"Only the echos of my mind:" My first college trimester in reflection

"Only the echos of my mind." - "Everybody's Talkin'," Harry Nilsson

After ten briskly-paced weeks, my first trimester of college has come to an end, and I'm left with a month off of formal school (albeit a class over winter break) before kicking off my second trimester in the very early part of January. Since college started, I did very little updating via social media and my film reviews on my experiences because I wanted this blog to take on some kind of significance or importance on its own terms rather than reiterating a plethora of talking points I already mentioned. In this blog, I plan to detail the pros and cons of the first trimester in college, what my schedule looked like, and even cherry-pick quotes and ideas from my previous blog "Swing Straight for the Fence" for my assumptions about college life and see if they materialized or were a product of basic nervousness.

For starters, the first trimester - or even the first year in itself - is a plethora of adjustments. It's adjusting to the campus, the new professors, the hundreds of new faces you see everyday, the buildings, the lack of structure in your formally-structured-to-the-minute schedule, and the rigor of your classes. To remind or inform, I attend North Central College as a commuter student, five days a week this past trimester, so I already didn't have the stressful circumstances of moving in and growing accustomed to everything from a resident's perspective.

My first day of college - September 15, 2014 - was met with nothing but crippling nervousness. I had an enormous stomachache driving my first day, worried about finding my classes, my classmates, the professor, and pretty much every little circumstance I had no control over; even the drive there saw me more nervous than I'd like to admit. My father, when he sees me get so riled and nervous, always told me, "you're gonna have an ulcer and be dead before you're twenty-five at the rate you're going." If you take that like me, that's just one more thing to be nervous about.

About the parking, however, I wrote in "Swing Straight for the Fence," "I'm worried about commuting, finding a parking space in North Central College's small selection of commuter parking lots and trying to park in strictly-timed lots catered more towards the shoppers of downtown Naperville than students at North Central College." With that, I need to say that parking has not been the chore I expected, at least for now. I park in the lot the furthest away from most of my classes, resulting in about a half-mile walk to my courses and the main heart of the campus; I'd walk another mile if I knew I'd get a parking space there everyday with little hassle. The parking has been much better than expected, but there's also the factor that I get there early (no later than 8:30am on most days), so that blessing may become a complaint if I wind up taking later classes (I'm already taking a class from 6:30pm - 10pm this coming spring).

Moreover, my classes were manageable, given this was the prime trimester for adjustments. With speech communications, college algebra, cities and cinema (an English course), and a seven-week-long introductory course, this trimester achieved a nice balance of different fields, and each course entailed a rigor and pace that was easy to keep up with. I gave five speeches in speech communications, on everything from hacktivism to why one should get a flu shot, all of which meriting an A grade. My college algebra course was not half as miserable as I foresaw, with me maintaining a B average and keeping up with the wide variety of mathematical computation. Cities and cinema saw me less pompous than you'd expect, with me often taking a backseat to the discussion and being graced by the evaluation of films like The 400 Blows and Midnight Cowboy, and writing two papers - one on verticality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Spike Jonze's Her and the other on race relations in New York City as detailed by directors Woody Allen and Spike Lee - both of which I consider some of my finest works. Finally, the seven-week-long introductory course was a pleasant way to ease into the shift from high school to college and ask questions that would be difficult to ask in your average, social setting. My classes, surprisingly enough, were enjoyable and didn't make me complain too much.

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday saw me on campus the longest, with speech from 8:00am to 9:10am and no class until 1:20pm, which was college algebra, with my day concluding at 2:30pm. During that four hour period, I'd write reviews, do my math homework, write my essays, eat lunch (pizza and fries from the cafeteria while watching ESPN First Take or a Banquet TV dinner), or simply relaxing in the lounge with some fellow commuters after I achieved some level of comfort. Tuesdays and Thursdays were far more concise, with the former being my day for both cities and cinema and the introductory course and Thursday being solely the cities and cinema course; both days would end no later than 1pm. Needless to say, I had a fairly solid schedule; one that started not too early and didn't run too late. My schedule, my parking habits, and the amount of things to do never really dwindled to nonexistent levels; what did, however, was my level of enjoyment.

For the first few weeks of college, up until week six, I wasn't having much fun. Classes were going well, my grades were all A's, and I was managing time pretty effectively, but there was a cloying emptiness to my daily routine. I had lost the popularity I worked so hard to maintain my senior year in high school, and going from where I knew about one in four people in the hallways on a personal basis to sometimes going a day or two at a time without saying a word outside of the classroom was a rough adjustment. I managed to align with fellow commuters in the proclaimed "commuter lounge," which is the basement of an on campus coffeeshop, where I met some interesting, eclectic souls like myself, who would take up roughly an hour or two of my four hour gap. I hung out there from week five and beyond, but still felt an emptiness; like I'd go to bed that night and have nothing to look forward to the next day other than the movie I had scheduled to watch in the evening.

And then I met Joann and that was almost the end of that.

On October 27th, I was in the commuter lounge with two other close friends, Sarah and Désury, sitting and eating, while I was flipping through channels on the TV, deciding between Do the Right Thing, Little Miss Sunshine, or a rerun of NHL Tonight. I'm flipping through the channels indecisively, mumbling Do the Right Thing quotes to myself, as, at that time, I was writing my paper on the film, and down the stairs walks a petite but undeniably beautiful woman, predictably my age, in a black floral dress and a beige cardigan. I muster the only marginally witty thing I can say, "pay no mind to the guy with the mullet flipping TV channels." "Oh, I don't care, put on whatever you want," she replies. Conversation began; I asked her name, her major, where she was from, and all the basics before I finally found myself settling on Little Miss Sunshine after a moment's contemplation, and to her liking. Her name was Joann and she was from nearby, studying athletic training and commuting five days a week, like myself. From there on out, I found myself engaging in one of the most thoughtful and meaningful conversations since high school, with a young woman nonetheless. I felt privileged, but there was little time to be self-critical and in awe (that was for the car ride home, believe me).

Joann and I are talked for two and a half hours, divulging details from our upbringings, to our parents' relationship and our relationship with our parents, her past relationships, and our personal histories. Whenever she'd take a bathroom break, I was given wonderful insight by my aforementioned friends. "She's so into you, dude," my friend Sarah, a religious studies major, claims, "don't fuck this up." "I'll find a way," I simply replied. "You two are so cute, keep it up," Désury added, referring to me colloquially as her "little brother," a nickname I coined for her. Following that day, we talked for another hour and a half, and were calling and texting each other throughout the remainder of the week. To this day, I can't remember a day since we met that we went without at least basic conversation.

While not we're not yet (if ever) going to formally date, I can say without a doubt this is the most significant and important relationship I've ever had with a female in my life. It feels like a replication of Andrew Haigh's film Weekend, about two gay men who meet each other randomly and find themselves stricken by the very presence of one another so much so that they divulge details they would otherwise save for months after knowing each other. Not Joann and I; in a little over a month, we have had a friendship that should've spaced over a year with the intimate conversations we've had about sex, politics, social observations, and the future of our generation. We've gone out for lunch, I treated her to a birthday dinner and a plentiful gift, and we're already planning other endeavors. She brings out the best and most thoughtful me, and I seem to provide her with the tranquility, kindness, and goofiness she needs to interrupt her hectic schedule. Full-blooded Italian and showing it down to her mannerisms and her Italian interjections, usually derogatory remarks directed at me, she has single-handedly, in one month, become one of the most important people in my life and revolutionized my attitude.

I'm not saying I walk on North Central's campus every day with my head held high, but lonely lunches in the school cafeteria do not occur as often as they did. Days where my thoughts or my musings fall on deaf ears rarely, if ever, exist anymore, and I at least had her virtually company with me during my four hour gap; she provided me with something to anticipate and look forward to when even my consistently impressive grades weren't getting me to jump for joy. I wanted connection and I got connection. A wonderful meeting with my former film studies teacher, who's current film studies class I spoke to this past month, went on to empower me in certain ways, as well, as she affirmed my thoughts, addressed my concerns, and left me with the sense of motivation and push I needed to rid me of a lot of anxiety and nervousness.

I recall the words my friend Martina said when I was spouting off some listless rant about my college experience and those words were, "a lot of things happen because of randomness." Joann and I met through complete randomness, and the contemplative part is, if my moronic comment hadn't been made, perhaps no introductory comment would've ever been uttered. With that, I would be writing an immensely different blog and Joann would likely have one less headache in her life.

Having said that, last week saw me take all three final exams I needed to, getting a C+ on my college algebra final and an A on my cities and cinema one, with speech still up in the air, and concluding my first trimester. To say it was incredibly hard, taxing work would be an exaggeration, but to say it was easy and required little of my effort would be a blatant lie. It was a serious change that forced me to be self-reliant and trustworthy of myself, and one that saw a lot of lonely days but a plethora of strong, memorable ones thanks to an aforementioned someone.

With the next trimester, I have a two-day a week load, only going to school Tuesdays and Thursdays and having the remainder of the work-week off. I haul a heavy load on those two days, with quantitative reasoning, introduction to sociology, and religion and ethics in film existing as two hour classes both of those days, but with the trade-off being a four-day weekend, I'll take it with a smile. Another update will come in late March of 2015.

Until then, the fence will be the direction in which I swing and my nuts will continue to be dropped.

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