summer

last weekend my parents visited. the trip was originally supposed to be for family weekend; it was later virtualized but they decided to come anyway. we drove somewhere around an hour away from boston to go on a hike and do other stuff. and then i convinced them to stop at lexington for food on the way back, since it happened to be on the way and i was curious what it was like as some of my friends went to high school there

and it gave me such strong flashbacks to fairbanks. the ~30k population sizes and tiny urban centers and proximity to nature trails and cute wooden buildings were all fairly similar. obviously lexington is not as remote as fairbanks and the scenery is not as diverse or pretty, but i’m just kind of shocked that i have friends who grew up in such a nice place, and also confused because they have good public high schools; most good high schools are either charter/private or exist in cities and large suburbs like plano and the bay area, since those are the places with money and strong demand for education and which are attractive to good teachers. but i guess maybe places like lexington can function because historical significance increases housing prices while restricting supply and so you still get strong wealth concentration despite it being relatively tiny and secluded? or at least that’s my best guess for how this is possible. maybe i’m reading too much into this and it’s just luck

i remember my last full day in alaska, where we visited uaf, definitely the most gorgeous campus i’ve ever seen (gorgeous in the sense of natural beauty, not the rich artificial lushness of some schools eg stanford which are still appealing but in a different manner) and walked along the chena river during golden hour and drove through unlit forest roads at night. then my housemate asked me what i wanted to get out of returning to college and i had a jumbled confused reply

but i think i’m doing most of the things i said i wanted to? like, self-care and meeting new kinds of people and reading about brain tech and learning a lot from classes without spending too much time on them. also a surprising amount of content creation – two weeks ago i made my first tiktok (an absolutely terrible video but it was important to get off the ground), and last week i sent my writing prof a complete draft of a short story and we had a really good hour-long conversation about writing, and this week we started rehearsing my arrangement and i got to see how music in my head translated into actual choral sounds. i think i want to get back to working on a more technical project soon, though i currently don’t have any ideas i’m excited by

i am not sure what i will be doing next summer yet. i have not started looking for jobs in earnest, though a company i really like rejected me and a company i feel okay about accepted me; i will not name either company yet. my freshman year research advisor reached out recently and told me to reconsider going to grad school, which i will do though i think the answer will still be no. on another note, the number of people i know going into finance is seriously starting to mess with my head as well; it’s mostly something along the lines of ‘how can i be so confident that i’ll find something better for me than finance when people i know seem to have reached a consensus that finance is the best thing for them’. the question is giving me a lot of anxiety, though i am less insecure about jobs and peer pressure than i used to be, so i will get over it

i miss alaska. i miss inhaling the aura of sibelius lingering in the air and feeling like i’d just seen sunlight for the first time and sitting in the passenger seat navigating people i’d trust my life with. but more than any of that i miss the state of total peacefulness i felt in august. who knows when i’ll feel that way again