Month-Late Blogging: Nicola and Emily S
Jun. 24th, 2009 04:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violetclmMonth-Late Blogging Part the Fourth:
This is still in the Reed zone of entry material, even though its subject matter is two non-Reedies, namely, a Lewis and Clark student and an ex-Evergreen student who's considering Portland Statue University. After my posts in late November last year, when I went through most of my Reed acquaintances alphabetically and gave them brief explanations/biographies so that my LiveJournal would be easier to read for people who didn't know them personally, this is sort of the reverse of that, talking about the non-Reed students who sometimes visit me at Reed so that people who encounter us will know who they are. And then at the end I get to blabber on a bit about other stuff, but a fair bit of it is biographical, at least in a subjective sense. Either way, Reedies, take note, sometime you may see me with one or the other of these people and they are well worth your time in talking to.
Nicola attends Lewis and Clark College, six miles across the river from Reed, but we're actually from the same homeschooling program back here in Santa Cruz, and had been for years and years before graduating. She was extremely quiet when younger, and had very long straight hair, but sometime in high school or thenabouts this began to change. She is part of my generalized theory of girls getting haircuts as they become more social...I don't propose that the long hair is used as a barracks to hide in or anything like that, I just feel that there is a strong correlation. Anyway, back in the pre-Facebook days, Nicola decided to add me as a friend on Myspace, and I accepted, although we'd never really spoken to each other. We'd been in some several plays together, and of course knew many people in common given the size of the homeschooling program, but we were both quiet in our separate ways. Over time, though, as she joined improv and we were both in the community college cafeteria and various other intersections, we started talking more and more, offline and on. I rotated her picture for her on Myspace when she couldn't figure it out herself, asked her out a month or two after my first breakup (she said no, and added me to her list of people she would never go out with), flicked pennies at her in the community college cafeteria, saw her multiple times a week in different contexts, created her senior yearbook page when she graduated, and was one of many to read over her college application drafts (naturally, I strongly supported her getting into and going to L&C). From humble, shy and internet-born beginnings, she is now one of my best friends in Santa Cruz, topped but by Elowyn. Although it took years, I've even managed to visit both her houses! She is intensely literary, politically active and socially minded, humorous, good-natured, and one of those happy people who will sometimes tease me and who actually contact me to set up hanging out, rather than my having to do it every time as is the case for most people. As someone said, we greet one another on the phone with, at the least, a double flourish.
This past year was her first at Lewis and Clark – she is a year behind me, and will be stretching that out further by taking a travelly year off between her sophomore and junior years, as I recently learned to my sadness. My initial conception of how this would work, based on a limited understanding of how far L&C was from Reed or how wide the Willamette was, was that we would sneak away to sit on opposite sides of the river and chuck stones at one another. Because, you know, our colleges were supposedly rivals! Turns out they're really not, having a friend at the other school is not unheard of, and the river is much too wide to throw things across and neither college is exactly right next to it anyway. The six mile distance is punctuated by an enormous hill right underneath Lewis and Clark, which one may scale either by a desolate road or by a cemetery, depending on personal preference. I don't have exact numbers, but we each visited the other maybe six or eight or so times over the course of the year? I started off with a huge advantage over her first semester, but she recouped that a bit around year's end. Sometimes these visits were for cultural reasons – I went to two of her concerts, and she attended a showing of Antigone and came to Renn Fayre for a few hours – and other times one of us would just have a free evening or afternoon and miss the other. Her visits here were often brief and hurried, and she would sometimes end up having important papers to work on while I was over there (we compared our respective Socratic dialogue-form papers, mine a sequel to Crito and hers a conversation between Socrates and Immanuel Kant), but the visits were definite highlights of life whenever they occurred. The other thing they highlighted, of course, is how busy our lives are and how few days we can devote to twelve miles of bike (or bus) travel to see a dear friend. Neither of us have met, beyond being quickly introduced to in passing, most of the other's friends, because time is limited, although she did stay for a little when she came to my German Unity Day party. Maybe we'll get better next year, when I won't have a newspaper to work on and she'll be more accustomed to being at Lewis and Clark and its schedule, although then she'll be an RA and have a dorm to take care of…
Emily's story is pretty simple: we met at summer camp. Specifically, Not Back To School Camp, although she was always a welcome gate-crasher who didn't actually homeschool, and more specifically than that, we met in an eye-contact bonding activity where we sat across from one another, introduced ourselves, and held eye contact for prolonged periods of time before giving up some personal details. This was a bit under four years ago, so I understandably have no memory of what either of us said, but I'm sure it was very camp. We also played concentration in the Eugene train station while waiting for various trains to come by (back when the Amtrak Coast Starlight was four hours late on a good day), and I think we signed each other's directories at the end of camp the next year, even though we hadn't really interacted in the days preceding that. And I guess we've added each other to a couple social websites from time to time, but the point is, we don't have all that much interaction history.
Nonetheless, all freshman year we talked about meeting up sometime because she was a'livin' in Portland, and then at the end of the year, after several failed starts, we managed it. And then we did it again a year later. Both times she has come to Reed rather than the other way around because I am a bad friend or something I dunno. And logic would dictate or at least suggest that, given our limited previous encounters and the setting, these meetings would be awkward, but neither time did we really stop talking for more than a few seconds. I don't know as we were all that deep, exactly, but the speed and energy of the discussion were so much higher than in an average Reed conversation. I've definitely enjoyed the brief times we've spent together and I think we should maybe meet more than once next year. So I am left to wonder, what is it about me that is keeping me from being as open and energetic with Reed students as with other people? Or what is it about these other people, Nicola and Emily and people back home, that makes me feel comfortable with them? Is it simply the shared background? Or is it some of both? And is there some way I can get around this and gain the same rapid-fire familiarity with Reed students as I had with an admittedly excellent person whom I had little talked to in previous years? Further research must be done...either way, this is a large part of why I don't join Reed-missing support groups or generally pine away all break long, because I don't have the same feeling of "all my best friends/the only people who actually understand me are all at Reed."
This is still in the Reed zone of entry material, even though its subject matter is two non-Reedies, namely, a Lewis and Clark student and an ex-Evergreen student who's considering Portland Statue University. After my posts in late November last year, when I went through most of my Reed acquaintances alphabetically and gave them brief explanations/biographies so that my LiveJournal would be easier to read for people who didn't know them personally, this is sort of the reverse of that, talking about the non-Reed students who sometimes visit me at Reed so that people who encounter us will know who they are. And then at the end I get to blabber on a bit about other stuff, but a fair bit of it is biographical, at least in a subjective sense. Either way, Reedies, take note, sometime you may see me with one or the other of these people and they are well worth your time in talking to.
Nicola attends Lewis and Clark College, six miles across the river from Reed, but we're actually from the same homeschooling program back here in Santa Cruz, and had been for years and years before graduating. She was extremely quiet when younger, and had very long straight hair, but sometime in high school or thenabouts this began to change. She is part of my generalized theory of girls getting haircuts as they become more social...I don't propose that the long hair is used as a barracks to hide in or anything like that, I just feel that there is a strong correlation. Anyway, back in the pre-Facebook days, Nicola decided to add me as a friend on Myspace, and I accepted, although we'd never really spoken to each other. We'd been in some several plays together, and of course knew many people in common given the size of the homeschooling program, but we were both quiet in our separate ways. Over time, though, as she joined improv and we were both in the community college cafeteria and various other intersections, we started talking more and more, offline and on. I rotated her picture for her on Myspace when she couldn't figure it out herself, asked her out a month or two after my first breakup (she said no, and added me to her list of people she would never go out with), flicked pennies at her in the community college cafeteria, saw her multiple times a week in different contexts, created her senior yearbook page when she graduated, and was one of many to read over her college application drafts (naturally, I strongly supported her getting into and going to L&C). From humble, shy and internet-born beginnings, she is now one of my best friends in Santa Cruz, topped but by Elowyn. Although it took years, I've even managed to visit both her houses! She is intensely literary, politically active and socially minded, humorous, good-natured, and one of those happy people who will sometimes tease me and who actually contact me to set up hanging out, rather than my having to do it every time as is the case for most people. As someone said, we greet one another on the phone with, at the least, a double flourish.
This past year was her first at Lewis and Clark – she is a year behind me, and will be stretching that out further by taking a travelly year off between her sophomore and junior years, as I recently learned to my sadness. My initial conception of how this would work, based on a limited understanding of how far L&C was from Reed or how wide the Willamette was, was that we would sneak away to sit on opposite sides of the river and chuck stones at one another. Because, you know, our colleges were supposedly rivals! Turns out they're really not, having a friend at the other school is not unheard of, and the river is much too wide to throw things across and neither college is exactly right next to it anyway. The six mile distance is punctuated by an enormous hill right underneath Lewis and Clark, which one may scale either by a desolate road or by a cemetery, depending on personal preference. I don't have exact numbers, but we each visited the other maybe six or eight or so times over the course of the year? I started off with a huge advantage over her first semester, but she recouped that a bit around year's end. Sometimes these visits were for cultural reasons – I went to two of her concerts, and she attended a showing of Antigone and came to Renn Fayre for a few hours – and other times one of us would just have a free evening or afternoon and miss the other. Her visits here were often brief and hurried, and she would sometimes end up having important papers to work on while I was over there (we compared our respective Socratic dialogue-form papers, mine a sequel to Crito and hers a conversation between Socrates and Immanuel Kant), but the visits were definite highlights of life whenever they occurred. The other thing they highlighted, of course, is how busy our lives are and how few days we can devote to twelve miles of bike (or bus) travel to see a dear friend. Neither of us have met, beyond being quickly introduced to in passing, most of the other's friends, because time is limited, although she did stay for a little when she came to my German Unity Day party. Maybe we'll get better next year, when I won't have a newspaper to work on and she'll be more accustomed to being at Lewis and Clark and its schedule, although then she'll be an RA and have a dorm to take care of…
Emily's story is pretty simple: we met at summer camp. Specifically, Not Back To School Camp, although she was always a welcome gate-crasher who didn't actually homeschool, and more specifically than that, we met in an eye-contact bonding activity where we sat across from one another, introduced ourselves, and held eye contact for prolonged periods of time before giving up some personal details. This was a bit under four years ago, so I understandably have no memory of what either of us said, but I'm sure it was very camp. We also played concentration in the Eugene train station while waiting for various trains to come by (back when the Amtrak Coast Starlight was four hours late on a good day), and I think we signed each other's directories at the end of camp the next year, even though we hadn't really interacted in the days preceding that. And I guess we've added each other to a couple social websites from time to time, but the point is, we don't have all that much interaction history.
Nonetheless, all freshman year we talked about meeting up sometime because she was a'livin' in Portland, and then at the end of the year, after several failed starts, we managed it. And then we did it again a year later. Both times she has come to Reed rather than the other way around because I am a bad friend or something I dunno. And logic would dictate or at least suggest that, given our limited previous encounters and the setting, these meetings would be awkward, but neither time did we really stop talking for more than a few seconds. I don't know as we were all that deep, exactly, but the speed and energy of the discussion were so much higher than in an average Reed conversation. I've definitely enjoyed the brief times we've spent together and I think we should maybe meet more than once next year. So I am left to wonder, what is it about me that is keeping me from being as open and energetic with Reed students as with other people? Or what is it about these other people, Nicola and Emily and people back home, that makes me feel comfortable with them? Is it simply the shared background? Or is it some of both? And is there some way I can get around this and gain the same rapid-fire familiarity with Reed students as I had with an admittedly excellent person whom I had little talked to in previous years? Further research must be done...either way, this is a large part of why I don't join Reed-missing support groups or generally pine away all break long, because I don't have the same feeling of "all my best friends/the only people who actually understand me are all at Reed."