EPT
Warning: this is long as shit and there is no TLDR.
To be quite honest, I don’t think my college experience is special. It’s nothing worth writing about for the sake of anyone but myself, unless what I am about to describe to you turns out to be a foreign concept, because you either went to a vastly different university, or because to me—an American—you are foreign. That said, I think it could be interesting if you’re (unlikely) not at college age yet, or (more likely) at or beyond that stage and so you can compare, reflect yourself, or just laugh at the angst you may recall so well.
I’m a freshman at Rice University. It’s in the medical district of Houston, Texas. My residential college (not a dormitory; more on that later) is directly on Main Street, a street that’s what I imagine the Wall Street of hospitals ought to look like, so sirens and traffic in general are now more white noise than abnormalities. I’m from the suburbs, so to me this is novel. I live in a suite with four people. Two rooms for two people each, conjoined by a tiny hallway with enough room to get through the door and a few small trash cans, and then a bathroom. One toilet, one shower, and two sinks serve us quite well, although I can see how people who are less laid back than we are might find that problematic. My roommate is an international student from Shenyang, China. Most of the time our relationship is one of coexistence rather than friendship. I’ve maintained that I like it that way. I’m a pretty introverted person and I’m in the room a lot. It’s nice to not feel like I’m getting tired of someone since I’m not really talking to him. However, there are times when I really feel the pain of not having a better relationship with my suite. Not to say that we’re incompatible as close friends, although if we made the effort I think that would be the result, it’s just that we’ve developed that way and that’s just how it’s going to be.
I had a hard time adjusting for a while. I still am, I guess. Plenty of people must have gone through this before me, are going through it now, and will continue to as long as different personalities exist in this world. Forcing myself to go against what I feel is the natural flow of interaction and invest time into conversations and relationships that are painfully superficial for the sake of possibly making a new friend or two is obviously not something I wanted to do for 15 weeks. But that’s how a lot of my first semester felt, which contradicts what a lot of the social structure of Rice should theoretically provide, even for people like me. Rice has a residential college system, which is almost Greek life in disguise. You’re assigned a college at random, go through an orientation process (minus the hazing, thankfully) with outlandish traditions and blind obedience that skirts the line of cultural indoctrination. Then you live there for all four (or five or six) years you attend as an undergraduate student, as opposed to moving to a different residence hall each year (at least that’s the norm in America).
It’s a blessing and a curse, this system. You learn who almost everyone is very quickly. Having come from a small high school, I get a lot of the same forced familial vibes from living here. You make some friends, you realize some people are shit, and cliques form because that’s all freshmen know how get by socially. But here I am, not extraverted by any stretch, and therefore definitively aloof from this clique. It seems insignificant, immature, and regressed to complain about such a thing at college, but I want to emphasize that the residential college system makes it a bigger issue than it has to be. Additionally, my particular college has a culture of drinking and partying that is, relative to the other residential colleges, big. If you couldn’t tell yet, that’s not my type of thing. My closest friends and I will drink, but at most there’s six of us and we’re just sitting in a room, talking and joking around. That’s the kind of social interaction I live for, which is great of course. But I am hopelessly still somewhat detached from them because they’re all juniors, and I am a freshman. One is even graduating earlier this year, and he’s my closest friend. I actually met him in Korean class (yes, StarCraft led to my interest in the language; no, I don’t think that makes me cool or special and I don’t even want to tell people about it when they ask me; yes I am insecure about this), and I had found him over the summer by trying to connect with Rice’s CSL team. So it’s a good start, but it’s going to be quick to end unfortunately. I have friends in my class too, and some of them are even at my residential college, but it’s not many. You may call me a hypocrite for complaining about not having many friends when I have already said that I am introverted, but I think with the amount of free time I have and the ridiculous amount of time I spend with/see some people, I need more variety, and people who can satisfy my needs for companionship in different ways.
It took me until basically two weeks into this second semester to finally feel like I have enough friends to get by for now. My best friend’s sister is from another residential college, a freshman, and she is nice and her friends are cool. I like to hang with them at lunch some days and that’s been a really nice addition to my social life. At my own college I’m avoiding the clique more and more and sticking with the people I like. Things are looking up and that’s great. There’s a girl I’m interested in but she might have a boyfriend, so that’s maybe unfortunate. But if she doesn’t, I’m working on getting to know her just in case. Many people say freshmen are too quick to jump into relationships. I did actually have a three week stint with another girl in my first semester, and I guess to some extent I can see why it’s considered rash, but that was a mistake for a lot of other reasons. I came out fine though, even though she’s essentially bullying me behind my back (making fun of what she perceives to be an “Asian fetish”, which is not only untrue but evocative of my deepest insecurities). But hey, I browse /r/starcraft, I can handle some toxicity every now and then
. So I’m going to be more careful moving forward. Unlike my replays in StarCraft, I have actually been able to learn a lot from my limited dating experience. Sometimes I wonder, though, that I was blaming too much of my inability to make friends on everything aside from me. I normally have a pretty internal locus of control, and I pride myself on that, but there are times when I (over?)think things and get critical of myself. An example: living on campus you are forced to have a meal plan with 19 meals per week. Saturday dinners are not included because they want to encourage students to leave the campus and explore Houston. A cool idea, but that requires having a group of people to go with, unless you’re really comfortable walking 10-30 minutes by yourself somewhere and eating alone while you watch other people from the university come in with groups. So every Saturday I’d wake up, get lunch (lol who the hell is going to wake up before 11 on a Saturday?) and start working on homework with facebook in another tab. I’d wait for the little ding to go off with someone asking me if I wanted to go to dinner. Not counting when I was with the girl, I think that happened once. In an entire semester. A few times I asked people and basically invited myself to their plans, something I hate and from which I suffered great cognitive dissonance. Most of the time I just ordered pizza. Domino’s reward system gives you a free pizza after six orders. I got two free pizzas last semester. To digress, I started thinking just recently that maybe I was blaming other people too much on not wanting to go with me. I didn’t bother messaging too many people myself, even if it was because I didn’t feel like I was close enough to that many people or was just sounding desperate. If you’re both waiting for the other to pick up phone, then you’re both just going to end up sitting there. But it’s okay now, like I said, because I have a more solid and reliable group of friend established.
Another rough aspect of adjusting to college life has been that my studies are inherently alienating. At Rice, a massive proportion of students are STEM (science technology engineering math) majors. Every other kid is pre-med, and the rest are some kind of engineer or computer science. Nothing against them, they can do them, but it’s boring as fuck when there are 20 linguistics majors in a campus of 4000. I was also considering majoring in Asian Studies, and still am I guess, but the same problem exists there too. While linguistics sometimes offers the chance to do something like homework or group projects together (if you can find someone), Asian Studies is almost entirely history courses, which means just reading and writing by yourself. I seriously envy the system STEM kids have where they can work on problem sets together, or just by nature of being in massive lecture classes find six people they already know with whom they can study. I joined a club, because that’s apparently what socially inept freshmen are supposed to do, and it was for humanities students at Rice to basically form a constituency and complain to administration about how STEM gets all the funding and it’s hard to make friends when some people are surprised, for example, to learn that we do in fact offer History and English majors, in addition to like six kinds of engineering. But, and I guess this is just a chance thing, I haven’t really been able to make friends from that. I go to the gym semi-regularly, see a lot of the same kids playing basketball, but nobody ever says “hey let’s grab dinner” or asks about classes or whatever. I probably should from time to time, but for some reason the fact that I’ve never seen it occur has soured my opinion of basically everyone who plays basketball as just the stereotypical douchecanoe who wasn’t good in high school but likes to think he was, and now gets to act like he was because he’s at a smart school with fewer athletically gifted students. I’m also trash at basketball so maybe that has something to do with it too I guess lol.
Classes have been pretty much all great, if absurdly hard at times. I can’t say I didn’t expect it, but I was definitely hoping I wouldn’t get 200 pages of reading per week. Oh well. It’s a pain in the fucking ass and I’m just not very good at reading in general, so it’s been really rough so far this semester, but I’m getting by I guess. Last semester I did really well, even though I took fewer classes, so it’s good in that I did well, but bad in that I have that precedent to compare myself to. If I do worse I’ll feel bad. And well, there’s no alternative because there’s no way I’m doing better, but I guess I can aim for doing just as well. That’d be fine. I’m having a really hard time finding motivation unlike last semester, which is especially discouraging considering I’m taking two major classes and Korean, which is just a ton of fun because of my classmates and instructor.
In times of despair I generally just get gloomier, which is what drove me to write this, because the lack of motivation has gotten me to perceive every other small misfortune as even worse. I recently went to the student health center because of a lump on my chest, and I’ve been told to monitor it. So far it has shown no signs of male breast cancer, thankfully, and it’s most likely gynecomastia. Sadly, that makes me feel like shit for irrational reasons, and it’s essentially imperceptible to the ignorant eye, but I’ve always been conscious of my body because I’m skinny and was born with (and still have) pectus excavatum. Google this shit if you feel like it because I’m not bothering with the hyperlink stuff. My best friend back home is also going through some personal issues, and that’s made me upset because I care about her and she is my go-to person for all my general angsty complaints and thoughtful conversations.
I also miss my parents. I don’t just miss the convenience of having home-cooked meals ready for me every day, a kickass mom who likes doing my laundry, and a bro dad who is always willing to take a break from work (he works at home) to spot me when I’m lifting weights. I miss all the time I didn’t spend with them. Summer before my senior year of high school I got into writing for TL because my passion for StarCraft was absurdly high. I also wanted something to put on my college applications that made my thousands of hours with this game sound productive and substantive. Well, they did turn out to be that way, and my ability to convey that in an interview is probably the only reason I got accepted into Rice, honestly. Anyways, I started spending literally (and I don’t use literally figuratively) the entire day in my room just watching, playing, and writing about StarCraft when I wasn’t doing homework. I was loving it so much that I probably could have spent an entire year living the way I did for the weeks over the summer when I would wake up stupidly early to watch Proleague and then sleep into the afternoon, fucking my sleep schedule to all hell. Like most high schoolers, I was to some extent embarrassed to spend time with my parents if we were in public, and at home I just always felt like I belonged at my desk more than chilling with them. But this insular lifestyle didn’t expose me to the things in the real world about which I would wish I had them to talk with. Now that I’ve considered transferring more than once and spent Saturday nights crying, eating pizza, and doing homework by myself, or some combination of the three (actually I fucking love pizza so that’s not so bad), I realized how much I wish I could just shuffle to the family living room, plop on the couch and talk for hours about everything that’s going through my mind. No matter how great some of my friends are, none of them can fill that void.
A consequence of being so busy since I’ve gotten to college, meaning more that I have to spend my free time deliberately socializing or fulfilling obligations than just having too much work, is that I’ve basically quit my role as a writer on TL. I say that I’m on hiatus, but aside from a minimal contribution to Blizzcon (which was incredibly disappointing, as far as the popularity of our coverage goes), I haven’t done shit and won’t until summer, if at all. Right until the bitter end (right before I moved in to college) I clung on to StarCraft as my pastime, and I could not conceive my life without it because I had spent almost a full calendar year doing it all the time. I don’t play but a few games every other week or so, I don’t watch much besides the CJ players, and never live anymore. But I don’t really feel bad. I thought I would feel like a part of my identity was lost, because that’s what it was to me a year ago. But now I feel an emptiness that has nothing to do with the need to find another passion/hobby. It’s one that set in once I realized that I could live without StarCraft. Except now I can’t appreciate my parents for what they would have been if I had spent that time differently. It’s a sadness that my writing abilities can no longer express.
I came home and unpacked for the winter recess and sat on my bed. But then I realized that it’s not really my bed anymore. I’m only sleeping in this bed, which used to be mine, for at most about four months in a year. I’ve started my journey toward being an independent man, probably never to return as a permanent resident of that house ever again. I’m a visitor there. My home is here, on this significantly shittier bed, with sirens waking me up at 4 am, with this forced coexistence relationship between me and someone I barely know.
I woke up on Christmas morning to my sister’s excessively loud voice. I used to wake up my whole family with the kind of excitement you would want to put on commercials. I knew something had changed. We sat on the floor in front of the tree like we always do and opened presents. To be clear I love Christmas. The best memories of my short life so far are usually from the Christmas season and some of the most exciting StarCraft moments I got to witness, like herO’s runs through Katowice and San Jose, 2014 Blizzcon, etc. That either says a lot about StarCraft or Christmas, depending on who you are
. But it just isn’t the same anymore. I have always been bad at gift ideas, but I put the lowest amount of effort ever this year. I didn’t get anything for my mom; my sister bought it and just made me pay for half. We got my dad a fucking mouse pad because he’s kind of boring but also because I couldn’t think of anything for him. I got my sister perfume because she told me to. I didn’t even pick it out, I just went to the mall and told them what she wanted. That’s it. Yet my parents and my sister outdid me infinitely. I won’t go into the details of their generosity or anything like that, but it was so noticeable how shitty I was at this compared to them that the happiness I experienced from receiving such nice gifts was almost completely balanced by the guilt I had for not reciprocating. I’ve bemoaned at other times and in other places that I’ve not been grateful enough to my parents, who have given me so much, but never to this extent. I feel like I’ve finally been able to capture what it is that makes me so upset. I don’t think I’ve told them I love them…well I have no idea how long ago that might have been. But now I realize that my only contribution to the family has been a massive expense (college) and a lack of decent human interaction that I now crave more than anything in the world. I don’t know how else to show my gratitude. I don’t like believing them when they say they’re just happy with me getting good grades and embracing all that Rice has to offer (yeah…I guess I should work on that more). I don’t like that no matter how often I call them, they are almost always the ones to hang up the phone because they run out of things to say to me, when I just don’t have it in me to let go and talk about all kinds of things that bother me. Yet every time I seek the opinions of others, be it talking to friends, posting blogs like this on TL previously (but much shorter), or considering going to the counseling center where you can talk to someone about literally anything for free, I end up feeling ashamed of my feelings. Either they say I’m not as bad of a person as I make myself out to be, or I decide that it’s all immature and the desire to share with people I don’t know is even stupider.
Everyone I’ve gotten to know well has told me that I overthink things. I probably do. But I cannot imagine not thinking about things the way I do. So I continue to. It’s agonizing, it keeps me up at night when I should be getting sleep because I still have fucking class tomorrow, and it nags at me when I try to sit down and focus on homework. I get flustered when I can’t read this textbook or that article because every paragraph or two I find myself preferring to think about this or that or the other thing, and then I lose confidence in my academic capabilities, and the cycle starts again. Maybe they’re right, those who say my biggest strength is self-awareness and openness to change.
My negativity needs a counterbalance. Here’s where a clever literary device would go to make a nice concluding sentence, if I weren’t so dreadfully rusty at writing.
Cheers,
Banjoe
