Thursday, May 1, 2008

Graduation and Saying Bye

Wow, so many things have happened since I last blogged. There are so many things in my head, now that I have the time. They will be blogged about, all in due time. I graduated on Saturday with my B.S. in biology. Graduation day was rather cold, but at least it didn't rain. There were so many graduates! It was pretty cool to see just how big my graduating class was, with everyone wearing the tassels of their corresponding school or field. I was a golden science tassel surrounded in a sea of white fine arts tassels.

Despite being happy at graduating, excited about "being done," and completely addled by the sheerness of it all, it wasn't all too thrilling. I must say, when one of the people addressing us said "You're done with studying," I turned to my friend next to me and said "Well, really it's only a temporary break from more studying for many of us." I didn't much like the student speaker and the guest speaker too much. I must admit, being a science major, a small corner of my heart was bitter. Both speakers mentioned things like Dance Marathon, Alternative Spring Break, various volunteering and community service, but didn't say a word about student research. And there's a lot of research going on in all fields. For some reason, I feel like all the countless hours I spent researching various things was being downplayed. I had a hand in (albeit, very small) hypertension, breast cancer, neurofibromatosis, and human genetic deafness research. It feels strange that some other groups get such publicity and praise, whereas I (or shall I say "we") get little/no recognition at large.

For this reason, I also couldn't much relate to neither the student nor the guest speaker. The student speaker was some fine arts major and the guest speaker was a journalist - who apparently practically got blown up in Iraq, was expected to die, went into a coma, and now made a full recovery. He talked a lot about the Iraq war - something I could hardly relate to. I feel so distanced and removed from it, so tired of it, so annoyed that it gets the attention it does. But no more of that here. That's discussion for another time. All in all, graduation was more successful than I expected, considering it was in a location that graduation had never taken place at before.

On Tuesday, I said my goodbyes to JW-F. It only hit me afterwards that I actually said bye and that I may very well not see her again, or for a really long time. Just before our goodbyes, we had to have bubble tea together for the last time. And of course, we reminisced all the way back to freshman year . . .

How we met is still such a great story. I was in my dorm room playing my cello. JW-F, who then lived on the same floor as me, walked by my room to get her laundry (which was right next to my room). She stopped at the closed door and just listened for a while. She was too shy to knock. So, she went on to facebook and looked me up by the room number I listed. At the time, facebook was still brand new. I was wondering who the heck this person was. Upon seeing it was a fellow cellist, I responded. The next day, she stopped by and said "hi." And we talked about the cello for a while. We sometimes waved to each other down the hall.

I remember one other time when practically everyone in the hall had gone to a football game. At the time, neither of us had tickets and neither of us had TVs. So we had really no means of watching the game anyway, even if we had wanted to. So, I took my cello and went to her room. For about 2 hours or so, we played cello duet music.

We also reminisced about our time with other friends in the dorms, how we got to know them, and each other's peculiarities. There are some memories that I'm almost surprised I remember still even after all these years. For example, I knew the first names of every guy who lived in my immediate hall and which rooms they were in. A fairly impressive feat I think.

It's hard to think that I, too, will soon leave this city. Fortunately, I still have a little bit of time yet.

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