Archive for December 9th, 2008

Listening to (for about the fiftieth time): Love Story by Taylor Swift from the playlist I made for the “Admin” of this site, my mother. She requests popular music from me and then listens to it early in the morning, as she sits at her desk in the dark, in the wee hours, pouring ink onto pages

I write this on the brink of a move, a transfer, and a holiday; in the midst of finals, pre-Christmas preparations, and the winding down of the semester. Upon leaving work, in the circulation department of the campus library, I was greeted by a phone call, telling me to produce a blog “by midnight, preferably three hundred to five hundred words.”

“I’ll get right to it,” I answered, despite the fact that I actually spent almost every hour from noon to eight translating Horace (Latin poetry).

I am tired, but the truth is, I don’t mind writing. Now I have just returned from prayers and am ahead of schedule for studying, a rarity at any time.

So, I shall write about my impending transfer to TCU, which has enabled me to write for this blog as Fort Worth College Girl. I’ve attended Southwestern University this fall, a small (twelve hundred student) liberal arts school in Georgetown, TX, which is about thirty miles north of Austin. I could go into the reasons for leaving, but it boils down to a desire to be on a larger campus, and one that is closer to home.

I made the decision to leave last week, quite late into the semester. It has been weird telling people, as one can imagine. It can be awkward to admit that one is rejecting the school that was previously shared by both the members of a conversation. However, I rummaged up the courage, and, surprisingly to me, the news has been greeted with a fair amount of understanding, and sadness. Being a fiercely independent, loner sort much of the time, I didn’t know I had so many friends. It is a pleasant realization and one I will take with me as I go on, in regard to both the friends here and the ones I will make.

I have received kind letters, and notes on the dry-erase board outside my room by all my hall-mates (organized by my roommate). Groups want to see me before we all leave. It is all quite bewildering – and a little sad. But that is the story of life.

One realization is that this is one of the first choices I have made as an adult, one largely on my own, an idea of my own making and a process maneuvered by myself. These are decisions that make differences. In Memoirs of a Geisha, Chiyo is described as having a personality full of “water” which “flows from place to place quickly and always finds a crack to spill through.” I am not sure if my character is such–though  my eyes are blue, like Chiyo’s–but whether or not, I am flowing along the current of life, and though the decisions are my own, I feel I am floating on the life force of the world, sometimes gliding on a shimmering lake, sometimes playing atop a gurgling creek, and, sometimes rushing along atop a cascading river.