It's been some time since I've written (anything at all, really), so I thought I'd try getting back into the swing of things. Within the past 3 months I've made the decisions to A) Move back to
Boulder from
Tacoma, B) Transfer from the
University of Puget Sound to
CU, C) change my major from
Philosophy to
Pre-Journalism, and D) take
summer classes. All four of which I'm starting to regret.
In trying to explain to people exactly why it is that I transferred I always seem to come up just short. "I did it for financial reasons", or "UPS didn't have a journalism major", but here and now I'm stuck in a place of intellectual downsizing on top of being left as a junior standing with little chance of getting into the actual Journalism school without first taking a mess of intro level courses along with 500-600 other freshmen. Alas, I suppose I really just should have figured things out sooner. I told myself that Boulder was going to be the better place for an outdoorsy guy like me, yet I'm starting to feel more and more like I'm being "compared" to everyone else as to just how much I'm willing to be so. It's not like it's subtle either. Everyday when I bike to class I see other's biking along the same path, passing me with stares of complete ambivalence to someone who's not as decked out in gear as they are. The 70 year olds in full bike attire are just as unlikely to smile as the even more so 30 somethings. And this is just one source of pretension I'm seeing in this new place. As I've walked around I've come across more girls with the exact same combination of fake looks, a lack of intelligence, dulled personalities, and outright fraudulence than I'd care to count. And their boyfriends are the very meatheads that I went to private school to avoid. There's only so much laughing you can do before the negative attitudes start to wear on you. I feel like my happiness can only extend so far before its worn into that something that's just as bad as everything else. Who knows, maybe it's just that everyone there is in summer session and are upset with the heat in addition to classes. Or maybe I just simply haven't found my niche of friends, either way it had better get better during the fall-- at least I'll once again have my mountains to escape to.
To top this all off I've fallen in love. But it's a conditional and finite love that I haven't treated as either. We fell during the very last weeks of school, knowing full well that I was transferring, and she was staying. Her name is Julia, and she's my complete opposite. We'd been friends-in-passing since freshmen year, and she would always come over to chat with the guys in my house. I'd thought of her as a little loud, but never in the annoyed sense of the word, just bubbly and outgoing. Never did I once think we'd get along as a couple. Then one night we were in her room, it was late, after a party, and I decided to take a ridiculous chance. Of course, my original justification had been that I was leaving anyways and didn't particular have much to lose on the whole thing. But that's were it all began. I ended up staying the night, and while we didn't have sex (then), I felt totally and completely at ease just kissing and talking and cuddling and spooning (with the most minor of naps in between). Somewhere within the second night I'd realized that this was love, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out where it had come from. I confessed it, and she did too. We spent the next two days in bed, emerging at times to make food in her kitchen but always ending up back where we started. It was no suprise that her housemates became intrigued, for I was the first steady "boyfriend" she'd had that year. At our end-of-the-year party out in Vantage, WA we first came out and started showing our affection publicly. It instantly became a subject which everyone felt they had to address. The drunken conversations went a little like this:
(them): "does this hand-holding stuff mean you guys are like, dating?"
(us): "yeah"
(them): "oh, huh, I never saw you two coming together, but it's, like, a totally great match"
(us): "thanks, dude, we think so too".
It became such a process that we decided to give it up a little earlier and retreated to the tent to be alone. From inside we could hear the party raging beyond us, but we only cared only about each other, it was total bliss.
Summer began, she went back to California and I to Colorado. She came to visit just a few weeks ago, and it allowed me to completely forget all my woes about my new home. Of course we again spent most of our time in bed, but I tried my best to get us both out to see the town. We'd go to dinner and could just stare into her beautiful eyes and fall in love with her in some whole new light, feeling entirely complete and meaningful and loved in return. I'm going to see her in just over a week, and I'm taking two days off of both my Principles of Journalism and Bioethics courses to do so. At this point I'm starting to think that I should just drop them both in order to extend my stay, thinking that, as far as priorities go, she is by far the superior to either. She's going abroad to Prague next semester, so I may just be able to convince my parents that with the amount of money I'm saving on switching from a private to an in-state public school I should get funded for a little European vacation.