Everything Under the Sun

April | College Years and Friendship |   Week 15 | 4/16/2023 Talk about junior year of college For most of our life, January 1st to December 31st is considered a year. But in our adolescence and young adulthood, the "year" is more accurately defined in the context of the school year, summer to summer. This parameter, set some generations ago (probably for farming reasons), gives structure to our pre-career lives. I know this to be true both anecdotally and personally - it is how I've catalogued and remember the events of the my life prior to leaving college, and I've confirmed this to be true for others. I've yet to find much commonality however, with my peers on the way in which my brain categorizes time periods thematically - years of growth, years of suffering, years of progress, of exploration, of rebirth. I see this tendency as perpendicular to my particularly strong, natural inclination towards nostalgia. And while this pairing can occasionally create diffic...

April | College Years and Friendship |   Week 14 | 4/9/2023 Talk about sophomore year of college Sophomore Year of college could best be compared to a fly-over state like Nebraska or Kansas, something you pass on your way to the final destination, at first appearing to be lacking in excitement and intrigue but actually a rich time and place, full of dichotomization and dynamism. It's most pertinent to recall that year chronologically, from Summer 2015 to Summer 2016, because of the uncanny sinodial-modulation-like path that the year followed, in which the highs were high and the lows were low.  In Summer 2015, I moved to the apartment that my brother had been living in his final year, which had a few months left on the lease. I'd decided to remain in Gainesville to pursue some coursework relevant to my medical school ambitions. Sam moved in with me for the first month - a major high. The dichotomization of dormitory on-campus living with a two-story apartment in downtown was q...

April | College Years and Friendship |   Week 13 | 4/2/2023 Talk about freshman year of college   It's easy to achieve inconspicuity inside the entropy of a major university. The inhabitants of dorm common areas and lecture halls could at any time number in the dozens. Each person arrives on Day 1, containing a mixture of ambition and trepidation, and the institution itself becomes a competitive arena more than a cooperative of endeavors. Every individual hurriedly scrambles to find their place in a group, to carve out some niche in which they too can achieve belonging and maybe success - attempting to tip internal scales towards ambition and away from trepidation. We're social creatures and our greatest fear is isolation. Believe me, one can be isolated, if not physically, psychologically all the same. My freshman year was the beginning of a long and arduous journey, in which the relics of my past grounded me with slightly too heavy weights, but ultimately culminated in a des...