Ruminations

Over the summer, I read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I picked it up more out of an interest to read about her "descent into madness" and less out of a desire to read a feminist manifesto, and it was fairly fascinating.

In some ways, her depiction of the character's feelings - the feeling of being "inside the bell jar" really resonated with a lot of the frustration I've felt...struggling for breath in a place that felt stifling, foreign, and unreal. I really don't believe that I am or have been "depressed" (or am or have descended quite so far into madness as she did), but sometimes there's still that....feeling.

I've been feeling a bit of that lately, but I think it's mostly normal.

Little things have been taking on big meanings recently. Tonight I was in Brian's apartment and his roommate was baking bananna bread, and it smelled just like my mom's. And for a second, I just had this horrible aching need to be back home, with my parents, in high school or middle school, working through a calc assignment or watching football on tv, or something just wonderfully normal and routine. It made me wonder how long it'll be until I'm in a place that feels truly comfortable again...

Over the summer I discovered (or just admitted to myself) that I'm quite right-brained. That's having some interesting consequences this year...it's getting to the point where the more I realize it, the more I indulge it. I've never really really liked routines - in elementary school, I hated starting fifth grade because we had a big schedule posted on the wall and it meant that the same things always came in the same order, and there was never any chance for some variety. It was awful. Seriously. Traumatic.

In the same way, now I'm struggling with things like cooking on a regular schedule, or joining organizations this year because I don't want to be so "tied down" to the same chunks of time every week...in a lot of ways, that's good though, because it's compelling me to find the things that actually interest me, things I'll look forward to doing, and I'm learning how to find the situations and arrangements that really work with my personality. I've started to think about things like appreciating the distinction between needing a commitment or confirmation, and needing a structure. I'm learning what it is to do things that I enjoy and can do well in (and balancing those with my values and work ethic...) instead of worrying so much about what I "should" be doing.

In some ways it's scary, and I think it's causing a bit of the alienation I'm feeling right now. There's this ideal, especially at CMU, where in order to "succeed" you have to get good grades, "network" incessantly with peers and mentors and faculty, "participate in extracurriculars" to be broadened, "develop leadership skills"...and it just seems like a fairly strenuous rubrik to get through - and unless I'm doing things I actually really enjoy, I tend to resent all the hours spent just "building the future". (I know, the answer is to find people/mentors/organizations that I enjoy, and then it won't be a pain. But what about if I enjoy being by myself? Reading books? Exploring places on my own? Going to church? Cooking? Those don't fit on a resume, but they're who I am...)

Obviously, it's also leading to a lot of satisfaction that I haven't felt before. I'm taking two "soft" classes - American Foreign Policy and Russian History (tzars). It's really, really, really, good for me to have a lot of material to read, mull over, research, and analyze. The foreign policy class has some issues that I actually care about, but I think I'd be about as happy in any history class as I am in the Russian one. It's such a joy to hear about people, cultures, interactions, conquests, adaptations and to actually think about them...after doing so much mathy stuff last year (oh yeah, all mathy stuff, all year).

My "hard" classes are really enjoyable too, though. The computer science class I'm taking teaches a functional programming language...so ideas and thoughts are expressed really abstractly, like mathematical functions instead of as procedures that get executed. It's completely fascinating because it allows so many nice ways to express *things* for a person who perhaps lacks the organizational skill to write really robust C or C++. My intro to networks class is just plain interesting (and I'm going to get to brush up those C/C++ skills, evidently. We learn socket programming next week! w00t). I think the only class that I'm lukewarm about is Signals & Systems...I'm not sure that I'm up for a bunch of calculus and MATLAB, after having burned out on that subject matter after 202 last semester, but I'm hoping to still get something out of it.

So...I'm in a strange funk right now, and hopefully I'll snap out of it soon. Things are good, and weird, and scary, and hard, and happy, and sad, and confusing, and changing, and familiar, all at once. Argh!