Just came back from a very short weekend on the Slope, Ithaca, NY.
Sadly, I realized-- I'm just too old for this stuff.
The gorges, the quad, the lake, the slightly-too-well-cared-for-flowers, everything was the same. And yes, I loved being back in collegetown, ordering late night food from campusfood.com, drinking beer at the nines, staying up till the sunrise talking about random thoughts. And yes, the weather was gorgeous, cool breeze, beautiful sunshine and crisp, clean air. The Pussycat Dolls were above awesomeness, I mean those girls can sing and dance! Everything about Ithaca was so much home and it was great to be back with people I have lived with and cared for, my family away from family.
Yet, I realized, more deeply in my core, that my college days are over.
My innocence had died during my past year away from the ivory tower.
I was no longer one of them, these carefree dreamers that have nothing but the rose tinted future ahead of them, free from exams, free from classes... until the start of finals.
Yes, what the upperclassmen had told me was true, college really is the best time of your life. And that Ithaca is absolutely gorges.
And I felt Cornell becoming so much more alien to me than it had ever been before.
Maybe that's why the first thing this morning, I went to Olin library, to the Asian language collection. When I was moving out last year, I had donated a couple Korean books to the library. I had noticed that a lot of the books in our library had the donator's name inscribed by Cornell on the front. A memoir of who had been there, I had always thought. A small piece of a human being left forever behind the institution we came to love. After some tedious browsing through stacks and stacks of dust covered paper, I finally found my book, picked it up, and turned to the first page.
But nothing was there. Just a new call number written on the front page, with a Cornell University Library stamp. There I was, rejected and forgotten. So I was unable to leave even my name in a book before leaving this place. What was I even doing here.
And then I came across some of the class of 09 members on the street. They asked me why I had not come to say hi at church graduation ceremony. One of them told me that a graduating senior had told the church members that his most memorable memory at Cornell was when he went to Washington DC for a mission trip that I had lead during spring break. I talked to a ChemE 09 girl who was my mentee during her freshman year, and realized, she actually lived the college experience I had truly tried to inspire in her during that time. A few girls remembered my short pieces that I have written for the church magazine and told me how they missed it. And Anthony, my goldfish that kept me sane during my hectic senior year, was still alive and well and a favorite amongst the fellowship.
I have fought vanity all my life, fighting against working hard to be recognized, just doing good because it is good; but sometimes that fight is just to difficult in a world like today, where success depends on self-promotion, and where absolute good rarely wins over absolute evil. Sometimes, you just need that pat on the back, the scratch behind your ears, you do crave for some selfish spotlight. And those brief, unplanned conversations were exactly that. Who cares if I could not leave a name in the library collection, who cares if I no longer can be a drunk college kid again. I left a legacy here, a piece of myself behind. Oftentimes I have felt so alienated by the inspiration I received from my own upperclassmen and the lack I felt of my inspiring the people who came after me. But now I realized, there are people who remember me. There are people who will remember me, as I remember the people before me, and a little piece of me will still remain on the Hill. I can never be completely severed from my alma mater, because I have made a difference somewhere, in someone's memory. So it is true, as my fond Cornell teddy bear declares, someone at Cornell loves me, until the last day Cornell remains the educational institution of choice.
I guess life continues on like this. Life is a journey, as we all say, because traveling always brings new enlightenment. Perhaps one day I will come to miss Houston as well, and the relationships that I have twined in this foreign southwestern state. Because there is just no way you can severe memories from someone else you have influenced, even if you yourself had forgot how much you cared. Just as I will always remember the memories of the people who came before me, and how much they had cared for me.
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