Eleven Days Left
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and my summer at Stanford is no exception. Though we still have over a week left before going home on August 20, a feeling of depression lingers in the air already. No one, in my house at least, is looking forward to returning home, though we all miss our home towns whether we like to admit it or not.
This foreboding aura settled upon us much earlier than one might expect because of a terrible and seemingly impossible event that occurred last week. As I mentioned before, each house has four mentors who are current Stanford students that are supposed to act as counselors for kids on their floor. In recent weeks, however, these “counselors” have become more like friends, older brothers and sisters who we looked up to and could hang out with whenever we felt like it without it feeling awkward. For the guys in my house, Eucalipto, the mentor who did the most to help us and befriend us was a guy named Cole, a sophomore originally from Phoenix. Almost everyone on my floor can think of some incident where we needed something and Cole was there to help, or some happy moment that only happened because Cole was there. We spent a lot of late nights watching unedited, unrated movies and the World Cup soccer games in his room. Considering that most college kids would probably hate to have “little” high schoolers hanging around all the time, Cole’s awesomeness toward us was amazing.
Last week wasn’t the best one ever. The weekend before, I had gone on one of my favorite trips so far, a sailing trip on a schooner on San Francisco Bay. Unfortunately, that goodness didn’t last. There was a CS assignment due that Thursday that I had to really work hard to finish on time, and my tiredness because of that assignment caused me to sleep through one of my word roots classes again on Tuesday. Though the instructor still didn’t really care that my roommate and I hadn’t come, he told us that we couldn’t miss any more classes. So Wednesday night, with a can’t-miss word roots class looming in the morning, I took the intelligent route and pulled an all-nighter. Mostly, I was just playing the open-source game Tremulous with some friends on the computers in our cluster, but I somehow finished the homework in that time, too.
At about four in the morning, the unthinkable happened. A random person walked in and asked if we had heard about the mentors. We said that we hadn’t, and so they explained that some of the mentors had been caught drinking at a party held in our dining hall weeks ago and that those mentors would be forced to move out by 5:00 PM on Friday. Worse, it wasn’t just a few mentors that were being kicked out; ten out of the 23 mentors residing at Lagunita would be leaving. And to top it all off, two of those ten mentors were from Eucalipto: Cole, and a mentor from the girls’ floor named Rose. I was shocked, to say the least. I thought that maybe I was so tired that I had begun to hallucinate, or that I had fallen asleep somewhere and this was all just a really bad dream. But it was all true, and I didn’t know what to think.
I still felt kind of numb when I went to breakfast with my fellow Tremulous players at about 7:30. We ate normally, and then I went and crashed in my room for an hour or so before word roots. By the time I got to class with my roommate, only a few minutes late, the numbness had been replaced with exhaustion, and I was reminded of why I had sworn to myself after last year’s three all-nighters that I’d never let my schoolwork get to the point where I had to pull one ever again. This time, though, I just felt stupid, because this all-nighter wasn’t caused by anything; it was a choice, and a bad one. I came really, really close to falling asleep in word roots, but thankfully we played a game where we make up new words using prefixes, roots, and suffixes that we’ve learned over the summer. Having to actually talk and write things was enough to keep me from nodding off.
When I got back to Lag for lunch, I couldn’t sleep because some documentation for my CS homework beckoned. I finished it just in time to submit it electronically before the deadline and walk quickly to lecture to turn in the paper copy. That was one of the most painful classes I’ve ever sat through; I was nodding off every 30 seconds, much to the amusement of a friend sitting next to me. At the very end, I actually went to sleep for about three seconds, and somehow that was long enough to have a short dream in which one of the CS instructors was in a darkened room carrying a chocolate birthday cake with lit candles toward me. It was kind of weird.
I finally stumbled back into my room at about 2:15, literally falling onto my mattress (which is still conveniently located on the floor). I slept deeply for four and a half hours, getting up only because I had to go to my CS discussion section at 7:00. After that, because I had missed lunch and dinner, I went by a Mexican restaurant at the student union and got a massive burrito, which I carried back to Lag and ate in Cole’s room while he and Rose talked about random things with some of the other kids from my floor. Eventually, I wandered back down the hall to our lounge, where some of the girls were preparing a “banquet” for our fallen heroes. I helped put up some balloons, a small offering of bowls of candy was placed on an altar-like table in the middle of the room, and Eucs began to gather. Once everyone was there, Cole and Rose stood on a raised area of the lounge where there’s a piano and a kitchenette with all of their “kids” standing around them in a rough circle. A few people gave little speeches about things that Cole or Rose had done for them or experiences that they had had because of Cole or Rose’s work, and the sadness in the air was replaced by some of the joy of remembering happier moments earlier in the summer. Then, we presented them with our parting gifts: a longboard (skateboard) paid for and signed by all of the Eucalipto guys for Cole, and a gift certificate to a Palo Alto clothing store for Rose from the girls. You could tell at that point that even the ever-cool Cole was getting a little worked up, especially when he and Rose gave their little speeches of appreciation and thanks for a great summer while apologizing for the behavior that had caused them to be kicked out. At that point, though, we didn’t care about the apologies; we had had six weeks to discover how great our mentors were, and we weren’t going to let one incident change what we thought of them. The “banquet” ended with all of us getting into a circle and singing “Lean on Me” while the song played in the background. Even with two weeks left, it felt like the summer had ended already.
The next day, Friday, I slept a lot and in the afternoon went out to the parking lot to hang out with Cole for one last time with a bunch of other people while he packed his stuff into his car. All sorts of random things happened, such as making a circle of people environmentalist-style around his car so that he couldn’t leave. We decided that we would meet Cole that night at a pizza restaurant in Palo Alto, just to show that even if he wasn’t our mentor anymore, he was still our friend and always would be. The pizza wasn’t that great (you could literally have wrung it out like a washcloth and gotten about a pint of liquid grease out of it), but it was fun just being there with all my Friends and Cole and Rose. When I got back to Lag, we had a subdued mattress party and ended up going to sleep at a more normal 3 AM.
The weekend was really nothing special; I went on a trip to NASA’s Ames Research Center which turned out to not be so great, but a Friend was there, so it wasn’t so bad. (If you haven’t caught on by now, Friend = someone I really know and like, and friend = just someone I sort of hang out with sometimes.) I bought some freeze-dried ice cream and immediately regretted it once I had bitten off a chunk; it tastes like what regular ice cream might taste like if you left it to melt and become lukewarm in a bowl and then drank it like chocolate milk. Saturday night was more fun, though: my Friend and I set up a Tremulous server on his dual-core laptop and invited five or six other Eucs to join our game. It was pretty fun, though I kept getting pwned badly. If you ever see a server on the Internet list named “Stanford” between now and August 20, that’s probably us, so join in and have some fun with random people you don’t know.
So far, this week hasn’t been incredibly eventful. The return to high school looms ever closer, so I’m getting more and more worried about finishing my summer homework on time. I haven’t really done much of anything as far as extended essay research goes, and I still have some books to read for English and TOK and some chapters to study for math. On top of that is web development work for my Arizona-based client (for whom most of my work is done) and continuing work on some of the hardest programming for Sangre and Gabo so that my newspaper management thingy will hopefully be ready in time to be live for the second issue. I also should be working on college applications (especially for a certain school that has a name starting with “S”) and such, but it’s been difficult to think about that with everything else that’s been going on. And I obviously want to get As in all of my classes, so I still have a lot of homework and quizzes to work on in between the other crapola. Next week will be especially horrible because of finals on the last two days of the session, so it’s quite possible that I won’t find time to write again until after I get back to Wisconsin. I hope that doesn’t happen, but you know how bad I can be about posting in a timely manner.
At this point I could go on and on about how much it will suck to leave Stanford, explaining exactly why and to what magnitude the suckiness will extend, but unfortunately some word roots homework is staring angrily at me. I’m sure I’ll be full of complaininess in the next entry, especially if I don’t write it until I get home. Until then…bye.