New Digs

Well, I managed to take some pictures of our swanky pad. Take a step inside Whitcomb 422...



As you can see, half my luggage weight was made of books. Books I have not yet read, books I read all the time, and lots of books that I frequently refer to for projects and English stuff.



This is my desk, and it is kind of messy right now, I'm still in the middle of organizing everything. My sister gave me that really jazzy desk lamp. You can see my laptop, and it's a very nice one. You DO NOT have to spend a ton of money to get a good one! Shop around and you can find some great deals. College expenses pile up fast and you don't want to have to dish out all of your money before you even get to campus. This one is brand new and I paid almost $500 less than the retail price. Have faith in eBay.



Our dressers are next to the closets. Mine is the messy one on the right.



We bunked the beds to make plenty of room. It's a really nice setup, but Wenhao really hates bunk beds, so we are going to try a non-bunk approach this weekend, and if it works we'll keep it that way. If not, bunks it is. Oh, mine is the sloppily-made top bunk (are you noticing a pattern here?)



This is our very swanky rug. Nice change from linoleum.



A view from the door. We have a nice big window. That's Wenhao's much tidier desk on the left. Note the fan! These really come in handy during the muggy Ohio summers....




This is the fantastic view of campus from our window!

Keeping to my One

Today was my first official day of classes at Hiram, and I must say that it was packed. I really should not be writing this blog with all of the stuff I have to do tonight, but I want to write it all down before it all ebbs away from me.

The day began, after a quick breakfast in Miller, with an 8:00 a.m. Intro to Literary Studies class. I was excited to see Brian, one of my high school friends, there with me. Lit was in Hinsdale today, but from now on classes will be in Bonney Castle, headquarters of the English Department. That is cool because it is just like a home and has a kitchen, and the professors stock it with warm drinks to help us early students wake up. Class was a hodge-podge of discussing our roles in the class and analyzing literature. Then we participated in a group activity where we drew objects from a bag (my group's was a framed cross-stitch of a small alley in Shambles York) and critically analyzed them before discussing our conclusions. Our homework for the class was to read a section of the text and take notes, and from those notes we will work together to construct our class syllabus.

Immediately after Lit I hopped on over to Frohring for my colloquium, Music in a Changing World. We received a syllabus, which very conveniently lists all of our assignments and tests for us. We were told that a mandatory part of the class is to participate in 2 meetings of the African Ensemble, the first of which was tonight. Extra credit is offered to those who participate in at least 9 of the 11 meetings throughout the semester. Then we were assigned quite a bit of homework: a reading from the textbook (both the introduction and the first chapter, roughly 68 pages), a chapter to read from a book that Prof. Dreisbach xeroxed for us, and the first draft of a 3-5 page essay!

Before classes started I viewed my Monday afternoons as a great break from classes, but after the flux of assignments I decided it would be best to spend some of that time working. So after lunch I decided to check out the library. This was the first time I've visited the library properly, exploring it a bit before picking a seat to work. The library is simply amazing. It is a beautiful building, and is much more spacious than I first predicted, judging by the outside. There are four floors, and each of them are packed with books, and the media collection is in the basement. The architecture of the building is simply wonderful and it can sometimes be hard to read in there without letting my mind wander, tracing the curves of the beams and ceiling. One of my favorite rooms is a large, round reading room with a few tables in the middle, computer stations lining the circumference, and international flags hanging from above. The ceiling opens to the second floor. If you visit the second floor, you will see a large, round bench that looks like a circular bar with plenty of room for books and materials, but in the center is the hole that looks into the reading room below.

Also, there are so many books there that I didn't think would have a spot in the library of a out-of-the-way village like Hiram. I found a very useful book that dissects and explains all of the radicals in Chinese characters, which will help me a bit with my Chinese. (I am not registered for a class, but Wenhao is teaching me Mandarin himself, and I'm teaching him German in return. Very quid pro quo.) I also found dozens of books in German, several of which are by an author that I have been interested in reading for over a year, Stefan Zweig. There were even a good handful of books about the Baconian Theory, one of my favorite conspiracy theories!

After the tour I worked at a table on my readings for a couple hours, but I did not finish. I took a break and hung out with some friends before eating dinner and running off to Frohring to catch the African Ensemble meeting for the evening. I was expecting the experience to be a bit awkward, but it was really one of the most enjoyable experiences I've had yet. Our instructor, Olu, was very funny and engaging. He really pumped some energy into our colloquium class! First we learned a few different types of ways to strike the drums. These drums are all hand played, which means that there are several ways to manipulate the sound with one's hand. After we learned the hits we practiced drumming in sync with each other, which we accomplished pretty quickly. Next we learned a very catchy rhythm and Olu was pleased with how quickly we caught on. We did a lot to mix up the music with different breaks, tempos, and patterns, and by the end we sounded really good. Olu had told us that the drumming could be very hypnotic, and he is right! I found that it is best to play without really thinking about what we are playing, but to feel it, to let the hands strike the rhythm that they knew. After a while, my hands, as well as many others' hands, began to get very sore. My palms were, and nearly still are, raw red, and the base of my right ring finger has that puffy sort of swollen feeling one gets after being stung by a bee. My hands ached with pain but my brain did not want to stop just yet. Then Olu had us stop and rest with our eyes closed as he tapped a quiet rhythm on his drum and spoke to us soothingly and had us repeat him, mantra-style. He likened college life to the drumming we just learned, that our hands keep looking for that first strong beat that will lead them into the rest of the patter before finding the One first beat again, repeating. He called this keeping to the One, and that we should keep to the One in life: to concentrate, and give our studies here at college our best effort. If we lag behind, keep to the One and speed back into the rhythm. As the pace of life changes, keep to the One and change tempo with it.

By the time we left we learned that we had accidentally been playing over half an hour longer than we were supposed to! We were doing so well that we just kept going and progressing to more difficult breaks. I left excited, and I cannot wait until the next meeting two weeks from now. My hands will have healed by then, but will they have healed for tomorrow morning's piano lesson?

Moving Day

Yesterday I finally moved into my dorm at Hiram! Dozens of cars lined the streets as students and parents unloaded luggage onto the lawns. Then began the actual moving. I happen to be on the fourth floor of Whitcomb, so that was some extra climbing for my dad and I. Because Wenhao could only bring so much stuff with him (2 suitcases' worth of luggage for the entire year!) it was up to me to bring some of the larger appliances that most roommates divide between each other. That was fun carrying up the stairs. It was quite a workout, and in typical Ohio humidity at that. Thankfully, my wonderful friend Mike, a classmate from high school who is also going to Hiram this year, offered to help carry the boxes, and it was all accomplished faster than I had expected.

Next came the truly fun part: unpacking and setting up the room. I had been looking forward to setting up my dorm for some time. We had got many neat and useful items at Bed Bath and Beyond (between our coupons and the coupons that our neighbors saved for us, we managed to cut down a lot of the dorm room expenses!). Upon first entering the room, my first thought was that it was too small. But really, it was just set up in a way that did not offer as much space. The beds were arranged in a way that made it difficult to move around, especially when we began putting all of the boxes in there. My dad and I studied the room for a minute to try to figure out the best way to lay it out. We decided it was best to bunk the beds. Our room is slightly different from other dorm rooms because it is in the corner of Whitcomb, and so the holes in our bedposts were a different size than the pegs that the RA gave us. My dad drove off to Garretsville to get some metal piping from the hardware store while I continued to unpack and move things around. The metal pegs worked nicely and the beds were very easy to bunk after that! I thought that Wenhao (who was not there at the time) would be very surprised to come back to the room and see it changed around so much. But there is so much more space now that he liked it.

Wenhao gave me a gift of a neat orangish-red bracelet and two scarlet hanging sort of charm decorations, traditional in China. I knew that gift-giving is a large part of Chinese culture, and researched it a great deal before coming to Hiram, learning of all sorts of gifts to avoid. Some of the customs are very interesting while others I thought were kind of odd. But I finally decided upon a book called The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck. It is very appropriate as it is written by an American woman who grew up in China. I wrapped the book in red paper, as that is supposed to be a very fortunate color to the Chinese, and wrote "friendship" in Chinese characters on the top (or, as best as I could, that is).

Soon after the welcoming ceremony (where one of the Deans made a much-appreciated joke about the required reading book) I met up with Wenhao for the first time. I had to say a quick goodbye to my parents before running off to my first Freshman Colloquium meeting, Music in a Changing World. I was surprised to find five students in my Colloquium that are from my area, three of them from Concord!

So moving in was pretty exciting, and I am sure that I will enjoy my years here at Hiram. Now, on to finish setting up the dorm...

Catching up

I have neglected my blog lately, which isn't good because once I put something off I forget about it entirely and I want to get in the habit of writing stuff down regularly.

Since my birthday, the date of the last post, I still have not finished my college shopping. I went out today and got a bunch of it done, but I still need to get my books, a bookshelf, a pillow, some storage bins, a hamper, and all those fun school/office supplies from Staples. For my birthday my parents gave me a stage stand for my keyboard, which is really nice, now that I don't have to play the keyboard on my dresser or bed. My amazing sister Heather gave me some "fun accessories for my swanky pad" and they are quite swanky indeed! She went way over the top with her generosity, and I just love her so much for it too. But her gifts also have a very practical side as well, which is excellent; she knows from experience what a college student should have in times of need. My wonderful brother wasn't sure what to give me so he gave me the universal gift of money, which always comes in handy as well!

Shortly after my birthday, we ordered my laptop. I had built a Dell Inspiron online and I thought I had worked at it very conservatively but it was still way too expensive. So i went on eBay and did some searching around and found a brand new Gateway MT-somethingorother laptop for like $350 less than retail value. We took the risk and ordered it. Thankfully the seller was an honest man and the laptop really was in brand-spanking-new condition. It works like a dream. It has a nice, big widescreen, which is excellent so I can play DVD's on there (and now I don't have to get a TV!). The keyboard is a nice size too, so I can type easily on it compared to some other laptops I've used which make it difficult to type with such miniscule keyboards. I absolutely love Windows Vista, I think there are some really fantastic upgrades from XP. I was hesitant to get Vista because I have heard so many negative comments about it, specifically concerning annoying pop-ups, but I have not run across any of these yet. And it runs so quickly, too! It has a nice selection of games. Mom has been playing Ink Ball, and she gets really into it, freaking out when a ball goes too close to a hole of a different color and starts swearing really fervently at the computer, haha. Also, I love the selection of "Sample music" that it includes with Windows Media Player. They usually include a few songs from little-known artists from around the world or songs that have long sicne entered public domain so that users can test out the sound quality before playing their own music. But the songs they included are really quite nice, I love the world-beat, easy listening sort of melodies they have included, and it really goes nicely in the background while I'm playing mahjong.

I move on Friday, which seems both so close yet far away. On the one hand, I'm really excited to go. On the other, I still have much work to do. I have to clean out my room, wash the clothes I'm taking to Hiram, finish my shopping, and pack everything up. I have packed a few things so far, such as all my toiletries, laundry, and first-aid stuff, as well as all of the stuff Heather sent to me. I'm going to go through my books tonight to pick out which ones I'm going to take and which I'm leaving behind.

Today I also got new glasses. The prescription is a little stronger this time. I went with slightly thicker frames in black, and I think they look nice.

Today I also talked over Skype with Elke, my German pen-friend. It was really fun, but I have noticed that my German speaking has slipped considerably this summer! A little bit ago I also talked with Wenhao over the phone at work. He seems really nice and sounds excited to be coming to Hiram. I had some difficulty understanding him over the phone, but speaking with him face-to-face should be much easier.

Midnight

Hmm... nothing.

Well, I'm off to shower and then go to bed... I've got to be up early tomorrow... or rather, this morning.
;)

August 6

In less than two hours, August 6 will arrive and I will have turned 18. This is supposed to be something of a rite-of-passage moment in every person's life, but I haven't seemed to fully grasp this yet -- similar to how it takes some time to accept the death of a loved one into your daily life, until it becomes something one accepts as true and not as something one has to be reminded as a truth.

I have not anticipated this day like I have for many of my previous birthdays. I remember when I was younger how I would start counting down the days and hours to the moment I could officially call myself older and add a number to my life, a countdown that always began a month in advance. As the days slowly ticked by I would have fantasies of what it would feel like to be a seven-year-old, such an auspicious age to be or a ten-year-old where, labeled with a double-digit, I could precociously imagine I could include myself with those elite few known as teenagers, the ranks of whom I would not officially join until 13.

Sweet-sixteen arrived nicely, with the stock birthday card jokes of driving tests and getting cars, only to later prove false for the next two years.

Seventeen was a kick through the door onto the threshold of adulthood: that summer I worked in the hayfield, stacking and unstacking heavy, cumbersome bales of hay. My birthday was no different, and less than an hour after waking up, before the idea of seventeen had fully sunken into my thoughts and before I even got around to eating breakfast, I had to hurry outside to help unload two wagon loads of hay into the barn. As a birthday treat, I was promised that all I would have to do was unload the two wagons, which is far preferable to loading them, and take the rest of the day off rather than work that afternoon. But, as fate would have it, that August day was extremely hot, and under the stress of moving bales of hay as fast as I could, gritting my teeth toward sweet relief for the rest of the day, I got heat exhaustion, a variance of hyperthermia. On top of the usual discomforts working with hay gives a man, my face was burning, my forehead pounded with each of my heartbeats, and my empty stomach churned uneasily. So I decided to have a glass of water and lay down to relax the pain away. This failed and I began to feel nauseous, so I locked myself in the bathroom and took a cold shower. Soon the nausea knocked me off my feet and my body still was not cooled down, so I ran a cold bath and slept in the water for at least half an hour. I drained the tub and hardly stood up to leave when I began throwing up.

There are many things I will never understand in this world, and one of them is how my stomach, completely empty but for about 12 ounces of water could produce torrents of vomit, a gallon at the least. The mess cleaned up and my stomach emptied, I dashed to my bedroom and lie down to let the body's best medicine, sleep, do its work. I woke up at 7:30 in the evening feeling much better physically but feeling a deep sense of disappointment that my 5 year vomit-free streak was broken on my seventeenth birthday, a day that I had all but slept through.

And now, 1 hour and 15 minutes to go, I reflect about how I have not counted the days or gone through any of the rituals that I once practiced, and that this eighteenth year of my existence has sneaked upon me. I know, from 17 birthdays' worth of experience (or 18, if you include the day I was actually born) that for the most part there really is no profound moment of revelation as the clock strikes midnight, no brilliant step up in my abilities as a person, no amusing ruminations about how the person I was a day ago was silly and less experienced in the world. I have not contemplated the trip to the store where I would purchase a pack of cigarettes, lottery tickets and porno mags, just for the simple fact that I can. Today I have not felt any great sense of anticipation for tomorrow or sense myself rising to the climax moment of blowing out the birthday candles on an ice cream cake and opening up gifts. In fact, today was rather uneventful and by all standards mediocre, a run-of-the-mill Sunday where the only thing I contemplate is having to get up early to go to work tomorrow morning (and it is for this reason that I dislike Sundays more than Mondays).

No day is more extraordinary than any other. Each is a day where we continue to live and, hopefully, to grow and learn. Each is one day closer to that unknown moment when we will not be blowing the candles out on a cake, but the candles of our lives have either reached the ends of their wicks and flicker out peacefully in a wrinkled pool of melted wax, or gutter and tremble in an uncontrollable gust that puts our fragile flame -- out, out. It is all fine and fun to celebrate our birthdays, but what about our deathday? Any one of the days that pass us by may be the anniversary in the future, near or far, that will be marked as our last. Shouldn't we therefore celebrate every day, live every one as if it were our last, as every one very well could be? My birthday, after all, was the death day for countless souls -- those lost in the bombing of Hiroshima as the most infamous example, along with myriad others throughout history who have died from causes both natural and macabre.

These are the musings of a young man, on the edge of eighteen, as he counts down the last fifty-three minutes of being seventeen -- anticipating the moment of magic and revelation. *He makes an early birthday wish at 11:11.* He counts down the last minutes not for the extra privileges, the cake, the presents. But for the fact that he knows he can claim this extended moment in time as his own, to look back on them with pride, and to look forward from them towards the rest of his adventure.

Wenhao Found

In an attempt to get in touch with Wenhao, I sent him a letter through snail mail. Shortly afterward I was chatting with Radina, a Hiram first year from Bulgaria, on Facebook, and she told me to ask Mrs. Hale, who is in charge of all the international students, for his home email address.

So I emailed her last night, and this morning woke up to find an email from Wenhao waiting in my inbox! She must have forwarded my Hiram address to Wenhao. So now we are in touch, but we can only really correspond at certain times of the day. With a 12 hour time difference, he's just going to bed when I am waking up, and vice versa.

His English is pretty good and I was surprised to learn that he's a Lebron James fan. :) We'll have to go to a Cavs game sometime then...

Mission Finding Wen

The moment I and several of my future classmates have been waiting for has finally arrived: we received email notifications of where we are staying on campus (which somebody had already figured out how to find online) and who our roommates are (which everybody has tried unsuccessfully to find out until now).

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I will be sharing a room with an international student, Wen Hao Li, who lives in China. I'm very excited about this because I am always looking for opportunities to learn about other cultures.

I have been on pins and needles lately, wishing to know who my roommate is, so that I can get in tough with him to find out who is bringing what, so that we don't end up cluttering ourselves out of the 11.5' X 13.5' dorm room. But I think it's safe to assume that Wen isn't bringing any large appliances, since it would be both difficult and expensive to fly, say, a dorm-size fridge overseas. So I don't think I have to worry about what not to buy any more, but I still want to get in touch with Wen before we start college.

I am not sure if Wen has his college email yet, since students get that at orientation, and international students have orientation right before everybody else moves in... so I have no idea whether or not Wen has received my email yet. The email included his address and phone number. I'd love to send him a letter snail-mail, but I'm not sure how long it would take to reach him. As for the phone number, I will have to try calling from work, which has free phone connectons through the internet, but I will have to time it right with the 12 hour time difference.

Also, I'm not sure if he is returning home for the breaks. It is very expensive, after all, to fly these days. My family is willing to have him over for the holidays, since we live only 45 minutes or so from campus, and we have extra rooms now.

So, this has become my new mission: finding Wen.