« Savage Says Happiness | Main | An Ordinary Week, Topped with Spices »
April 24, 2005
Selfreflection: Summer and School
'philosophy', life
In which Trevor ruminates in a potentially boring fashion on the present and the past which lead up to it.
I'm starting to look forward to prom, which is next weekend, primarily because it's a great social opportunity – for some reason I'm feeling a bit starved in that regard. I'm feeling a wee bit stifled by responsibilities, and just want an opportunity to be quintessentially Trevor for a while; which now, rather surprisingly, involves being with real life friends. In this pursuit, most responsibilities become both a blessing and a curse; although school and crew mean being with friends occasionally, they also mean doing work, more so at school than at crew.
Last year this time, computers were just about my only hobby. Since then many things have changed. I've finally become social and I've picked up a horseload of hobbies, so many that I have trouble juggling them all at times. Many of these changes can be tracked back to the summer preceding the school year, and enacted themselves throughout the first half of the year.
The first substantial event of the summer was Port Isobel (just found that awesome picture while googling; that's the building we stayed in); it instilled me with a love of oars which carried me full blast onto the crew team, which in turn helped miles with my sociableness.
Next to take to the plate was JHU CTY on Franklin & Marshall College's excellent campus. The course, Philosophy of the Mind, was great and infinitely mind bending, and, although after the first day I was a bit beaten back by the scores of people who already knew each other, I eventually settled in with a nice group of people and began to, perhaps, become a bit more social. At CTY I also was introduced to dancing (without which I probably wouldn't have been driven to poetry), as well as They Might Be Giants.
Finally, over the summer I generally became more defined, thanks to the internet. A forum post prompted me to think about and define my philosophy, and further thinking lead me to change my mindset about being social. Last year, my goals on this front were meager; I hoped to make people laugh occasionally, and other than that I didn't care what anyone at all thought of me. The height of my happiness in this realm came only occasionally when jokes were flying in the classroom or, much more delightfully, during field trips.
The rest of this last year's changes can be more or less directly attributed to crew. The crewbie scarf knitathon, the results of which were sold to raise funds for crew, got me into the field of knitting – without which I wouldn't have started reading the blogs which made me decide to get create this website, which lead me to discover that I do fairly love writing. The proliferation of crewbies with instruments, as well as my own desire for music, drove me to the banjo ukulele. And, last but not least by far, crew lead me to meet the niftiest people in the entire school, people with whom I finally had something to talk about.
In sum, I'm delighted at all the changes that've occurred in the last year, although after tallying them all up I do find them responsible for my current blessed plight: if not for these changes, I wouldn't be longing for the socialization & sociability which have been compressed by responsibility. But it's pointless to complain; I'm off to work on both the responsibility and the sociability, that they might both be improved!
Posted by Trevor Savage at April 24, 2005 8:50 PM