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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
THE GRADUATION SPECIAL
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Friday, May 6, 2005
4:58 p.m.
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I'm calling this page the "Graduation Special" because I intend to do a large amount of writing (some of it reflexive and perhaps essay-style) about the end of my undergraduate career and related topics over the next week and a half. This means there are going to be long entries and (hopefully!) lots of them — be forewarned if you're adverse to that sort of thing. My undergraduate work is now officially complete. The last assignment, a set of French essays that I think I've mentioned a few times already, was due yesterday at 5 p.m., and as usual I needed every last minute before the deadline to get them done and handed in on time. I started work in theory after the AI exam on Monday, but I really didn't get going on them seriously until Wednesday. This made things a bit tight, but all my suitemates were really supportive and nice about letting me work when they were all done and ready to celebrate. After I turned the stuff in (14 pages, including three of pictures) we went out to the Green Road Heinen's to get stuff for a dinner of steak and sherried mushrooms. That was good stuff — Mark cooked some amazing pieces of meat; Nicole and I sliced up strawberries for dessert. We also had some good Australian wine on the side. Today I decided I should start putting stuff in boxes, but I actually didn't get any further than boxing up all my class notes and associated papers. These — the Backfile, as I usually call them — are collected into 38 folders (one for each class) and weigh an awful lot when they're all in one place. That was as far as I got packing because we ended up making a bit of a shopping trip at 11:30. Nicole wanted Mark to get roller blades, and I needed a camping headlamp-flashlight, so Brian went with the three of us out to Dick's in Beachwood, to Target, and then back to Dick's to get more stuff there that they didn't have at Target. I called my dad at work before we went and got authorization to buy a new bike helmet that actually fits my head instead of the child-sized one I've got from 1995. Lunch in the common room afterwards was also quite nice. I think all of us are enjoying the fact that we're now completely free of academic responsibility. The sentence "It's not like we have anything else to do" was frequently heard while we were out today. I know I feel happy to have the chance to enjoy life, the way it's supposed to be, a bit now. This afternoon I put on shorts and went on a 8.7-mile bike ride in Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights, a pretty rare activity for me in the last two years or so. It was fun to go through nice residential neighborhoods, see kids out playing, high school track teams out running, etc. Very normal. Plans for the next week and a half (until graduation on May 15) are pretty exciting. Tonight Brian, Jeremy, and I are going to the Case Alumni Association senior banquet. Then I've got tomorrow to get ready for the "giant bike ride" from Erin's house in Strongsville to Cedar Point and back. We're planning on leaving Sunday, camping that night about halfway between here and Sandusky, finishing the trip Monday, going to the park on Tuesday, then biking back on Wednesday and Thursday. A possible excursion to Kelley's Island might delay us an extra day. Packing and clearing out my room begins in earnest after that. Next Saturday's calendar is filled from 9 a.m. to some point after 6 p.m. with graduation practice, the senior picnic, two awards ceremonies, and Dan's graduation party out in Moreland Hills. The following day is graduation, and then summer plans and work at Rockwell begin. Semester Eight – Box Score:
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Wednesday, May 11, 2005
10:16 p.m.
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Pushing relentlessly across the open farmlands of northwestern Ohio. Driven onwards by the urge to not be homeless. Five days. Nine people. Over 120 miles. A near-infinite amount of sunscreen. It's... The End-of-School Cedar Point Bike Trip! So we're back a bit earlier than I thought we'd be, based on my last entry and our original plans, but our grand adventure is complete and turned out to be another success in our long line of camping trips. It started out a day earlier than planned — on Saturday — when we all met up at Erin's house around 9 p.m. Ben and his bike came in with Erin, Dan drove by himself from his grandpa's house, Paul and I drove our bikes down from campus, Eric and Bret biked from campus, and Kathi and Vicki showed up from somewhere with one bike between them. We spent the rest of the night planning out food, going grocery shopping, and fixing up the bikes before going to bed around 1 a.m. Seven of us (Eric, Bret, Vicki, Paul, Erin, Ben, and I) left around 10:00 in the morning on Sunday following a cross-state route that we had a map for. It was mainly on two-lane country roads, so the traffic was only an issue as we were getting out of Strongsville. Two wrong turns, a few hours, and 32.8 miles later we stopped for lunch in Oberlin. At the 50-mile mark, we'd just gotten to the center of a small town called Berlin Heights when Bret got a call on his cell phone from Kathi. (She was driving with the car and most of our gear to the campsite we'd picked for the night, which was about seven miles further out.) It turned out that the price we'd been quoted from the campground that morning ($20 for a site with up to four people on it) only applied if your definition of "four people" was "two adults and two kids." In order to have extra adults, there was a $5-per-person "visiting fee" charged for people who weren't really supposed to spend the night. This brought the total cost of a night's stay for the eight of us to $60, which Eric said was flat-out unacceptable. We formed the plan to call the campsite ourselves, explain that we'd just biked 50 miles under the assumption of cheap camping, and ask them if there was something they could do or another place we could stay. Eric said he would make the call. The approximate transcript was something like this: Eric: Hi, we're the bicyclists. When we talked to you this morning, you only told us that the sites would be $20 a night, and you didn't say anything about these extra fees. What gives? So the negotiations sort of fell through on both sides. After that, we decided that we might want to go somewhere else for the night, so we recalled Kathi by phone, told her where to find us, and sat down in the shade outside of the public library to wait for her to arrive. She came with a map of Ohio and a phone, so we started a process of variously looking up any state park near Sandusky, calling information to get its number, calling the park, and calling AAA to ask about discounts. Since it was after 5:00 and a Sunday, this met with extremely limited success. Eventually, a guy on a bike wearing a bright yellow shirt stopped by and asked us if anything was wrong. We explained the situation, and he gave us the name of a campground in Sandusky that he knew the way to. As a back-up, he also offered his own backyard to all of us if everything else fell through. Kathi managed to call up the Sandusky place and get a price ($52), which we accepted as the best possible way to not be homeless for the night. The biker guy (who introduced himself as Mr. Tim Work — "Don't laugh at my last name") explained how to get there, then offered to guide Bret and Eric most of the way there himself since he was going to Huron anyway. Kathi went on ahead in the car to get a spot, and the rest of us set off by bike a few minutes later. Kathi arrived with an empty bike rack and car at about the 63-mile point and picked up Ben and Erin; Paul, Vicki, and I decided to finish off the trip since she said the campground was only a few minutes down the road. And finally, just as the sun was going down, after 66 miles and 10 hours, we arrived at Bayshore Estates campground in Sandusky, Ohio. That, of course, was only the first day of our saga, and we then had a completely unexpected free day on Monday to make use of. We spent it in a carefully choreographed ballet of car-shuttling and people-moving designed to get eight people from place to place using a car, a three-bike rack, and as many bikes as needed. The goal of the day was Put-in-Bay on South Bass Island, which is reachable by ferry from Catawba on the end of the peninsula that sticks out into Sandusky Bay. Bret, Eric, and Vicki also needed various things from a bike shop on the peninsula. You can reach this from Sandusky by crossing the Route 2 bridge, but bikes aren't allowed and have to go all the way around the bay in order to come through Port Clinton. Our solution: Kathi drives Bret, Eric, and Vicki, plus associated bikes, to the bike shop, then returns to the campsite to drive the rest of us to Catawba to catch the ferry. During this time, the three bikers make their purchases and pedal their way to Catawba as well. The timing was perfect. Eric, Vicki, and Bret arrived about 30 seconds before we did in the car, but we missed the 1:30 boat to Put-in-Bay by about a minute. A rather hurried lunch at a place down the road rather nicely filled the time until the 2:30 boat, though. On the island, we decided to rent a pair of four-person golf carts in order to make the most of the time until the last boat for the mainland left at 6:30. We first drove to Heineman's Winery (love the name!), then to the Perry victory monument, then downtown. Bret, Kathi, Vicki, and I stole one of the carts and drove around a bit while the others stopped for a drink at a bar downtown. After they were done, we all drove around a bit more, dodging and making faces at each other like little kids, until it was time to head back to the boat. Going home was just as interesting as getting there since no one wanted to do any more biking. Kathi took one load of people to a grocery store on the peninsula, then came back to the ferry dock, drove the rest of us to the campsite to start dinner, then went back to get the grocery people. And thus to dinner and to bed — with the addition of Dan, bringing with him Erin's car and his bike. Tuesday was Cedar Point day! Everyone wanted to get an early start, so we were coming into the park shortly after it opened at 10 a.m. The season actually just started last Saturday, but by picking a Tuesday during the normal school year we were hoping to minimize crowds and lines. It worked perfectly: not a single line was longer than about a half-hour unless you wanted to wait to sit in the front car of the ride. A lot of the smaller or older rides (i.e. ones I can actually go on without dying) had no lines at all, and you could walk up to the platform and get onto the first or second train that came by. We managed to stay until within 15 minutes of the 8:00 closing time, and I managed to not spend any money at all inside the park since we'd packed our lunches and brought water bottles. And yet yesterday's dinner still managed to be the earliest one out of the whole trip, since we were able to start cooking it at least while the sun was still up. Eric ran into a Japanese biker at the campground — he had started biking in April in San Francisco and was bound for New York. From New York he was going to take a plane to Lisbon in order to bike from there to Shanghai. Bret, being a rather serious biker himself, talked to this guy for a while and invited him over for a dinner of fajitas and smores, which was pretty cool for all of us. Which brings us to today and another early start. A fleet of six bikers were making the return trip: Bret, Eric, Dan, Kathi, Ben, and me. Paul, Vicki, and Erin were taking the cars back to Erin's house and/or campus. We all left a bit after 9 a.m. Lunch was again in Oberlin, at Feve, the same place where we'd stopped on Sunday, and we were sitting in the shade back at Erin's by 4:30 after a total trip of 63 miles in around seven hours. Our average speed (13.6 m.p.h.) was about 1 m.p.h. faster than the first trip, even though the grade was much more uphill coming back. A series of about four ups-and-downs between Grafton and Strongsville was by far the worst. Four of us stayed with Erin at her house for some dinner, and then she drove us all home after that, ending this week's series of adventures a bit after 8:00 this evening. |
Friday, May 13, 2005
3:06 p.m.
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I'm about to shut my computer down for the year and take out my network card, so this is probably the last entry I'm going to be able to write from my own room. My own room, though, is already looking less and less like a place to live and more and more like south Florida after a hurricane hit the day after the season opened. You might guess that I've been packing to go home, and you'd be right. The whole suite has been in shipping-out mode, actually, for the past two days. I had put a few things in copier boxes and left them in the hall before the bike trip, but when I got back Wednesday night the blight had spread to the entire common room. Mark's brother David, a really cool guy, came up yesterday morning to help Mark and Nicole shuttle stuff down to their summer housing in Howe, and Brian spent the day putting things in crates to drive to his grad student temp housing up in Taft. I joined in and started clearing out my drawers and shelves. Lunch was rather afternoon-ish at Aladdin's, and then we all went back to work. I stopped a bit before 6:00 to go out to Aaron's ("Boy's") end-of-year party in Strongsville, arriving around 6:45. I got there at a bad time: the party had actually started at noon and everyone but Amber had already gone home. Erin and Ben were planning on coming by later in the evening, though, so the festivities continued with the five of us until shortly before midnight. Today has been one of those sad days when you realize the end is near and coming towards you at about 90 clicks, as Nicole might say. The hallway, except for a few crates and other odds and ends, is completely desolate. Jessica's blank door has been staring at me for seven days now, and all the others are quickly catching up, minus the "Occupied" signs that Res Life put up last week for the rest of us. The chaos in the common room is starting to empty out, but that includes standard features like the TV, refrigerator, and all the cooking stuff back in the corner by the table. Nicole left today on a plane to Georgia to be home for two weeks, and Mark only has to come back up tomorrow to check out of this suite and take up permanent residence down at the bottom of the hill. Brian, Jeremy, and I will be here through Sunday afternoon, but my dad is going to be here in about an hour to take about 85 percent of my stuff home, so we'll be living in pretty stripped-down conditions for the next few days. Our time, however, is almost completely claimed. Tomorrow we have a graduation practice at 9:30 and a send-off picnic at noon. Following that, I have to go to two awards ceremonies: one for the Office of Student Community Service at 2:00 and then the general senior honors assembly at 4:30 that my parents will also be attending. Dan's graduation party starts at 6:30 and fills out the rest of the evening. On Sunday we have to be lined up on the quad at 8:30 a.m. for the convocation and graduation stuff, and then there's going to be a reception afterwards. Check-out for me is at 3:15, and then I'm home for a bit before our next grand adventure. But I don't want to talk about that yet. I was hoping to have this entry focus more on feelings about the summer and beyond. We were doing a lot of swapping at Boy's last night about where everyone is ending up and what they're going to be doing, and it's really starting to sound quite exciting. Some people are moving into apartments down the street, and some of us are running off to different cities to see what's out there. Affording Carnegie Mellon is by no means worked out yet, but I'm really looking forward to having a little place of my own, working on interesting stuff, and visiting and being visited by friends on weekend. It seems a lot like how I felt just before going off to college, even though I can't remember for sure. This time, though, I feel like there are a lot of really cool people that I don't want to lose contact with. I hardly keep up with anyone from high school, and I haven't talked to anyone in my own year in about nine months, but I don't think friends in high school were as integral to the experience as friends in college. Here, since we're all living together and working together all the time, we've had so many more opportunities to get to know each other as people instead of as classmates or acquaintances. A camping trip with people from my AP English class would have sounded really weird, but those kind of things are almost standard issue with the college crowd.... |
Friday, May 13, 2005
9:10 p.m.
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I don't suppose I'd been without my computer for more than three hours before I got bored, and I only lasted that long because I spent two hours loading my stuff into the van for my dad to take home. He got here at 4:00; by 6:00 I was left alone in my room with nothing to do but drink tea and read books. I spent about an hour working on "The Code of the Woosters" before getting bored of that and wanting to think about dinner plans. My suite was deserted, so I took to the phones to see if anyone was around to have dinner with. Unfortunately, this pursuit was limited to two numbers I thought I could try and the recept of no answer at both of them. Around 7:30 I decided to go out for a walk instead — I remembered Stefannie and Laura were moving into a house on Grandview, and I thought they might be outside or see my coming down the street. No such luck. I walked all the way down to North Park and back up Harcourt (in order to look at the pretty houses and gardens) without meeting anyone I knew. Since I only had a dollar in case with me, dinner ended up being a can of soup I had in my food drawer with some P.G. Wodehouse on the side. After that I tred to start writing a short story, but I could only come up with the opening half-sentence before I realized I couldn't come up with a plot or a reasonable set of characters. I drew a line across the page and wrote this entry out below it instead. My handwriting, though not as awful as it's been on various occasions in the past, looks rather unpracticed. I should probably try to write properly more often instead of typing or scribbling. In other, more relevant news, I took my graduation robe out of its plastic bag today and put it on a hanger. It persists, even now, in remaining creased and wrinkled from being in that bag since March. I was going to hang it up in the bathroom during my shower tomorrow, but then the rain outside gave me an additional idea. I put the hanger on the curtain rod above my window, then pulled the usual curtain-moving cord so that the gown hung right over the part of the window that was open. The temperature before the rain started around 8:45 must have been at least 75°, so the resulting humidity is hopefully ironing out my gown as I write. |
Sunday, May 15, 2005
10:08 p.m.
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After four years and 38 classes, as of about 12:30 this afternoon, I'm a fully-certified graduate of Case Western Reserve University with a bachelor's of science in computer science. This is perhaps the obvious consequence of me enrolling at the school four years ago, so I suppose I'm a bit less excited, sad, melodramatic, etc. than everyone else (i.e. parents) is expecting me to be. It's been interesting to see how the university has been suddenly pampering us this weekend. We had a graduation "practice" yesterday morning that was immediately followed by the Senior Send-Off picnic in Adelbert Gym, at which banquet the administration showered us with free food, drinks, umbrellas, cups, and a champagne toast served in rather nice keepable glasses. (I had two in order to pocket an even pair of them.) The quad, which usually looks rather nice in the summer anyway with flowers and trees in full force, has also been groomed in the past two days at a shocking expense to future tuition-payers. Brian and I were down there on Thursday for something or other, and both of us remember noticing a nice batch of blooming red tulips by the sidewalk next to Bingham. The very next day, going down by the same route again, we had a bit of a start because they'd been completely replaced with some sort of begonia-style plants! Going back to the bit of chronology, then. I spent an hour between the champagne thing and the community service reception at 2:00 in KSL, up by the Thomas Edison books I first got interested in when I was a freshman — somehow I still knew the catalog number. The book I ended up reading through was Edison's "Diary and Sundry Observations," published in 1948. Some really interesting stuff. After the community service awards in Clark 309 I had to go immediately over to Amasa for the general senior awards ceremony. I got something called the Andrew Jennings award for excellence in computer science (that's news to me!) and then an award for a Case School of Engineering senior who had made major contributions to campus publications. I had no clue that something like that existed, but whoever endowed that definitely moves up several places in my book. If I ever end up in a position to do something similar, more awards for engineers who can write wouldn't be a bad sort of gift to the university. Which brings us to the commencement stuff that was today. We had to line up in front of Wickenden and Yost at 8:30 this morning, so I got up at 7:15. Dan and Paul stopped by just as Brian and I were adjusting our sashes and getting ready to leave, so the four of us walked down together. Vicki was my row leader, so we got to stand together amid the mass craziness of 700 undergraduates milling about at a time when all of them should have been asleep. Kathi, Jeremy, and Susannah stopped by briefly, but otherwise there wasn't a lot of friend-meeting and picture-taking, unfortunately. The ceremony was quite long. Chris Matthews' speech wasn't so good (I thought), and his voice volume was pretty unsuited to microphones and speakers and echoes in a big room, so I didn't understand a good chunk of it. Jerid Kurtz, the class president, provided a surprisingly good few minutes, bringing up a lot of good points that the administration had to at least acknowledge (such as Doc Oc and Dr. Justik not getting tenure because they don't do research). Prof. Gasparini, reading the names of CSE graduates, was the only person this weekend to pronounce my last name correctly. Afterwards — it was like 12:30! — my parents wanted to skip out to a quick lunch right away, so after a few pictures on the quad we were off to McDonald's. Afterwards we had to finish out cleaning my room so I could check out at 3:15, so I still didn't get to take pictures and meet up with any of my friends. Quite disappointing, but I suppose they were all off with their parents doing the same thing. Dinner was at the Olive Garden with my family tonight as a sort of celebration; my sister just came home from Akron this morning, so all six of us are around again for the first time in several months. Chris starts back at Ye Olde Heinen's tomorrow, but I've got off from Rockwell until May 31 in order to engage in a bit of camping and backpacking, which should begin on or around this Thursday, as soon as we figure out where we're going! So I guess that's the end of the graduation special page. The "so-called summer break" starts tomorrow, so we'll officially return to the normal mode of normal-sized journal entries as soon as possible. |
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