BrockLi Soup

Today I had my last two undergraduate classes.

It’s weird to think that I may never have to go to class again. I’m still planning to get a Master’s at some point, but I don’t have any definite plans and it might never happen. For sixteen years, class is almost all I’ve known, and now it’s over.

I can’t help but think about my first day of Kindergarten. I remember standing at the end of our dead-end street, where the kids on our road met the bus. Both my parents were there to see me off. I guess the school recommended that they make a name tag with bus numbers and other information, because I remember consulting it as the bus approached to make sure I was getting on the right one (as if my parents would send me away on the wrong bus). I really don’t remember anything past that, though I assume my friend Paul was on the bus, because he was the stop before me.

I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that this quarter is already over, let alone the four years leading up to it, not to speak of the twelve years before that. Almost the entirety of my life has been leading up to this moment - well, really, this week.

How anticlimactic. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so underwhelmed.

I miss the good old days.

I miss having a car. I miss keeping half of my worldy posessions in it, so that anything I ever needed was as close as the parking lot. I miss the conversations that took place there - what’s said in the car, stays in the car.

I miss living in the dorms. I miss hanging out with friends until 3 in the morning, and staying up until 5 because my first class wasn’t until 2. I miss the last cigarrette of the day and being deafened by a silence that can only be found standing between buildings that hold hundreds upon hundreds of sleeping people.

I miss the seemingly endless supply of time and the opportunites it held. I miss thinking that this would go on forever, and that I could just sit back and let it happen.

I especially miss the friends that have moved away - geographically or otherwise - over the past few years, and knowing that some of them will never come back.

The weather this morning was perfect. It was cool, around 68F. It was dry. The sky was clear and the sun was shining.

And for some reason, it reminded me of my childhood.

I often crack my window at night when I go to bed. Lately, the breeze coming in has had a damp, organic scent to it - the smell of a Rochester summer. It smells like grass that was cut a couple days ago and fresh dew on the lawn.

Not surprisingly, this reminds me of last summer.

I’m having a really hard time adjusting to this summer, mostly because I know it can’t possibly live up to last year. Don’t get me wrong, I love the guys I’m living with now, but it would be hard to top last year. Everything was new and exciting. I was starting to take CS classes again (even if it did prove to be a mistake in the end). I started two new jobs. I got a new laptop and an iPod - toys to occupy myself with. I had a new apartment and three new roommates. I made a lot of new friends. On top of all that, I got to spend all my time with some of the closest friends I’d ever had.

It was an incredible summer, and I knew it wouldn’t last long into the school year. That’s always the hard part about things going so well - you know that they’ll have to go back to normal sooner or later. This past year was lackluster at best. I had a lot of fun, but things just got stagnant quick.

This shouldn’t be a big deal; life is full of ups and downs. Unfortunately, the ups were so great that they made the downs all the worse.

I’ve always been jealous of people that see reruns of some old TV show and get all excited because they watched it all the time when they were kids. I can remember watching Thundercats and GI Joe when I was a kid, but I don’t remember any of the details - character names, plot lines, anything. This itself isn’t important, but it’s a perfect sample of my childhood - I remember being there, I remember things happening, but I don’t remember any details. My childhood is a blur. I know I didn’t particularly care for middle school, largely because I was the geek in my class. When there’s only 17 kids in the class, and you’re the geek, you find yourself at the ass end of every joke and insult.

Things didn’t change in high school, because I hadn’t changed. There were more people around, so I could find people to hang out with who I got along with, but I still felt like I was the geek that no one particularly cared for. I had accepted things for what they were and wasn’t really unhappy with it, but I wasn’t too pleased either - an indifferent contentedness, I guess.

By senior year, I had changed significantly, and I had a real hard time because people still saw me for who I was when they met me, three years earlier. I couldn’t wait to get out and start over in a college where I knew no one. I started calling myself Brock and changed who I was. I had incredibly high hopes for college and couldn’t wait to leave everyone I knew behind.

When you build something up in your head like that, it almost always disappoints. Unbelievably, RIT exceeded every expectation I had. There were some 3,000 freshman (compared to the 320 people in my high school), so I had no trouble finding people that I got along with. I found I could act like myself, and people accepted me for who I was. I had the opportunity at a first impression, and it went better than every other one I’d had.

I’d like to think that the people I’m close to now honestly like me for who I am, but even now, I can never shake the feeling that people are just kind of tolerating and humoring me. I got so accustomed to being the geeky kid that I’m always leery of people that are genuinely decent to me; part of me is always waiting for the practical joke they’ve been setting up for. So far, I haven’t been the butt of any colossal joke that’s been four years in the making, so I think I’m OK, but I still can’t shake the feeling.

Anyway, I mention all of this because things have become stagnant. College was supposed to be the defining period in my life, the four or five years that would leave me with great memories and hilarious stories. Apparently my childhood was an inconsequential non-event, because I don’t remember it, and high school was a four-year exercise in patience. The past four years have largely been ups and more ups, with a few plateaus. The tail end of first year and the beginning of second year were incredible, and my second year kind of leveled off. Third year was generally good, with this past summer to cap it off. This past year, though, has mostly been more of the same. I’ve made a few new friends and done this co-op, but I also found that I hated the classes I was taking. I drifted away from, and (in some cases) found myself at odds with, some close friends.

With only five months left at RIT, these shortcomings are becoming more obvious by the day. College lived up to all the hype at the beginning, but I don’t want to leave on a down note. I don’t have many fond memories before the age of 17, so this was supposed to be it. Four neatly wrapped years of happy memories and close friends to define my adulthood and who I am.

I fear I may have wasted it all freshman year, and now I’m just coasting it out. I don’t know what I’m going to do once I’m done here, because this is the only place I’ve ever really been happy.

Friday was the last day of class this year. Being on co-op, I haven’t been paying much attention to the progression of the quarter, so the end of it snuck up on me. Without finals and project due dates looming, I didn’t realize how close to done we were, especially since I know I won’t be leaving or changing my routine for the summer. I saw a few people moving out of the dorms earlier today. That’s always depressing, even when it’s people I don’t know, because that means the people I DO know will be leaving soon too.

We were just talking about Welcome Back, and it seems like it was just last month. I can’t believe how quick this year went, but I guess we say that every year. I’ve been living in the apartment just shy of a year now, making Brie the longest-running roommate I’ve ever had (excluding my younger brother, of course).

The end of the year is always tough. Saying goodbye is always tough. It’s especially hard for me this quarter because I know this may well be my last spring at RIT. It’s starting to sink in that I’ve only got another six months till I’m done. I may stay in the area once I finish, but I’m trying to make the most of the time I’ve got now just in case.

It’s going to be a great summer, and a lot of cool people will be here, but it’s still hard to send friends off for a three month break.

Since Wendy is moving back to California soon, she wanted to throw one last bash before taking off. So last night was the Disco party, and it was totally awesome. It wasn’t too big, which worked out perfectly - in a bigger party, you’re going to have small groups of people that are just kind of hanging out or don’t stay long. Everyone there was having a blast, dancing and singing and just unwinding from quarter-end stress. We played beer pong, I sat by the pond and had good conversations with good people, took lots of pictures, and we all got drunk and ended the evening in the traditional manner - shouting along to Cake and Ace of Base.

Around 4:30, the seven or eight of us that were still around were in no shape to drive, so we crashed around the house. Half an hour later, I was laying on the carpet in my boxers, using my jeans as a pillow (this is unbelievably uncomfortable), watching the end of Toy Story 2, when I got up to get a drink and noticed that it was getting bright outside. I stole BP’s last cigarette (sorry buddy), pulled on my jeans, and went outside to enjoy the birds singing. It was absolutely beautiful out and I wasn’t really tired, so I decided I should walk back to campus. At the time, I thought it was 3 or 4 miles - I found out this afternoon that it’s closer to 6.5.

I left the house at about 5:30. When I got to the gas station at East River and Erie Station - which is RIGHT by their house - half an hour later, I started to wonder if this was going to be a bigger endeavor than expected. I’ve always been riding in someone else’s car when I go to their place, so I didn’t have a very good sense of how far away it was. Nonetheless, I grabbed some water and Power Bars for the walk, and kept going.

I was having a grand old time enjoying the beautiful morning and snapping a few pictures, when I started coming up on Racquet Club (RIT’s off-campus apartment complex). I really had to pee, so I was keeping an eye out for a decent place to go into the woods. Off to the right was a clearing in the brush with a bunch of tire ruts in it - I assume the trucks from the gas company park in there when they’re working nearby or something. There was plenty of brush around it, so I went about 20 yards back in there, made sure I couldn’t be seen from either direction on the road, and took care of business. As I was coming back out, I saw a Sheriff car pulling a U-turn maybe 10 yards away.

I stopped walking and kind of stuck my hand in my back pocket like I do when I’m just standing around. They stopped the car and both got out, and told me to show my hands. When they asked what I had been doing back there, I’m like “I’ll be honest with you - I really needed a piss.” They asked where I was coming from, why I was walking, if I had any weapons on me. After frisking me, they had me sit in the car (which, by the way, was tiny as hell - I hope they don’t have to arrest many fat guys). As I’m sitting there waiting for them to call in my license, two more Sheriff cars pull up and two more guys get out of each. I was starting to worry that I’d picked the wrong place to piss, but the first two guys there were really cool and didn’t make it sound like a big deal, so I didn’t worry too much about it - if anything, I found the whole thing pretty amusing. They wandered into the clearing and looked around, presumably to see if I’d dumped a stolen purse or sack of heroin or something. I was toying with the idea of text messaging people to tell them I was in a cop car (for the sake of recording the incident) but decided I shouldn’t push my luck.

I was only in there for maybe five minutes when they came back and said they were going to give me a ride home. They wanted to talk to one of my roommate’s to make sure someone would be here and I’d be OK - they’re like “We know you’ve been drinking and you seem to be fine, but we’d like to make sure.” I was so nervous and trying to act normal that I probably came off as pretty cracked-out. So they gave me a lift home (which was nice because those shoes are terrible for walking) and we had a nice chat. I felt terrible because I had to wake Fonny up at 7 in the morning - “I need you to come talk to the police real quick.” That’ll throw him off first thing in the morning.

I got about three hours of sleep before Lucas called to tell me he was on his way here because wxs was in town and it was lunchtime. There were probably fifteen of us at Pellegrino’s, which was awesome because I hadn’t been there in months. It was good to see my Wesley again, even though I was exhausted. After a half-hour nap, I went shopping with Fonny, JymBob and Rich, then a few of us spent the evening hanging out here watching man shows on Spike TV.

So I’ve been running on precious little sleep all day, but it’s been a great weekend so far. Tomorrow I’ll be helping friends move in the morning. I don’t have anything else planned for the day, so I think I’ll pencil in a couple naps.

I couldn’t have asked for a better weekend to finish the quarter.

Also, that bump in my mouth WAS in fact a wisdom tooth coming in, and it seems to be coming in straight (but it hurts like a bitch). Because I know you were worried.

Around the end of my senior year, I registered for free web hosting. This wasn’t my first web site: a year or two prior, I had decided to make the biggest joke collection ever. Then I planned to expand it into an index of the Internet - like Yahoo!, but all mine.

Five years ago, these goals were realistic. At the time, the entire World Wide Web consisted of Yahoo!, AOL, and 46 home pages with distracting backgrounds and obnoxious animated graphics.

I started the site and dubbed it BrockHaven (this was right around the time I started calling myself Brock). I had never heard of a “weblog,” and I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. It was, effectively, the first blog I’d ever seen, and lasted a full six posts (three times the average LiveJournal account).

I’ve gone looking for it now and then over the past several years, just to see if it was still up. Until a few months ago, it was. When I couldn’t get to it sometime during Winter quarter, I figured it was gone forever and lamented the fact that I’d never backed it up for nostalgia’s sake.

For some reason, I was inclined to look for it again today. It was back online, with the counter reset to 0. I saved all the pages, removed the banner ads the server added, and now, against my better judgment, I give you BrockHaven, the very first blog in the history of communication.

Please note that the “days till college” counter says I’ve been in college for 1,318 days now. This fact makes me feel older than I thought it would.

I’m starting to think that my recent fatigue may not be the cause of too much sleep after all. I’ve been having some crazy-ass dreams lately. I won’t bore you with the details (because really, no one wants to hear about other peoples’ dreams unless they’re a psychiatrist, and that’s only because they’re being paid). Last night’s episode featured a full cast, including Nim, Heewa (we joined a frat together), Govind (he wanted to join the frat), BP, Heise (he got deported), Schmitty (didn’t get deported, but I thought he did), Rhubarb, Dan Lee, some guy from my high school that might be named Tom (I can’t remember), Miss Baer (an English teacher from high school), and a girl that I barely recognized, but she knew me. I wish I could remember more about her, because I’m curious if it really was someone from my past that I just couldn’t place when I saw here in my dream. I’m also wondering if she called me Randy or Brock - what does my subconscious think of me as?

I wake up tired every day because I’ve spent the night running around campus and joining frats. Based on years of exhaustive study, I know that my dreaming patterns are inversely proportional the amount I’ve been drinking lately: if it’s been a dry month, I’ll dream a lot. A month into fall, after everyone has come back and thrown parties, my subconscious has given up. Obviously, this provides a simple solution, but I’m not sure I want to cure dreams by killing off brain cells.

On the other hand, it did work for anxiety.

Looking at pictures is like eating chocolate cake. You see, chocolate cake is great every now and then, but if you have it every day, you won’t appreciate it any more.

When I went home this past weekend, I grabbed a copy of those photos I scanned over Christmas break. Looking through them again was a lot of fun. I had seen a few before, when I was younger, but most of them were all new to me when I scanned them a few months ago. Going through them again today and deciding which ones to post made me all nostalgic. Photos that we see every day quickly lose their meaning. My mom has some pictures of my brothers and I around the house, and I barely even notice them any more. But looking through pictures every once in a great while makes it that much more special.

At any rate, they’re up on Flickr. Enjoy.

My mind doesn’t wander so much as sprint madly around my subconscious with blind, reckless abandon.

If I’m lucky, this leads me to happy thoughts, which lead to further happy thoughts, which make it easy to sleep.

If I’m unlucky, it leads me to a memory of some minor perceived slight against me earlier in the day. This generally leads to memories of further transgressions of the offending party, leaving me pissed off at someone with no good reason.

More often than either, though, it leads me to some distant, almost-forgotten memory of on of my own inadvertent foot-in-mouth comments, which inevitably leads me to every other offensive thing I’ve said or done in my entire life, leaving me feeling like a total asshole.

Tonight, it was the last of the three, but it was quickly averted when I tried to find a clever way to use both transgression and slight in the same paragraph.

About a year ago, my parents’ printer died. They did some looking around and settled on a cheap HP to replace it. It’s one of those scanner/copier/printer combo deals, so they figured it was worth the extra $20 because it would come in handy.

When I was home over Christmas break, I dug out a shoe box full of pictures from the closet at the end of the hall. There are probably 3 or 4 shoe boxes and a couple albums full of photos in there, and I have no idea when they were pulled out last. My brother and I went through a bunch of them one time when we were kids, but I haven’t seen any of them since. With my plans to start digitizing my life in a Wiki, I figured it would be good to have a photographic history too.

I picked one of the small shoe boxes to start with and scanned some 75 or 100 pictures. They ranged from 1980-ish till about 1991 and had no real order to them. It was tough to tell when a lot of them were taken, but some had a date stamped in the bottom corner or on the back, and my mom had written a small note on the back of a few. For the most part though, it was a shot in the dark, or (if I was lucky), deductive reasoning: dad’s wearing that same shirt in both of these pictures and they’re both from a Christmas, so I can assume they’re both from 1989. Even so, they were all mixed in together so the date on most of them is a mystery.

I would post a few pictures of Baby Brock, but the CD I burned them to was somehow corrupted. I’m hoping no one deleted the folder I left on my parents’ computer, because I’ll copy them when I’m home this weekend.

Anyway, my point in telling that story was that our kids won’t have to go through the same crap. Digital cameras can be had for less than $100 these days, and almost everyone has one. A lot of people have them on their person most of the time and snap pictures of everything. You never have to buy film or pay for photo development; once you’ve got the camera and (if you want) a larger memory card, you can just keep taking pictures for free.

So we do. A lot.

Most people I know have some kind of organization technique for their pictures. I create new folders for each event and add the date to the end of the name, for reference. From there, I view and rename them in Picasa2, which I highly recommend. A lot of people (myself included) use Flickr, providing an enormous photographic resource, due in a large part to tagging. Consider the sxsw2005 tag: there are, at this writing, almost 800 photos from SXSW. Almost 3000 are tagged simply “sxsw” and presumably cover this and past conferences. I don’t need to know anyone who went to the conference to see what happened and who was there - dozens of people are making that information available to me, and a lot of them provide detailed information on every shot.

Due to the prevalence of digital cameras and the popularity of Flickr (and services like it), our generation will be better documented than any before us. My kids will be able to look through old pictures and know at a glance when and where it was taken and who the other people in the photo are. My parents can’t even give me a definite year for a lot of their pictures.

Granted, this hinges on the continued availability of Flickr and my own hard drive and CD backups, but, barring disaster, we will leave behind far more visual artifacts than our predecessors.

Before I tell this story, let me be clear: I am not a pothead. I’ve smoked pot about a dozen times over the course of a couple years, and not in the past several months.

The first quarter of my freshman year here, I used to stand outside and smoke with my buddy M all the time. He introduced me to Camel Wide Gauges, which are still my favorite kind of cigarettes. At some point I mentioned that I wanted to try pot while I had the chance to be irresponsible in college, and he immediately offered to provide. I had heard that you won’t get high the first time you smoked, so we agreed that we should just smoke a lot of it.

That weekend, the two of us went out to B lot and moved his little 1986 VW Jetta to the back row, and smoked three bowls in a matter of 15 minutes. The tiny car was hazy with smoke. M was obviously affected by it, because when it came time to tap out the bowl, he did it into his hand. The ash - and with it, the cherry - landed in his palm and burned his hand. His door was closed, so he didn’t know what to do with it and started tossing it back and forth, hot potato style. I laughed so hard I nearly pissed myself; I actually had to get out and pee in the woods because I was honestly afraid I was going to piss.

We walked back to the dorms and stopped into the Corner Store. I was still convinced that I was sober, because no one gets stoned the first time they smoke, right? I bought a liter of Mountain Dew and a box of Little Debbie Star Cakes, M got a drink and a box of some kind of Little Debbies, and went up to hang out in his room. For the next two hours, I laughed more than I had in weeks, drained the soda, and finished off the box of Star Cakes. They tasted so good I couldn’t stop eating them. I was convinced I didn’t get stoned, but I have never known munchies like that.

M left RIT after winter quarter, and I haven’t seen him since. I’ve smoked with a handful of different people since then, but I don’t think I’ve ever had as much fun with it as I did that night. He gave me a chance to try something new, and that’s what I came to college for.