fair harvard holds sway

in general, i really like being an alum. i love the extra time, i love being considered an adult, i love being able to pay for things, i love having my evenings and weekends free to meet up with my other alumni friends, i love how being apart makes our time together that much more special, i love buying my own food, i love having the time and freedom to read whatever i want.

there have been two times, though, living back here in massachusetts when i've really missed being in school:

the second was this past friday. the activity that 2 friends and i were going to fell through, so the three of us drove planless towards cambridge, figuring something would come up. after searching unsuccessfully for parking for 15 minutes we gave up and parked at the church. eric had access to the science center observatory, so we went up there. two other randos came into the observatory and we pooled all of our collective knowledge to get a fuzzy image of a random star (which was actually awesome - it was blue and green and purple and looked like the little animations you might see on a website about unstable isotopes, glowing and moving all around). then a random older guy came in and took over, telling us we had found sirius, the brightest start in the sky, and we could tell because sirius is orion's hunting dog, and he follows the hunter's feet across the sky every night. he then focused the telescope on five or six stars in the orion nebula and talked to us about mormons he knew when he was at school. as we were leaving the science center we ran into chad, who took us to a refreshment table at science center B for an event he had just missed, where we spent an hour munching and meeting people, including a guy who had stefan fly out to be an usher in his wedding two months ago. aww! then the four of us walked to kirkland house and joined cam and maryn to make their date less(??) awkward, and the 6 of us watched Bride and Prejudice in a random basement seminar room that had an awesome flatscreen tv. as i was walking back after midnight to my car at the church i realized that this kind of thing happened all the time while i was in school (i'll go here but then i'll see them and go there and we'll end up over here) and happens NEVER in my normal life now. everything is planned, and there's no way to run into people randomly, and i'm hardly ever surprised where i end up at the end of the night compared to what i was expecting at the beginning.

the first was my first sunday back - there was a big snowstorm and church in cambridge was truncated to 1 hour. it was soooo much fun to see all of my friends, and there was a baptism for a new guy peter at 3:30 so we all stayed and it was wonderful and i was so happy. 4:00 all of the harvard kids dispersed with plans to meet in annenberg for dinner (it was reading period) at 6. great! i can't remember why, but i was stalled a bit leaving the church, and when i got outside everyone had already left for their different houses. it hit me then that i had nowhere to go. i didn't have a room and i didn't have a bed and i didn't have a dining hall and i didn't have roommates and i didn't have a tv playing gilmore girls and a futon to sit on and a coffee table to put my feet on and a pomegranate to avoid and a microwave to close and i didn't have a home here. i kind of stood there on the sidewalk for a minute or two trying to figure out what to do now, embarrassed that i was an outsider in a place where i had once so entirely belonged. i eventually called emily, sat on her floor, read magazines for a long time, caught up on all of the news of my friends, and ate in pfoho, where i saw chad for the first time in 2 and a half years and morgan, alex, and celeste came and it was sundae sunday and we all had a great meal. i loved being able to sit there and enjoy my friends as long as i wanted because i didn't have reading to finish or psets to do, and i loved being with that group of people and having some of the best memories of sophomore year flooding back again, but all of those great things came with a price: it was that day, 7 months late, that graduation finally sunk in.