Mail Room

There’s a rumor going around that Eugene is going to lose a post office.  Not just any post office, but the one I go to, University Station.

No big deal, right?  There are other POs in town, even quite nearby.  In fact, I now live closer to the main station than to University Station.  No one is going to be prevented from sending and receiving their mail, in no small part because, as Obama recently reminded us, there are many private companies now willing to take part in that transaction who are “doing just fine.”  Yep, “it’s the post office that’s always having problems.”

Be that as it may, I would be greatly saddened if University Station is closed.  Fundamentally, I think that every university should have a mail room.  In fact, it surprised me to find that the University of Oregon had a post office, not a mail room, when I arrived, but I guess there’s a matter of scale that makes the mail room at Oberlin viable, and that at Oregon a post office (Though perhaps the problem lies somewhere in that inequality).

The mail room of a university or college serves its students tirelessly, providing a stable address for those orbiting campus.  It is a place for paying first bills.  It’s where really good things happen when you’ve been away from home for a while – a care package arrives, or just a postcard, when you thought you had been forgotten.  It’s a portal to a place far away.

Amongst the little cubbies or up at the window, you have the sense of really being in a physical place.  You see the postman heft a box of letters dropped into the slot for the 1:45 pick up.  You’ve written on paper with pen, folded that paper, tucked it into an envelope, and licked the envelope closed.  Now you lean against the counter with the envelope in hand and ask for stamps.  You look in the folder proffered – you select from the objects at hand.  You’ll drop your letter in the empty box, they’ll wheel it out with the 5:30 mail.

Perhaps it’s a relic of things past, but I think that’s why it’s so valuable.  There’s no scrolling through options, imagining the shapes and sizes and weights of things.  Here, things are measured, they’re displayed in their corporeality.  Keys are turned and doors are opened, objects are filed and sorted.  That’s not to deny the electronic scale or scanner, but it is to say thanks for the man behind the counter, wearing his blue ringer polo shirt, affixing that label to that package.

I think students need to have a place so connected to objects, since many times they’re living a life so overstuffed with ideas.  They need a place that is neutral in the way that government places are; where freedom of speech is practiced in a dramatically different way than in their classrooms.  They are lucky to have a place devoted to their physical connection with those far away, and a place that so effortlessly combines responsibility and spontaneity.  When all of that is at the heart of campus, it becomes an important place for chance meetings or reality checks amongst the craze of finals; when it’s that convenient it doesn’t take away time from studying or socializing.

Against the realities of the federal budget, my fondness for and belief in the importance of University Station will probably weigh naught.  Yet, for that foreign student, or for the man in the blue polo, I’m hoping that my thoughts are worth more than their weight.

Oberlin, Again

When they told me at the airport desk that I was flying standby because I had no seat reservations, I knew I’d be writing about going back to Oberlin.  It’s been so long since I blogged that they’ve entirely changed the WordPress layout, which, by the way, looks really good.  But sometimes you just have something to say, or far to much to say, and you realize that even though your last post, from two months ago, was about how long it had been since you wrote, it’s time.

I got on that plane on Thursday night, flew to Vegas, and Chicago, and finally Cleveland, where I begged my way back to Oberlin.  We drove in pretty quietly, everyone on the airport van watching the landscape for change, trying to remember what had been there last time we came that way.  Finally, past the Farm, we arrived.

Getting back was like inhabiting a memory.  In my mind, the place had become more real than the actual, alive Oberlin.  I knew where everything was (with some notable exceptions, like the A-level remodel), remembered everything, but it all just looked a little flat.  Maybe that was in part due to the fact that when I arrived, the town was still quiet.  Friday was a day of arrivals, and after I found Sam at his gas station and put down my bags at his house, I returned to Tappan to collect people.

This clumping was something I hadn’t quite experienced as a freshman, coming in for preseason and missing out on that first week of orientation friend-finding.  It’s a thrill to have a posse, though, and I thoroughly enjoyed adhering first to Melissa, and then to Tina, Phoebe, and Henry.  In the Feve by around 3, it just felt so good to be back.  The whirlwind started.

The dance party at the Sco, the dance parties/porch sits at 189, the alumni game, the trip to Chance Creek, breakfast at the Black River, stumbling into the Swing Dance, schmoozing at the art show, visiting the AJLC to use the facilities, showering, drinks at the Feve, the front lawn of Tank, softball at the Pleasant street park, the Bippy show, weirdly, partying in South, buying a sticker at the bookstore and a postcard at Ben Franklin: all over the place, reuniting.  Sleep a little, do a lot.  Miss even more.

Revealed (or rerevealed) to me:  

1. I want to do everything I ever find interesting, and am frustrated at the impossibility of that desire.
2. I know a lot of fantastic people doing amazing things, and am frustrated that I do not
   • know them better
   • keep in touch with them more frequently
3. There is a script for the reunion meeting that is a little sad and progressively harder to overcome the more you use it. Phrases often repeated:
   • Where are you now?
   • I’m in grad school/I’m going to grad school/I’m working in this amazing environmental job/I’m getting married
   • I know you look familiar, but I can’t remember what context I knew you in
   • Meet at the Feve tonight
   • Do you know where Hans is? (a representative example)
   • When did you get in?
   • What’s going on tonight?
   • and my repeated conversations – about Eugene: how close it is to everything, how it took me a while to like it but I do now, how it’s not as rigorous as I like but you just have to make it what you want, how if you’re ever on the west coast you should visit me/I should visit you – about Oberlin: how much it feels like this weird memory that I’m inhabiting, how I’m in sensory overload, how when I was there I could deal with a lot more going on all at once but since I’ve left I no longer can be in that close proximity with that many people and be comfortable and happy, how the people even if you didn’t know them that well just feel like the kind of people you want to be with, how everyone is doing such interesting things, how I feel kind of dorky taking pictures of the buildings but I feel like I need to because they come up in my architecture classes – about the reunion: how so many people are here!, how certain particular people are not here, how amazing it is to be here, how it’s not actually my reunion but I knew that I couldn’t come next year and maybe not for some years after that and this was the last year I knew anyone graduating and plus the people in this cluster (02-04) were the people that were there when I was a freshman and I felt close to them maybe even more so than my own cluster.
4. Oberlin is beautiful, especially in the spring.  The people there are pretty amazing, and really are different from the general population of the US.

So, a mostly wonderful experience.  Even the hard parts, the not getting enough of the people I wanted to see and soak up, the occasional awkwardnesses and left-out feelings, the being excited when you’re so sleep deprived that you want to cry, even those were pretty good.  Maybe the hardest part, scheduling my plane so that I couldn’t find a ride to the airport and had to spend a lot of valuable party time asking people to borrow a car and then leaving straight from a dance party and not getting to really hug people and say goodbye – maybe even that was pretty good.

When can I go back?

letting it go too long

what do you get? way too much to actually write about.

Seeing Barak in Eugene, and being so inspired that you campaign for him for hours in the rain, snow, hail, and occasional sun. I hope I’ll write about him more once I get wireless in my…

New apartment that I moved into on Thursday and have gotten 90% organized in. Thanks to the fearless four – Renee, Jake, Truc, and Stacey – who made the move from old to new take just about four hours! Photos coming soon…

Which I didn’t take on either of my two trips to Portland this break. Trip number one, I visited Herman and Ruth, enjoyed the excellent okra stew and Herman’s amazing flatbread as well as his amazing dutch oven bread and the divine sheep/cow cheese that they shared with me. We went to Ikea and did several hours of shopping…

Which also happened somehow on trip number two, after I picked up Emily from the train station and we had an excellent lunch at Besaws, but before we drove back to Eugene along the coast, which made me wish I had gone to the coast a long time ago, and made me promise myself I’d go again soon…

but which has the fault of not always having a strong cell signal, so that a call with Stefan was cut short. We’ve made a date to re-call, though, so I’ll surely get to hear his news, as I did…

when Joe Little called out of the blue. He’s moving to D.C., so I’ll have one less reason to visit Chicago, but one more reason to visit D.C. Which I don’t have a great desire to do right now considering…

The current state of our government, and if you didn’t, like me, obsessively listen to NPR this last week, you should at least hear ;this week’s This American Life.

Anyway, this term I’m taking it easy. Just doing a practicum with Gary Moye Architect;, taking Roman Architecture and Architectural Precidents 2.0, teaching Architectural Contexts, organizing and attending the HOPES conference, and taking a short class on Graphic Statics. It will give me enough time to play some frisbee, I hope, and celebrate Ruth’s retirement, I hope, and maybe even visit Oberlin for a reunion…

And maybe, if I’m lucky, I can read some novels this semester. I hope.

Facebooked

I finally gave up and joined Facebook.

I’ve been holding out for years, but since the people that I see every day in studio kept asking me, I could no longer ignore it. I’ll admit, it’s a lot of fun, and it reminds me of just how many people I’ve met in my life.

Talking to a friend recently about all of the relationship upsets that we’ve heard about this term, I couldn’t help but muse that the proliferation of people that we’ve met in our lives makes steady relationships much more difficult for our generation. We know a lot of wonderful people – we also know a lot of people that can’t live up to our composite of all of the wonderful people that we’ve met. We’re moving around all the time, which makes it difficult for us to comprehend being set in one relationship with one person (even if that doesn’t necessarily mean in one place, it implies it).

So, just musing on the fact that I’ve taken a small step away from being here. I’m also, now, being everywhere, with everybody, at least until I get tired of it.

BTW, Studio is pretty intense, in part because everyone else is kind of freaking out about what a short time we have left. I’m just slogging along, continuing to design. Haven’t decided what media I’ll use, but I’m imagining I’ll be hand drawing, perhaps in pencil (I’d like to use some color, so I’m not sure that I won’t switch to ink; but I did some more tone rendered drawings earlier in the semester, and I really liked the way they looked).

No matter the intensity of studio, I’m planning to take Thursday off and relax with friends.

Here’s an image from this summer - it’s the drawing Michael and I did of the smoke sauna in Kiljava.

Blog Action Day

Today is blog action day, so I’m doing my part.

It’s been rough coming back to school, because all those things I learned in my undergrad are being updated. Getting my minor in Environmental Studies at Oberlin was great. I knew all about the things that were horrible with the world, and how to fix them. It was going to be tough, but if we took action right away, we were going to change our course.

I finally watched Inconvenient Truth last week, and while it was interesting, I have to say, school has been full of a lot more pressing ideas, since we didn’t take action right away. Probably the most intensely upsetting of those are presented in Stephen Meyer’s The End of the Wild. Everyone should read this book, or at least the article “Gone” from Mother Jones, which summarizes some parts of the book. As far as that goes, thank goodness for the visionaries at the Wildlands Project.

At school we’re trying to address all these extreme situations with our designs – the greatly increased problems of climate change, the massive extinction we’re undergoing, and the social inequities that result from our decisions. But, even though I think this is a great way to approach the problem, it’s not enough. I demand that those in politics, those in power realize that we do want change, and not just as a passing fad. This is real. I am disgusted that the White House just didn’t get the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, that was intended as a message to you, Mr. President. But, change can happen at the next level down, and the next.

Keep making your personal progress. The efforts we each make are worthwhile. They give us encouragement, they teach us about living within limits, they show others that this issue makes all the others – universal health care, abortion and marriage rights, education reform, whatever it is – sink or float. If we don’t have a world, or have one that is constantly racked by disasters, we don’t have any hope.

Let’s unite. I’m hopeful today.