My housemate submitted his Fulbright application this morning.

How are those possibly due this early?? That cannot be true. Who knows their future self a year in advance? And those other September deadlines, from where did they creep? Who let them in? What are we all going to do next year, and why did we have to start planning that answer months ago, because we just got here — we’ve barely figured out how to do this thing. I’ve been living off of cereal and trailmix and scavenged fruit for a week. I’m still figuring this out.

So maybe we just throw ourselves at cover letters and coffee chats and fracture our futures into formulas for fellowships on foreign continents but also there’s laundry to do and dishes to wash and will someone close the blinds in the bathroom, the neighbors can see right in. 

I go for a long run.

First years on the library steps during orientation

That’s one draft for this intro. Here’s another:

If, on the first day of classes, you and your friends wake up at 7 a.m. and cook 100 pancakes and attempt to give them away in the thoroughfare of your college’s science building, you will be at first baffled and then incensed that barely anyone at all will accept your offering of small joy, and so, righteous, you’ll pick up the tray and walk around campus, handing them out in the morning sun, and you will see old friends and confuse the freshman, but you will learn a lot about someone by their reaction, maybe all you need to know, and sometimes you will find a stranger who is just as earnest about receiving pancakes as you are about making them. And maybe that is all I want from life.

The rest of the story

I’m back on the East Coast! I am well! It’s felt really, really good to be at Wesleyan again. 

I end up having a wonderful (surprise!) week back in the Bay before flying east. I go to the beach, I go to the opera, I board three flights without a RealID. You truly can’t stop me — they’ve tried. I’m feeling grateful and lucky and inspired, and on the plane, when a stranger announces he is going to use our two-hour layover at the Myrtle Beach airport to swim in the ocean, I join him, sprinting with our backpacks to the water.

(The whole row on this flight is awesome. The 20-year-old next to me is flying to Myrtle to meet this woman he’s been texting for months but has never met in person! I tell him to email me updates.

“IT WENT SUPER WELL!” he writes. “I finally met my girlfriend in person after four months. And it was better than I could have imagined.”

My god, and we just get to live like this.)

Wesleyan/alum 🙁 friends on my stopover in Minneapolis. Henry Owens is also at the ballgame but for the life of me I can’t find the photo with you in it. I’m deeply sorry.

I have ten days at home, which is oh-so lovely. In between the dentist appointments and doctor’s visits that mark adult returns home (that’s a lie, I haven’t had a physical in years, but I eat, like, so many bananas so I think it’s okay), I spend SO MUCH time outside, rafting and running and swimming and not wearing any shoes at all. It’s just what I needed.

Everyone has moved into their senior houses, and everyone’s giving house tours, and we’re all playing pretend for a little while. (“How old is still acceptable to have posters on your bedroom walls?” a friend asks.) I’m living with the frisbee team boys, and I also have questions about our decor choices, but I think I gave up some autonomy when I chose to live with people with names such as Brick, Bronco, Mango, Dash, JR. It is also quite a lot of fun to live with people with names such as Brick, Bronco, Mango, Dash, JR.

Our guest book makes me happy

It’s bonkers to watch the freshman walk around. 

“Were we that young??” I ask a friend.

“No,” he says, “we couldn’t have been. I knew other people that young, but not us.”

Are we still?

Recently, I’ve been feeling like I’ve come to a deep peace with Wesleyan — the place and people and professors, myself. There’s a sense of wholeness on campus I haven’t always felt, a deep comfort and calm that we’re here now, maybe newly aware that we’ll be there then soon, but not too soon. This is so much fun and full and busy, and I’m back using Gcals, and my god we haven’t really even started classes yet.

“Enjoy the fruits of your labor,” someone jokes. But really, that’s what it feels like — that you put in all this work and reflection and growth over these three years and then you get one freebie. 

Scavenged fruit!

Thomas