Sorry for the rather ridiculous delay between posts. I am in Santa Cruz now, visiting my [grand]mother, and so, of course, school has ended. What to say?

Well, my courses for next quarter are in place, and should all be great. Math, humanities and social sciences core all carry over with new professors. The profs for the first two have good reputations, and for the third I changed sections (along with a friend) to the class of a likely terrific anthropologist Prof. Mazzarella. I added drama for art core, which sounds promising, and to fulfill a somewhat less exciting requirement, added a social dance class, about which I know nothing.

Finals were manageable: two papers – one long and book-reportish, the other less so – and two exams. I was satisfied with all of them, but can’t really predict grades at this point.
One dandilly ambiguous personal situation, a few friends’ birthdays, some new bands, countless teacups and a quiet last day later, I made it home. I am intensely tired, and not for lack of sleep, and most of my friends are gone or in finals, but it is nice to be back and have a chance to reconnect and eat some real produce.

I took a trip to the Reg’s special collections research center to kill some post-finals down time, and with the help of Bryce Lanham, I found out a few interesting things about the dorm. I apologize in advance, you probably don’t care.

Anyway, some trivia:

Snell and Hitchcock were both built as men’s dormitories, and both were used for that purpose at least through the fifties. Despite this, Snell holds the record of oldest women’s dormitory in a co-ed college. The University’s first women’s dorm complex – Foster/Kelley/Green/Beecher – was not ready in time, so for the spring quarter of 1893 Snell was assigned to women before becoming the next fall “a center of university life for the men of the colleges” (Goodspeed, A History of the University of Chicago 1891-1916).

Hitchcock (as well as B-J) allowed graduate students until the sixties.

Snell and Hitchcock, as well as most of the older buildings on campus, are held up by their stone walls, which is why they are so thick.

Both dorms were renovated in 1972-3, this renovation included:

• Replacing the section I and V stairways, and moving the section I stairway south, to meet fire code.
• Renovating the bathrooms.
• Rearranging some walls in the upper two floors of sections I and V to create access to the fire escapes.
• Replacing most of the dorm’s plumbing and wiring.
• Closing the chimneys for the inner-section fireplaces.
• Adding those annoying door-closing pistons to the inner section rooms.

This was supposed to draw “20 more years of useful life out of the aging dorms.” By comparison, Woodward courts (now the GSB) barely lasted 50 years, and rumor has it Max P. is not intended to last more than half that.

There were several more major changes intended that were never funded, including:

• Creating horizontal links between sections and buildings by cutting hallways through the inner sections (thus turning most of the doubles into singles) and connecting Hitchcock to Snell on each floor.
• Building a loading dock and bike entrance where the Hitchcock kitchen now is.
• Building a common mailroom and front desk for the two buildings at the base of section I, and giving Snell a second floor porch in the process.
• Giving Snell a third-floor study lounge (directly above the tea room).

There was even talk in the early seventies, which never made it to blueprints, of dividing section III in half, connecting the rest of the sections, and turning Hitchcock into two sections, each of which would be a separate house.

A few points

The last 36 hours have been complicated: a roommate's medical emergency (on the mend), and a rattling murder in the university. I am doing fine, but this is just an odd place to be.

In better news, the great debate is tomorrow, Plato’s “Symposium” is amusingly strange, among other things, and coffee, tea, chocolate and curries abound gloriously. I have too much to read outside of classes, and this is the ideal state of things.

one more thing...

the people I’ve met here, by in large, have some single thing above all that they can do. Not to the detriment of anything else about them, I just found out that of the friends I’ve made, one has published scientific research more than once, another wrote a novella, or something along those lines, and reviews professionally, and another is on the search committee for Chicago’s next archbishop. Some take better pictures than I do, or make better tea, not that either of those is a feat of greatness. Most of them play an instrument well, and a sport.

I can’t think of anything like that for myself.
But I think that, at least for today, and at least for this year or these few years, that this is something that I can get used to.

I am doing well here, and I am genuinely content. And right now, that is enough.

[By the way, I realized ofter writing this that I read something last week by a friend saying something phrased similarly. This has been bouncing around in my head for a while, though, and isn't an intentional response.]

Packed Days

Yesterday and today:

Four classes
Go
A quiz
The drinking of tea
An experimental wind instrument concert
A paper
A bestselling author
Homemade cinnamon rolls
An antique telescope on the roof of my math classroom, and the ISS
Someone's travel photos from Iran
Plotting for Scav
Proofs and a class on proofs
Zany house meeting
Reading on the grass

thoughts on walking to Crerar

the rain
the grey woolen blanket of air
and the trees and the stones
quietly worn away,
slowly
as they were meant to
drop
by
drop.

it feels like the best days at Ishibashi or Awara.

and the beauty of the sad silence
the silence that gracefully accepts any sound trying to pierce it
and lets it pass through
as if it were nothing.
the joy, the complete overflowing contentment of the silence
of the stones
and of the rain
and of the blanket of air
all makes me want to cry
and embrace every inch
and let it pass through
as if it were everything.

Move-In

The last couple of days have been much less busy. Aside from the PE/Swim test, and a slightly underwhelming Aims of Education address, it has been downtime. Again, good people. Scav sounds amazing.

Today the returning students are starting to trickle in, including my roomate. All good so far. He has a crazy beard, and geta.

Speaking of the PE test, I have to take one quarter of something. Yoga, Pilates, Archery or (in the winter) Social Dance.

Classes

Honors Calculus: Proving everything. The professor is notoriously hard in the best possible way.
Human Being and Citizen: Largely classics lit seminar with a philosophic bent.
Self, Culture and Society: Intro to the social sciences via texts on these three things.
Accelerated Core Biology: Getting a requirement out of the way, though it does not sound bad. Oddly, with no bio background, I placed into accel.

More

Information. Indian food downtown. Information. People. Placement tests. Cheery old songs about nuclear experiments in and near the dorm. All goes fine.

I am working to find an exact class schedule. Wish me luck.

Day One

There are pictures, but not enough to be worth posting at the moment.

So it went well. The O-Aides (upperclassmen in the house back early to help) were ridiculously helpful (one arranged a technically unavailable shuttle to get my stuff here), and when move-ins were done, just really interesting people. The first years are cool too. Good people, and from wandering campus a bit, the reputation of Snell-Hitchcock (where I am) of being the eccentric, geeky and insular part of an eccentric, geeky and insular university is quite noticeable.

The room (and a half) is good. I am not sure how to set it up, since it is large enough (very close in size and layout of the dining room and back room at home) to have plenty of options, and my room mate hasn't said much. Things are definitely beat up, but most of the furniture, and all of the copious molding is well-cut old hardwood. The upper panes of the windows are elaborate pentagons.

By the way, ivy? My three east windows are all half-covered by it, and face a building that is equally furry. The north window has a view of the odd blocky Reg library, mostly blocked by trees.

The building is a ridiculous maze. To get from here to most other rooms involves going through the basement kitchen. Getting back involves a cloister on the first floor and a whole other set of stairs.

The non-house events opening day were a bit ridiculous. Aside from my ID (so-so photo, no retakes ever, even if you stay for grad school) and test appointments, I got pounds of what is essentially trade show swag (University IT logo flash drive...), and about three hundred pages of coupons, maps and information, on top of the hundred already sent. We will get more.

The food is edible. There are burritos.

It is early here.

9 hours to go

Expect me to post less often as things start to happen. I move in in 9 hours. Since I am staying across campus, a taxi would be silly, but since it is about five blocks, I'll need to go in advance and borrow a dolly to get my stuff there. Wish me luck.

Oh, and I am buying a used fridge from a graduate in Hyde Park the same morning... and buying a bike, and having my ID made.

Today was tired and sore, punctuated by good tea and a concert with fellow 11ers at the surreal Pritzker Pavillion.

Chicago

Chicago
Originally uploaded by kodama (home)

The pictures are up. Click for my flickr stream.

The First Day

I am in Chicago. The flight went well, but getting to my lodging was made a bit tricky by a broken (big) suitcase wheel and a five block walk.

The architecture is mind boggling. The campus is completely stunning, as is the river downtown. The neighborhood seems very friendly.

No pictures now, as I am still looking for my camera cable. If I don't find it, I mapped out a handy CompUSA.

I am planning my next 48 hours, so more later.

It isn't called procrastination if you don't have anything you should be doing...

I am at work doing two things, waiting for a phone call that shouldn't come for several hours, and (theoretically) training someone to do something that they already know how to do, while she does more important things upstairs.

What do I do with this time then? Sadly, a fair bit of it is spent reading the official and facebook-based forums for the incoming UChicago class. There is little left to talk about that can't be better dealt with in person, in Chicago, but the buzz of anticipation is too strong for that to matter.

I haven't been sleeping as well this last week either. It is the same insomnia and nervous energy I get before any trip, but a bit stronger. I am only now starting to get a bit nervous, but not about any of the standard things... weather, workload, room mate.

I think I am just worried that I am expecting impossibly much of the place.

By the way, the Berlin photos are online. Paris should be too before I fly.

Work is winding down. I am training people that are not enthusiastic to be trained, and unsurprisingly, they are finding many excuses to keep busy with other things. I appreciate the extra time though, since other web design jobs are keeping me busy during my time at home.

My things are on their way to 60637, and I will be, alone, in seven days. I'll be staying at a guest house on campus in the Int'l House dorm building for a few days before I move in on the 15th, and wandering. I am happy to hear that there is a very large South Indian enclave in the North Side.

I am still thinking about classes, but more or less resigned to have everything redone by an advisor when I get there.

Current thoughts:

Any Humanities class but Philosophy or Media Aesthetics.

Any Social Science class but Mind or Classics.

General Chemistry (my roommate is a Chem major, at least nominally).

Whatever math I place into, probably Calc or Honors Calc.

I just got back from Georgia last night. It was interesting. Not fun, just interesting. I guess I prefer the latter though.

To sum it up, my dad won two weeks at a parent’s summer house on a lake in the Blue Ridge of northern Georgia from an auction at my little sister’s school. I opted to go only for the second week, citing work, and a general apathy towards travel as my consciousness drifts back home from the big trip. Margie, my stepmother Jan’s mother, had planned to come, but a wave of major (but they say not life-threatening) unexplained blood pressure fluctuations kept her home.

The food was breaded and deep fried tan paste, without exception. Trucks were abandoned in every driveway two-by-two. A heat wave neatly bracketed our time there. The local newspaper read as if written by ten-year-olds. My younger sister Lee’s anxiety skyrocketed with the strange surroundings, leaving everyone snippy.

The only thing pleasant about the whole thing was the warm and very floatable-in lake.
In other news, O-Week (Orientation at UChicago) is finally feeling within reach. I am packing warm and soft and steepable and go-like things into boxes and lining up luggage to take with me. I am quietly reading the forums and catalogs more than ever.

My mother says that she will come with me for my first few days in the city of Chicago (from 9/12) and the opening of school (9/15), and has tickets, but with her health, dogs, housing, companions and finances all uncertain at best, she and my social-worker-deluxe grandmother are struggling to put things together faster than they fall apart. She may not come.