My favorite part of college life is that at Stevens, I am always surrounded by and interacting with like-minded people. At home, in class, and around town I rarely go an hour without encountering someone I know and can strike up a conversation with. As a committed extrovert, this is an ideal life.
It is a life that eludes me now. It has been 35 days since I fled Hoboken to observe New Jersey’s “stay at home” order, and little remains of my routines and hobbies that populated the pre-spring break semester. I was not planning on moving out in March; my computer, notebooks, etc. that I have used for schoolwork since my freshman year are all still in Hoboken, and I without them. The machine I used to make my morning espresso is probably what I miss the most.
I arrived in my expatriate home with the equivalent of a blank easel and a command to, somehow, read it.
Some of my time is spent emulating the life I appreciated months ago. My friends within driving distance see me, occasionally. Perhaps once every two to three weeks. I still host parties, but the guest list is severely restricted and the itinerary even moreso.
What I have found is a crushing sense of obligation to that easel. As I count the hours from each day to the next, wondering when I will be able to return to city life, I am dogged by an unconscious yet ever-present feeling that I owe the easel a good painting. That I owe myself and my spacious time something worth spending time on, that if I eventually return to Hoboken with no glorious memories of my time away, I have failed.
These thoughts are obviously nonsensical, yet they persist. In their wake, I have attempted to start several new hobbies and other methods by which to pass the time. Some of these attempts have been more successful than others.
First, I tried to learn Finnish. This was not successful.
Second, I began actually reading the books that I was assigned to read last spring in HLI 316 Science Fiction. Some of them are quite good; I am currently about halfway through Neuromancer and highly recommend it.
Third, I began to trawl through old media. As an avid fan of history, consuming old media is one of my favorite ways to see the world through the eyes of people in the past. The New York Times wrote in February of this year that modern society is experiencing an “age of decadence” — that the “story of the West in the 21st century is one of stalemate and stagnation,” owing to the slow failure of Western institutions as well as the inability of Western culture to progress beyond entrenched ideas and established norms. From this perspective, post-Cold War American history becomes a strikingly linear tale. I recently acquired a box full of three years’ worth of The New Yorker (my second favorite magazine, behind Harper’s) issues. In attempting to assemble a coherent narrative of the 21st century, I can draw a straight line between a 2014 New Yorker article detailing the rise of fascism in Russia and this screenshot from a late-night comedy show in 2000 (in the lead-up to the 2000 presidential election) which has aged like white wine:
Forth, I sleep about sixteen hours per day.
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