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.