now scared but respectful, and patiently excited.

Some summers are for ice cream, but maybe this one was for growing up a little bit.
And again, not just me, but everyone who needed a prelude.
A short taste to the event to come.
A way to turn high-schoolers into college freshman.
To turn me from a freshman to a sophomore.

Sophomore....It doesn't sound so weird saying that now.

Ya Feelin' Lucky, Mines?

At a time like this, I've gotta ask myself: what did I do right, what did I do wrong, how can I improve, and what do I actually want to do to improve?

I had good intentions going in, formulated even more good intentions during the middle of the semester after a little bit of experience, and ended up winging it. I meant to read the textbooks, meant to do the homework, thought about starting a lab report as soon it was assigned. I told myself I would take out the trash and do laundry every Sunday. I would wake up each morning and get breakfast. Make coffee overnight. And yet I barely found time to comb my hair, never made coffee in the morning because I didn't want to wake up and make it (or have it wake me up and time it), and mostly studied just the week before the subject to be tested (except Calc, which I actually did find a study buddy and did well the last two tests).

Coming in Spring semester, I have even more experience and even more good intentions. For example, I think it would be really nifty to do homework as soon as it is assigned (a.k.a. DON'T PROCRASTINATE). Imagine what I could do on the weekends and think of a world where I don't have to do two things the same night because they're due! Secondly, I hope to read the textbook even though it's not required and do the problems. I have actually taken action on this and registered for Calculus II with a teacher who makes us do the bookwork. Go me! But I intend to do any Physics problem thrown at me and attempt to understand it, same for CompSci 101. I'll read the book. As for the other class I'll have, Nature and Human Values, there will probably be not too much to worry about, and the "tests" are essays. So I'm obviously doomed since science nerds can't write. Good intentions won't help. But actually, I should probably have the intention that I'll start my writing not too late. That always helps.

I want to write more for the Oredigger and actually go pick up my money. I want to keep my room cleaner. I want to learn to play the ukulele. I intend to wake up early again and eat breakfast. Maybe I'll go to the gym this semester more times than I did last, which amounted to zero. Not let things distract me when I need to get soemthing done. Do homework and study after classes. Which will actually work this semester, since I did not schedule myself the worst schedule in the world (seriously, starting at 1 and going until 7 in the evening?!. No wonder I never got anything done.) and will have some structure in my life. And that structure will be key: I work best in a routine- not winging it- and organizing time and events and tasks helps me.

I want to seriously and legitimately have a good physics study group- a couple people that will help me and not distract me. And I hope to regularly meet to continue on the structure thought (inquire within, freshman). Same for Calc, but Physics is going to be a huge focus of mine this semester. I want to prove that I can do well in this class that I've heard everyone whine about all of Fall semester. And I want to like it. You see, I was almost a physics major until we visited the campus and fell asleep in one of their presentations about optics. I took two years of it in high school, "not like it matters" or I'll be prepared for Mines physics or anything: so say the others. I suppose I liked it and did well enough in it. But I decided to keep my soul and do Geophysics instead (which is awesome, by the way...it just is, don't ask me questions until next year). But I still want to do well in Physics, and considering it's a 4.5 credit hour class as opposed to a 4 credit hour class, I need to do well.

But I can't put all my efforts and burn out on one class- we know where that got me last semester. But I think with the right combination of execution of good intentions, I can do much better than last semester. And I fully intend to have fun again.


So go ahead, Mines. Make my day.