Brettia

Profound title, I know. It’s no secret that Wisconsin winters are harsh. But this winter has been a little strange. It snowed lightly on Thanksgiving Day. In December, we had about twice the snowfall we did last year. But instead of sitting around and accumulating as more storms passed through, the snow would melt off almost completely on warm days before being replaced by a new six-to-eight-inch blanket. I came back to find about four inches on the ground, and more snow last week added another couple of inches. This past weekend, the unthinkable happened - temperatures rose above 35 on Sunday and nearly reached 50 on Monday. It was warm enough to wear shorts! This morning, it was 43 outside before the sun was even fully up. Unfortunately, the temperature dropped from there. And dropped. And dropped some more. At around 2:30 I found myself caught in a hailstorm while trying to get home from class. After about a half-inch had covered the ground, the hail became snow. By 5:00 it was 23 degrees and the slush on the ground was beginning to freeze. As you can see, it is now 3 and will hit -12 overnight, a 55-degree difference in 24 hours.

Like 100 million other people, I’ll be watching Super Bowl XLII (in which the New England Patriots will destroy the New York Giants) on Sunday. As a proud semi-Arizonan, I can’t wait to see all the coverage of the Phoenix area and the beautiful desert surrounding it. I’ll just close my eyes and imagine the warm sun beating down upon me.

Sorry to bore you with a weather report, but I just needed to write something.

Savor this, because it might be another month before the next one. I am not really sure what I want to talk about right now. I’m not as bad a blogger as I seem; I’m constantly planning new entries in my head - they just never end up getting written down. I often wish I had some way to just plug myself into my laptop and let it read my thoughts. (And let it be remembered henceforth that I was first to welcome our future sentient computer overlord.) I need some sort of light, low-tech, readily available recording device. I think it might be called a pencil and paper. One day I will remember to carry it around. But then again, the idea of hand writing something in the age of keyboards and word processors seems so painfully slow. Plus, my handwriting, once so perfectly formed and girly, has begun to devolve into a much more masculine scrawl. Now you see both why my ideas don’t usually make it to the database and just how completely disorganized this entry will be.

There is a girl walking around in my hallway and the nearby stairwell talking loudly on her cell phone. Normally I wouldn’t be one to eavesdrop, but when the talker shouts her conversation to the world I can’t help but listen in sometimes. Unfortunately, the girl is just spouting gob after gob of mind-numbing drivel. Probably her victim has already hung up and she’s just talking to herself at this point. (Wait, she just walked by again and I could hear a voice at the end of the line…I pity the poor soul having to listen to her.)

I have found that the level of maturity here is lower than I would’ve expected. Keep in mind that I can only contrast my experience here with my two months at Stanford, and maybe that’s a flawed comparison. At Stanford, most of the students in the summer program were between our junior and senior years, and plenty of juvenile things happened there: citrus fights, nutball matches, mattress parties, etc. However, kids’ actions were for the most part carefully controlled - they did childish things for fun sometimes, but they weren’t childish by nature. When you talked to someone individually and seriously, you found them to be responsible and intelligent, even if they didn’t act that way in social situations.

At Wisconsin, instead of high school students acting like adult college students, there are college students acting like childish high school students. The girl in the hallway (who after about 45 minutes has finally ended her call) is a classic example, talking about all kinds of random, insignificant social “events” (”this cute guy let me borrow his jacket!”) and sounding exactly like one of those brainless popular girls from high school. Similarly, many of the guys here seem to have no purpose in life beyond partying, drinking, and getting laid as much as possible. Whereas at Stanford the idiocy of high school was superseded by simple, joyful, intellectual camaraderie, at Wisconsin kids just do everything they couldn’t get away with (publicly) in high school. Everyone drinks fairly heavily - for some, the weekend starts Tuesday night; on average, it begins on Thursday. The hallway often smells like alcohol, sometimes with the scent of vomit or urine mixed in. The bathrooms and lounge can be worse. Academics are always second to partying, an annoying barrier to having a good time. Nerdiness or geekiness is looked down upon. At Stanford I told a number of people about my web design hobby, and most seemed to think it was cool or at least mildly interesting. Here, I’ve gotten enough dumb looks and blank stares that I generally don’t even bring it up. Not being from Wisconsin is looked down upon too (”coasties” generally cluster together in private dorms and get made fun of by the natives for their low tolerance for the cold). Originally I would mention that I’d graduated from Oconomowoc but also had ties to Arizona; now I just say I’m from Oconomowoc whether I really feel that I am or not.

Of course, there are exceptions. I’ve met some people (unsurprisingly, none from Wisconsin) who are much more intellectual and mature and less driven by alcohol and parties. There’re many shades of gray. I’m only describing things as I feel them from where I’m sitting in room 201 on the second floor of Witte Hall, tower A. From what I’ve heard, there can be a very different vibe depending on what dorm you live in or even what floor you’re on, and my dorm in particular has a reputation for craziness (”gettin’ shitty in Witte”). There were differences between the houses at Stanford too: Eucaliptolites were a little quirky and liked to goof around in weird, random ways; Granadans seemed a bit more rebellious; Ujamaa was rowdier; and so on. I might find next year that things are completely different.

Even so, the immaturity - and especially the culture of alcoholism - seems pervasive here. I sense it in the snippets of conversations I hear in the Southeast dorms’ central cafeteria. I can’t go into the Walgreens on State St. without hearing someone talking loudly about their drunken exploits the night before, or about how they can’t wait to start drinking “around 4:30, when class is over.” I see and meet ditzy girls like the one in the hallway all the time. Even some of the more levelheaded upperclassmen that I’ve met get taken in by it, though they certainly don’t seem to plan their lives around it like some of the kids in my dorm. It’s like Wisconsin’s party-school reputation (we’re #1 on the Princeton Review’s “Lots of Beer” ranking, and some years we’ve been high up on the “Party Schools” list) is an excuse to go crazy. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t have a problem with partying - with or without beer - but it’s not my favorite activity either, and I tire of it quickly when I’m surrounded by it as I am here. To some kids Wisconsin would be a dream school - finally they can do everything they did in high school but always had to hide from their parents or teachers or the police. Here, authority is pretty loose, especially in dorms (RAs don’t care about the drinking and, in the rare event someone gets busted for it, they don’t really get punished), and kids get away with just about anything. At Stanford, anyone caught drinking or smoking was flown home immediately. That’s a pretty draconian policy, but not caring about it at all is similarly extreme.

Faced with the situation here, the logical question for me to ask is, “Are all colleges like this?” I would think not, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe college is all about being stupid and pushing one’s body to its limits by eating badly and ingesting illegal substances. And it’s all okay because I’m just a young adult learning about life through “experimentation.” Maybe being passionate about academics doesn’t matter, and I should just concentrate on socializing as much as possible and graduating…eventually. Maybe my problem is that I am too rigid, too reluctant to change myself and embrace the partying and the binge drinking and the shallowness.

I was never very sure about coming here. I knew this school’s reputation, I knew that it was huge, and I knew that it wouldn’t be quite like Stanford, though I hoped that it would at least be similar. I had the chance to go to Pomona and potentially have a much more Stanfordesque experience, but attending the school wasn’t really possible financially. Now I begin to wonder if I traded happiness for in-state tuition, some scholarship money, and a lenient transfer credit policy. I begin to wonder if by coming here I continued my rather mistake-prone tradition of ignoring my gut in favor of my mind. Hopefully by the end of the year I will feel better about my choice.

It reached 33 degrees outside today and I can’t believe how warm I felt.

Until next time (which could be quite a while, sorry)….

This entry is meant to introduce you to me. Being a self-centered person (not a good thing, I know, but at least I can admit it), this shouldn’t be a hard one to write. But I’m still hazy about who I am and who I want to be. I guess that’s something I’m supposed to figure out in the next four years or so. Maybe I’ll never be sure. For now, I’ll just talk about what I’m more sure about, saving the uncertainties for later posts.

First, the basics. I am an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Wisconsin, majoring (probably) in computer science. Along with computers, I like English, Spanish, linguistics, history, and philosophy. I hate math, but I’m still not too bad at it. I don’t have that many hobbies because I’m usually too busy to cultivate them, but I like reading, writing, listening to music (who doesn’t…), playing video games, developing websites and software, and watching football. I have two jobs right now. I work as a web developer for a small company in Phoenix whose website is too ugly to be worthy of linkage. One day we’ll get around to redesigning it. On the side, I am the webmaster for the ASM Student Elections Commission. We’re the group that plans and runs elections for the university’s student government, and I keep our single web page up-to-date. It sounds boring, but it’s a lot less stressful and more fun than my main job.

Now, some history. It is strange to say, but I’m not really from anywhere. I was born in Springfield, Missouri, and most of my extended family lives around there. My family moved from Springfield to Salt Lake City when I was eight. We only spent two years there, moving to Phoenix in 1999. After adjusting to the desert heat, I grew to love it there. I found a band of friends who were almost as geeky as me, and we hung out together all through middle school and the first year and a half of high school. In about 7th grade I made my first website, and in 8th grade my friends and I spent much of our spare time posting on an online forum I’d set up. We’d set aside some of those nerdy habits by high school, but the friendships remained tight - the summer before freshman year, my two best friends and I went to Europe together. As you can imagine, I was surprised and crestfallen when I learned in the fall of 2004 that we would be relocating to either Boise or Milwaukee by the end of the year. Eventually, my parents decided on Wisconsin.

At first, I tried to be positive. While I didn’t want to leave my friends or the life I had in Arizona, I figured that perhaps starting over wouldn’t be so bad. It wasn’t like Wisconsin was another country or anything. My optimism didn’t last very long. It snowed about a foot the first night we were here. I had to spend a miserable month cooped up at home because my school’s second semester didn’t start until the end of January. When school finally did start, I felt like both a ghost and an alien at the same time. Since the year was already half over and classes changed after each term, most people just assumed I’d been there all along and didn’t pay that much attention to me. If I mentioned that I’d just come from Arizona, I’d usually get a confused look that meant, “Why the heck would you want to move here then?”

People in general were different - more family oriented, less open, very traditional. It wasn’t all bad; they were also not as materialistic or judgmental as Arizonans. My first eight months in Wisconsin were a dark and depressing time for me. I became very quiet and reserved, going entire days without uttering a word. I kept my grades up, even though my Wisconsin high school was significantly harder and I was continuing to take AP European History with my Arizona teacher via email. I made a few friends, but none were very close, and some of them I didn’t really like that much. I didn’t hang out with anyone. I didn’t understand the things that most Wisconsin kids are into, like hunting and hockey and ice fishing. For some reason, though my unhappiness was deep and sometimes a little dangerous, no one seemed to notice. I felt like a machine that did nothing but go to school and do homework, like an emotionless, thoughtless robot. I knew that I was as much a victim of my failure to adapt as I was a victim of an untimely move, but I didn’t know what to do to dig myself out of my hole.

Things began to look up in my junior year. I began the IB Diploma Programme, which is similar to AP but more comprehensive and with more meshing between courses. At first, not much changed. I was still quiet, and I still didn’t have any good friends. Then, in mid-October, I was tasked with writing a short essay on my definition of success. Instead of turning them in, the teacher surprised us by having us read our essays aloud in class. I was mortified. In Arizona, I was a bit of a teacher’s pet. I asked questions and gave answers all the time, and I enjoyed being smart. That disappeared after the move. I never wanted to say anything. And so the thought of putting my work out in the open for twenty other minds to appraise was terrifying. When my turn came, I somehow read my essay without stumbling too much, even though my heart was racing. There was a long pause after I’d finished and everyone’s eyes were on me. I was grateful when the teacher finally asked the next person to read. Later, I got the graded essay back with an A+ on the front and a comment on the back that said something like, “You are an excellent writer, and the whole class was hanging on your every word while you read this. Please share your thoughts in class more often.” I felt encouraged, but the damage of the previous year would take a while to undo.

The school year moved on, and I became the lead design editor of my school’s newspaper and a tutor in the writing center. I did a few things with my church’s youth group but never got too into it. Two other papers, an English one that my teacher copied and used as an example for everyone else and a history essay that I had to read in class, cemented me as one of the brightest in our little group of “IB kids.” But while I had the others’ respect, I didn’t really have their friendship. And though I was no longer so sad, I still wasn’t very happy. It was a transitional period.

In the summer of 2006, I spent two months taking classes at Stanford University. It was, without a doubt, the most incredible experience of my short life. It was eight weeks of near-complete freedom. I spent my weekends on day trips to San Francisco, Monterrey, Marin County, or Palo Alto, my weekdays programming games in Java or learning about word roots, and my nights goofing around in the dorm or throwing oranges at people or snuggling with girls (!) at mattress parties. I met my best friend at Stanford. For the first time in a long while, I felt alive. It was difficult to leave, and even more challenging to return to high school in the fall after having that little taste of college.

The first half of senior year was much like the year before. I was unhappy again, vexed by the huge difference between life at Stanford and real life in Wisconsin. School was harder than ever, and I had a bunch of IB exams in May to look forward to. My social life improved a little. I went to a couple of parties in December with two IB-kid friends, and I played Guitar Hero for the first time. I began eating lunch at school again, having abandoned the practice sophomore year as I lacked anyone to sit with. I finally had my driver’s license. I was reborn a little.

In May, it felt like all of my efforts during the previous two years came to a climax. I chose a college, spent three weeks skipping school in order to study for and take exams, and I put a huge amount of effort into making the final issue of the newspaper that I worked on the best of them all. Freedom came in June, and it was sweet. I went to some graduation parties, and a few party parties. I had a birthday party with my friends. My parents gave me a MacBook Pro. Things were looking up a little bit. I spend the second half of the summer in Arizona, since my family was moving back. I got to hang out with my old friends again, though Arizona no longer felt like home.

Fast forward a few months, and here I am, nearing the end of my first semester of college, feeling far away from and yet still similar to the timid Brett that left the desert for the hinterland three long years ago. I apologize for the crazy length of this entry, but now at least I won’t need to keep going over this stuff in future entries.

It feels so good to be blogging again.