The Road Less Traveled

Of all days to not carry my camera, I left it at home today.  I suppose these images will have to be stored inside my head instead.  The sun finally came out today, so I figured it would be nice to take a break from studying, venture outside, and get some fresh air.  

It’s amazing what you can discover when you pull your head out of the books and take a look at your surroundings.  I have been here for 3.5 months now, and I still find new and amazing things about this city every day.  Yale is absolutely beautiful.  Sometimes, walking around this place feels like a dream.  The buildings look like structures you might see in a movie, not someplace actual and tangible.

I started off the day with brunch at one of the undergraduate residential colleges.  The undergrads here are split up into different colleges the way the kids at Hogwarts are split up into Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, etc. (I know….I am a nerd….whatever).   The colleges are hidden from the streets by large walls and gates, so from the outside, there really isn’t much to behold.  Once you walk through the gates, however, you enter a different world.  The buildings are massive, and ornate, and resemble castles more so than dorms.  Sometimes you have to suck in your breath and pinch yourself just to make sure that the vision before you is real.  

 After brunch, I did something I have been wanting to do since I first arrived here, but never got around to it.  I walked through the Grove Street Cemetery.  I know it sounds creepy, but it’s actually quite beautiful.  The first burial took place in 1797, and some of the tombstones are so old and weathered that it is impossible to discern who they belong to.  The cemetery is designed to incorporate family plots, rather than random grave sites, so entire families lie together.  The tombstones range from the massive and ornate to the barely visible.  I can only imagine how breathtaking this place would look covered in a blanket of snow.  

Post cemetery, I met up with my roommate at Sterling Memorial Library.  The libraries at this school are phenomenal.  It’s actually difficult to study inside them because I keep looking around at the architecture and artwork instead of focusing on my books.  

I may have not accomplished a lot today in terms of studying, but I definitely learned something;  

At any given moment, there is beauty standing right in front of you.  All you have to do is open your eyes.

Eat, sleep, STUDY.  Eat, sleep, STUDY.  That’s all I have been doing for the past 6 days.  7 more days to go! It has been raining really hard here, so the sky has been gloomy and gray.  Couple that with the time change and the days sort of meld into the nights.  It’s hard to differentiate between the two sometimes.

Last night, it started raining so hard that I swore our ceiling was going to cave in, and what do you know…..it did!  It didn’t exactly come crashing down, but there is now  a hole large enough to let significant amounts of water through.   

The brunt of this burden was actually faced by my roommate.  The hole is in her bedroom, over her bed….over the spot where her head rests on her pillow, to be exact.  I was sleeping when the incident happened, so I missed the screaming, the  3 am phone call to the management and the visit from the maintenance man.  It wasn’t until this morning when I saw the buckets and heard the dripping that I figured out what had taken place.  

My poor roommate.  She has been suffering through the same eat, sleep, STUDY cycle that I have.  Only now, the sleep part of her cycle has been disrupted because she can’t sleep in her room for the next few days.  When it rains, it really does pour…and sometimes it lands on your face.

I’ve seen snow before, but somehow this feels different.  Usually when I see snow, its because I have driven 8 hrs to go snowboarding.  This time, it was there when I looked outside my kitchen window this morning.  I got so excited, I called my parents and then went outside to take pictures.  My first, real, Connecticut snow!  

Prior to going home for Thanksgiving, I was feeling really burnt out, and honestly quite miserable.  Life in New Haven had sort of hit a wall.  I was scrambling to try and get over it, but I seemed to keep losing my footing.  Then I went home, and it felt like someone had plugged me into an electrical outlet.  I felt recharged.  I think I just needed to be away for a while in order to gain a fresh perspective.  Now that I am back at school, its been nothing but homework assignments, final projects and exams.  The midnight oil has been burning every night for the past week, and will continue to do so until I am done on December 19th.  Despite all the work though, I am excited and happy.  I came back to Yale with the same bright-eyed fresh outlook that I had when I first got here in September.  Only this time I am armed with a bit more experience and wisdom.

I’m not sure what my time here is going to throw at me, but whatever it is….I’m ready.

Bring it!