Notes from a greyhound station in the Adirondacks

So that’s it, I’m done, c’est finit, no more Plattsburgh, probably forever. This afternoon I took my last exam here, I packed up the last of my things and now I’m sat in a coach station fused onto the side of a hotel, waiting for my midnight bus to take me away from upstate New York and back down to Massachusetts. Hard to believe that it’s been a solid ten months since I left England to come here now, hard to comprehend just how many days I’ve spent in this town, the people I’ve met, the ways we passed the time. Hard to do anything right now in this balmy heat; even nature itself is pleased to see me leave, the sun blaring all day and blanketing the region in humidity tonight. All of my clothes are packed away and I’m sat here, grossly overdressed in a long-sleeve T shirt and jeans, wool jacket and wool flat cap, wishing it would rain again. Rain like it has done almost every day these final two weeks when I’ve yearned for sunshine, but no matter what the weather is it seems I’m destined to be drenched.

It was hard to leave tonight. Much harder than I expected it to be; much of my time here has been spent with indifference to the people and the place, but of course when you go to leave somewhere people make their feelings apparent. Hugs, handshakes, kind words and melancholy smiles were shared as I looked at my room, now completely lacking any kind of personality I’d once tried to grant upon it. It’s a strange feeling, seeing a place you’ve spent months of your life living in suddenly be wiped clean, as if you were never there in the first place, and then to think of how many people have done that before I have, how many backs have lain upon the bed, how many shirts hung within the curtained wardrobes, you feel insignificant; the brick walls of the dormitory have stood for fifty years before I arrived and will stand for many years to come, they were here before I was born and may last longer than me, too. Now though I sit here in the coach station, a chapter of my life shut.

With it being the last time I’ll probably ever be in Plattsburgh I’d considered doing something to my roommate. Nothing major, but a prank of some sort: a note about how I feel about him or hide/take something of his. Of all of the factors here my roommate has been the most negative throughout; he’s rude, antisocial, has no manners, and is constantly chewing on something. If it weren’t for him I feel as though I would’ve been a good deal more social, I know for a fact that a lot of the friends I’d made weren’t comfortable coming to visit me in my dorm because of him. I wanted some kind of payback, everybody in the building was very uncomfortable with him around which made it feel much more deserved, vindicated almost, but I didn’t do it. These last few nights I’ve had untold trouble sleeping, and as I lay there mulling over whatever came into my mind it dawned on me that I hated what I’d become. I used to pride myself on the fact that I hated no one, yet here I was so twisted with animosity that I was ready to steal from this person just because I didn’t like them. He’s already messed up enough, I decided, I’ll just leave him be. When I said goodbye tonight he just looked at me, but I still felt the better man inside, I’d done the right thing.

Like so many times over the last three years, I find myself sat in a Greyhound station once again. The one in Plattsburgh is little more than a 10’ x 10’ waiting room in a hotel. I get here early, always do. Greyhound buses deliberately overbook and make no qualms about it, so if you get here late and it’s a busy day there’s a good chance you’re not getting on the bus and won’t be refunded for it, so I like to be prepared. I don’t have the money to be buying new tickets on the day. There’s no sound other than the whirr of the refrigerated vending machines and as I sit here I find myself with the urge to take out my guitar and play, but I’m no Robert Johnson and these aren’t my crossroads, and chances are the staff working the night shift are already pissed off about being here enough, they don’t need me adding musical frustration to their evenings. Instead I took out my laptop and started hammering out whatever thoughts came into my mind, as you can see here. It helps pass the time and the patter of the keys keeps me sane. Not like there’s anybody here to talk to, after all.

Having made the trip up to Plattsburgh by coach a few times I know very well just how beautiful the Adirondacks are, but I’m much more content to be travelling at night, when it’s too dark to see and I can sleep, than at day. I’m a nervy passenger at the best of times and travelling on mountain roads does not do much for my manner. When I travelled down to Boston in March the mountains were still very much covered in snow with occasional snow showers as we passed through them, and to be able to see your coach swaying and shifting as we’d travel along mountain roads with drops to the sides really shot my nerves badly. I’m a dependable person in a crisis, but I don’t like being in a situation like that where, though nothing happened, you can think of nothing else. The only experience I’ve had that’s comparable is when I flight I was on hit turbulence so rough that the plane just dropped for a few seconds. Going from being on a bumpy plane ride to the blood rushing from your legs as if you’d jumped off a ledge leaves you paralysed with fear because there’s nothing you can do, you just have to sit there and hope for the best.

Though obviously it’s not evident on here because I never got around to writing here, much of my time up in Plattsburgh has felt negative, and with the benefit of hindsight I’m starting to think that’s a little unfair. I’ve had trouble since I got here, with everything from money to visas, which will always put a downer on things, but there’s plenty of good that can be taken from these ten months, too. I’ve broadened my horizons, learnt about subjects I never would’ve had the opportunity to study back home, met lots and lots of new people, become more mature. Most importantly though is I’ve proven to myself I can do this. I can go out into a foreign country completely on my own and live for a long period of time, and not just fall apart. It may not be the same as holding down a job and paying the rent but it’s a stepping stone to that, I can tell I’ve become so much more mature simply by being here, so much more responsible, productive, just simply more adult. No matter how many negatives there have been, how many shit nights or days spent on my own, I’ve gained enough that all the negatives are cancelled out instantly. I might be a few years behind my peers, but I’m finally starting to feel as though I’m growing up.

12/05/2011

I’m sat in my room here in Plattsburgh. Today I had my final two classes here; I have finals next week but I’ll never be going to a classroom at Plattsburgh to learn ever again, and everything is suddenly starting to feel so very final. I’m starting to see more and more people walking around with suitcases, the international student office have been in touch with me to fill out some transcript requests, and the student union-ran events are very thin in number now. It’s something that can be seen in the very decoration of my part of my room, the walls now bare and the desk cleared in place of colour and clutter. My rucksack is standing up next to the closet, still hollow apart from the foundation of a few shirts better suited to winter tightly packed together at the very bottom. It’s waiting for me to stuff it to the brim, pack my life away and make my exit. Maybe I’ll take a picture of the room the day I leave, completely devoid, I don’t know yet.

Though I’m very, very ready to leave Plattsburgh now, these last two weeks have left me full of melancholy. This is a chapter of my life now, one that is all but complete, and though I complain about being here a lot it’s had its positives, too. There are the simple things that you can do anywhere, like getting into the routine of going to the meal hall every morning after my 9am class to eat a bagel and drink coffee whilst I read a few chapters of whatever book I was working on at the time (currently les miserables), the hours I’d spend in the audio labs doing extra work on projects just because I loved doing that kind of work, or even just walking around and seeing people you know. There’s plenty of things to complain about, but then again there are always plenty of things to complain about, it’s in our nature to find things we don’t like and complain about them, as a species we’re terrible at being content with things.

One thing that’s really gotten to me over the last two weeks is the fact that it’s only just now that I’m making connections with people. Not in the business sense, just the friendship sense. The whole of this semester I’ve been too much of a loner and a recluse, partly because I just wanted to get the whole thing over and done with already, partly because my roommate is such a freak that he’s drained the life out of me. Last semester I stopped talking to a lot of the people I was friends with because of events that happened on my birthday - we were meant to go to a bunch of house parties and they ditched me before I’d even left my room, and though they said they’d just forgotten I still took it hard, especially because they never apologised; I didn’t both with them much after then and it was the first time I’d really started to think that I was done with this place. Fast forward to now, with not even seven full days left here, and I’ve finally started making new friends through being involved with a club and just being more outgoing in my hall. These are people I like, and would want to hang out with, which is a sad irony because there’s a very strong chance that I’m not going to see most of them ever again. I spend the majority of my time here playing the outsider and then once I get acceptance within a social clique I have to leave soon after. It’s my kind of luck, been that way as long as I can remember, and I can make excuses about it as long as I like but really it’s down to me, I’ve improved a lot over the last 4 years but at the end of the day I’m still awkward, I’m still shy, I’m still antisocial. There’s still a long way to go, but at least I’m going.

Plattsburgh has given me things though. It’s given me a sense of drive that I was missing in the past. I’ve developed a ‘do it now’ attitude when I get things like projects or papers to write, rather than leaving them until the last minute. I’ve started taking my readings and studying much more seriously, and the results are apparent. Just today I got an essay back with the note ‘nothing here to criticise’. I don’t necessarily like the class or the professor, but it’s a sign that the methods I’m now practicing are working. I can tell my writing’s improved; I’m planning more, I’m editing more, and I’m composing better, and it’s all paying off when combined. I daren’t even look at the work on my blog from early 2009, before I went to university, but I’ve always been like that, I hate everything I create after a while. Just like doing a ‘365 project’ really helped my compositional and creative skills with a camera, university essays (and looking into the methodology of writing such things) have unquestionably helped my penmanship.

This has been more of a rant than anything else. I felt the urge to write, so I sat down and started typing, so it’s probably not much of a read, but there you go. Also this is very close to my target post length. I decided that I want this blog to be around 1000 words per post; not too short, not too long. Sorry for wasting your time if you read all of this.

Well this didn’t go to plan

It’s been a while, huh. The best part of ten months in fact, all the bohemian wishes of grandeur as I chronicled my adventures abroad seemed to have faded away. There are two reasons for this: neglecting all of my writings and the routine of daily life. For whatever reasons my writing habits went into a lull in late August. It’s most evident in my journal (though you’re not going to get to see that) where, for example, I wrote around 30 pages of text in my little black moleskine between July and thanksgiving in November, then since thanksgiving until now I’ve written somewhere around 175 pages – from 6 pages a month to 35 pages a month. Similarly with my bluepig blog, where there’s a vast gap between July and November, where I started writing regularly again. The routine of day-to-day life takes the edge away from the freshness of experience a year at a foreign university; eventually it stops feeling foreign altogether, something that was probably sped up because I’ve spent time over here before. At least now I’ve dragged myself back out of that marsh and am writing regularly again.

Plattsburgh has been a very mixed experience, some true highs and some painful lows. At first I was going out to parties regularly with a gang of other exchange students, but the police in a small town like this really don’t have anything better to do than to harass the students in their houses, which soured the whole thing. Add to that the real bane of my alcohol-related life: light beer. I can’t get drunk on light beer, I can’t even get tipsy on the stuff, I could drink 10 and still be stone cold sober, and because I’m not too keen on spirits and that’s all American students drink, I was pretty much stuck. So I gave it up, no more alcohol in the US, no more house parties.

I went home in December for Christmas to see my family and friends. Had a complete nightmare in getting home – all flights to Heathrow were cancelled which meant I was stranded in Montreal for three days. British Airways put me up in a hotel, so it wasn’t too rough, but my flight had to be rearranged, leading to me flying to both Miami and Paris, where I had a 9 hour layover before I could finally fly to Manchester and go home. It was exhausting, and made me pretty sick for around two weeks once I got home.

My blogging has been pretty limited in the past. I love the bluepig blog, which is now 2 years old and still going strong (I’ve got a few ideas that may very well pop up over the coming months, depending on where I end up) but it’s not necessarily my writing. In my mind I see bluepig as a photography blog with some minor travel writing included, seldom in detail, though since I’ve changed from writing directly onto the blog as the words come to me to writing on Microsoft word and editing/redrafting before I publish I feel as though my work has gotten better. My work’s gotten more professional in my academic writing too; I guess I’m finally growing up as a writer. Then last night I came across this:

It’s something I needed to see. So often I’ve felt like I should give up this whole blogging stuff due to feelings of inadequacy, even though I’ve seen the mantra of ‘the only way you get good at writing is by reading and writing a lot’ sometimes you don’t believe it. It takes a lot of willpower to say ‘even though I don’t like the way I write right now, if I carry on I’ll get better’ but it’s true, and that’s what I’m going to try and do from now on.

For a while now I’ve been considering starting up a new blog; a more personal blog where I write about what I’ve been up to, just day-to-day life wherever I’m living at the time. Life’s an adventure after all, in theory there’ll be plenty to write about if only I look for it. So stick the two together, a need to write more often and wanting to start a new blog, why not start using this one again? I’m not going to start properly for a couple of weeks; I’m entering the last days of my semester here so I’ve got a bunch of things to deal with as it is, like my final exams, packing up and leaving, and sorting out a flight home too, but it’s my hope that this blog can become a weekly-posting thing, with writing in long-form, rather than the short snippets I do on bluepig. Here’s to hoping.