On Fall Break

Fall Break (noun): the act of coming home, the dissipation of eleutheromania as the familiar trees reappear in your eyeline; thinking that the road not taken looks really good right about now; eating until your stomach hurts and your pants don't fit; your first peaceful sunset in six weeks.

When I visited Dartmouth's campus last year, I was paired with a student-buddy Rachel, who walked me through all the dining halls and took me to her Engineering class. As we walked, she looked warmly at my parents and told me earnestly, "your parents love you a lot, to drive twelve hours to Hanover, New Hampshire to see whether you vibe with Dartmouth." Her nose crinkled as she said 'vibe with', as though the concept wasn't all I had thought about for the past six months. I rolled my eyes and responded with some off-hand joke about how they really just want to be rid of me, but this semester, I've been able to witness how right Rachel was. They drive eight hours to Pittsburgh and back frequently, wandering around campus with me and pretending to be excited by the (quite boring) Gates Building and Tepper Quad. They book a hotel so we can catch the Drama School's production of A Doll's House, and my mother regales my father and I with stories of Gabriel Macht's (of the Suits variety) time at Carnegie. As I'm going to delve into, I've become the most nihilistic version of myself in this past half-semester -- education and work seems to stretch far beyond my capacity for it in a way it never has before; but I've never resented the Asian American experience or relationship with education, because when my mother jokes about kissing the ground in front of the computer science building, how can I not laugh? I'm lucky enough to have been raised in a household where knowledge wasn't something to obtain or hold, but rather acquire then gift away. To sit in a classroom is a blessing, no matter what else may be true in tandem with this fact.

Nonetheless, I must confess -- this week off from classes, clubs, and the general grinding gears of college was appreciated beyond words. I slept sixteen hour days and ghosted my research mentor's emails. I met with my old high school friends and was reminded that social events aren't inherently draining, the way they've felt so many times in the past two months. Rather, they can fill the bottomless pit in my soul, feeding into our collective need to be understood. In college, surrounded by people I didn't know enough to love yet, I grew keenly aware of how grand a goal understanding is -- the concept of being understood became so incomprehensibly large and murky that it started to seem like the singular thing humans spend their entire lives searching for. I forgot that it was possible for me, sitting on a couch at Aritzia, to feel understood. Just like that. 

And then I traveled down to Ann Arbor, where I lined up meetings with my other high school friends like dominoes, then spent the entire day knocking them down with glee. It felt like living an alternate timeline -- this is what my life could've been, had I chosen it. I could've found Parnika every morning and eaten quesadillas on her bed while gossiping about girls we barely knew. I could've made my sister buy me mango smoothies every weekend and embarrassed myself in front of all her friends. I could've wandered between State Street and the Quad, and maybe even developed a sense of spatial awareness. For someone who had been so desperate to leave the state not six months ago, that life now has a certain Gilmore Girls-esque appeal to it... a small town, obscene loyalty to a sports team I don't follow, friends that feel like silence. Such is life, and our tendency to romanticize that which we do not have. 

My sister, in her final year of college, has become the most spontaneous version of herself. She goes cold-diving in the river at early morning hours and jokes about how much money she makes and takes midterm exams without studying. (Maybe this doesn't sound adventurous to you, but honestly, I think my mother is three days away from staging an intervention about her "rebellious phase".) To that end, she booked us a trip to Tampa, Florida on a whim, so on Friday morning, off I went. Allow me to utilize a bulleted list to connect all the constant, random musings I had during this ephemeral endless vacation:

1. Floridians are wonderful, probably mostly because they live in such close proximity to the beach. I don't think it's possible to be angry about anything when you have such easy access to the most beautiful sight in the world, though Ron DeSantis certainly serves as a counterexample to that point. But I digress -- as we got lost (several times) and struggled (quite hard) to figure out the public transportation system (yet remained determined not to waste money on Ubers), random women with giant tote bag purses gave us directions and walked us part way to our destination. When we wandered into a Trader Joe's to buy mango juice, the college-aged boy working the register told us how to use the HART bus to get to downtown St. Petersburg. Our taxi to the airport came with scintillating conversation about how Vogue named Tampa International Airport is the best in the country (though it has nothing on DTW, in my opinion...). 

2. But more than general southern hospitality -- Floridians are so carefree that instead of work, they find themselves at taco trucks and The Container Store at 3pm on Friday. They wear shorts and flip-flops in October, which logically makes sense but still feels illegal to two girls who grew up shoving snow-pants into giant backpacks every morning. There's this lyric in Homesick by Noah Kahan that goes "I am mean because I grew up in New England". The first time I heard it, I had to pause the song to let those words settle into my skin -- I didn't grow up in New England, but being raised in the cold is such a fundamental feature of my personhood I almost didn't realize it was a universal experience until I heard the thought voiced. At Carnegie, we always joke that one can immediately tell when somebody is from California or the east coast, but the punchline doesn't land about Midwesterners -- something about this fact makes me want to gatekeep Michigan, keep it a hush-hush that it's the best place in the world to grow up, lest everybody find out and crowd the street I was born on. 

3. Sitting on the beach, I decided to pick up Either/Or by Elif Batuman. Have you ever read a novel that feels like fate? Like, this book isn't a new favorite, and frankly at times I found it pretentious beyond words, yet somehow I know my life will be framed by things this book has taught me. The review on the back-flap says, "Batuman has a gift for making the universe seem, somehow, like the benevolent and witty literary seminar you wish it were...This novel wins you over in a million micro-observations." And that's exactly how I felt. 

The novel follows a character navigating sophomore year at Harvard, while she romanticizes and deprecates her live through the lens of the novels she's reading in class. I felt like I was romanticizing my life alongside her, giving this novel a certain meta-quality I'm sure Zuckerberg aspired to when he changed Facebook's name. There are a thousand small paragraphs I could pick out and analyze, but one sticks out to me -- 

"Adults acted as though trying to go anywhere or achieve anything was a frivolous dream, a luxury, compared to the real work of having kids and making money to pay for the kids. Nobody ever explained what was admirable about having the kids, or why it was the default course of action for every single human being. If you ever asked why any particular person had a kid, or what good a particular kid was, people treated it as a blasphemy -- as if you were saying that they should be dead, or the kid should be dead. It was as though there was no way to ask what the plan had been without implying that someone should be dead."

There is a distinct possibility that this paragraph will seem like any other paragraph you've ever read. There is even a possibility you may be offended by it -- of course having kids is important, I can hear some Bible-loving suburban mother arguing. We were put on this planet to procreate! To which I say: I actually want nothing more than to be a mother. And to be rich, frankly. I just happened to read this paragraph at a time when it was first beginning to register that this -- work, work, work -- is what I'm signing up to do forever. Work I enjoy, yes. Work I get paid more than I deserve to do, hopefully. Work that is relatively painless compared to everything else I could be doing, certainly. But work. 

My sister, talking about her investment-banker lifestyle, once told me that "I don't believe in a work-life balance. 'Life' isn't the thing that is happening when you're not working -- life is happening all the time, including when you're working." It's a fascinating take; she's not suggesting that we don't drink matcha lattes and do yoga before sunrise to soothe our inner children, just that those things are as much a part of life as work is -- that there is nothing to balance, because it all exists on the same plane. I've thought about that a lot, recently, if only because my life has begun to feel consumed by the kind of work that exhausts me. People like Elon Musk don't get rich thinking they balance, or something like that. But then again, what is Elon Musk doing that is so great? I hate him, actually. Money is pointless, actually. Kids are pointless, actually. 

All this to say -- embrace the aesthetic life over the ethical, responsible one. Nihilism has the same undertones of dark academia, if you think about it. Kirkegaard and Batuman are right: of everything humans do, work is absolutely the most boring and also the thing we spend the most time doing.

4. I wonder what my life would look like if viewed through the lens of books I've read at certain phases in my life. Maybe that should be my goal for 2024 -- not to read 100 books, as has been my goal since freshman year, but to read only (mostly) books that are decidedly life-changing. We change a million little times, you know? We never wake up and realize, holy moly I'm so much different than I was, but at some point diverge so wholly from who we were that our past selves wouldn't be able to recognize our future selves in a mirror. It's borderline surreal, how life works out: the things we want come true only when we don't want them anymore. It seems almost like a Greek myth, the paradoxical way we inherit blessings and curses. 

It's this I think about as I click submit on five more job applications: which infinitesimal decision that I made yesterday will change me forever. Which step in my path turns out to be a fork, because for some reason we never think to look down and see as we move. Only after. 

And just like that, I find myself back in Troy, cleaning up my laundry and buying oatmeal from Trader Joe's to take back to Pittsburgh tomorrow morning. Fall Break is over, and though I spend most of my nights feeling like my soul is split between two cities, I'm starting to realize that maybe that's not a bad thing -- after all, aren't I twice as lucky to have two places where my entire job is to sit and think?