The calm before the storm

I've taken to doing my reading and studying in the school libraries and even in Media Union (abode of the engineers) on north campus. This past week, I spent several hours each time at the Grad Library and the UGLI (Undergraduate Library). Rather productive, I must say, since there aren't any comfy futons or computers (read: Internet) to distract me. The last time I made like a good student in the library was when Lin Kiat and I were still hmm...keeping each other company, I suppose. We weren't dating, we were just hanging out as neighbors who got on well. That was in 1998, I believe.

Anyhoo, the libraries are especially empty and peaceful this week. The storm of university students hasn't arrived on campus. They're all in the midst of moving in and settling other businesses. Classes haven't started, after all. It's only procrastinating graduate students like myself who are buckling down to work two weeks before term begins.

I drove by the dorms on central campus and it was very nice to watch the people settling in. Moving vans, parents' cars, international students checking out each others' new cars. The excitement does rub off on you. Going past my old dorm, Stockwell Hall, an all-girls dorm, I fondly recalled the day I first moved into my wee little room. That was seven years ago! Next door to me was a nursing student who played the clarinet, and to my left roomed a music student, a cellist. Next to the cellist was a Vietnamese-American girl who got assaulted in her room one night. I remember being asleep and waking up to her screaming and then some sounds of a struggle. It was some fellow spending the night who got a little too far, I believe. Hmm, I meant to reminsce on happier moments. I did make friends with a girl who first introduced me to the movie, Strictly Ballroom. She'd borrowed the video from the hall library and watched it and promptly told me that Paul Mercurio was hot stuff. It took me six years to watch it (I seem to take a long time to act on people's recommendations - three years before I watched My Sassy Girl!) and well, I did like the movie very much after picking it up at Blockbuster last fall. Definitely one for my home library.

Sadly, I've lost touch with the friends I made in my hall. One girl who lived down the corridor, a Singaporean girl, tragically passed away a year and a half ago. Another friend, Jenny, a Shanghainese-American girl, used to converse with me in Mandarin and invited me to visit with her family in New York City where they own a Chinese restaurant. I never went. I've even lost contact with another friend, Renee, whose home in Ohio I did visit one spring. That was where I got to hold a real gun for the first time - a Magnum. Her father showed me the gun closet - literally filled with guns. Her grandmother asked me what I thought of Clinton. They were Republicans, of course. Renee's dad wanted to take me to a target practice session, but there was no time as her twin brothers (whopping giants who stood at 6'5") were graduating that weekend. Alas, I never returned to enjoy the promised target practice - shooting cans on a fence. This year at the writers' conference in Chicago, I did miraculously bump into another friend Lara, who was friends with me and Renee. She's doing an MFA in creative non-fiction in Ohio. We didn't get to talk long but we did exchange emails (I should write her soon). Lara is Lebanese-American, and both she and Renee, had been a little anti-Semitic, as they'd once confessed to me. That had been two years before 9/11.

Every year, new students arrive and forge friendships. Some are steadfast, others dissolve. The dynamic social system in universities never ceases to amaze me. Some people stay in touch with professors for long years, others can't wait to be done with course evaluations. Speaking of courses, I hunted for my classroom a few days ago. It's situated in Mason Hall. Rather small, which I like (I don't have to raise my voice), with a blackboard that's clean and all ready to be desecrated by my horrific handwriting. Life is going to be pretty exciting over the next few weeks. The cycle begins again. Welcome back, students (and instructors)!

Posted by Monoceros at August 27, 2004 2:49 PM