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this blog will no longer be updated.

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Persephone, trying to flirt: so… do you come here often?

Hades: …This is my house.

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journal entry: it’s now november

what a summer! I mean it’s November now which means autumn is basically over as well but here we are. this blog always feels like a bit of an afterthought but I feel like it’s still important. A few updates: I turned 23 (which is just so odd), I moved again, I adopted two kitties (Jane and Lizzie, loves of my life), I joined a regular game night, I joined a D&D group and for the first time really since graduating I’ve found a community. The hardest part about post-grad life is that after having your closest friends within walking distance, suddenly you’re all spread out and even the ones who don’t live far are hard to spend time with due to work schedules and travel schedules and maybe it’s just my group of friends but it’s no longer odd to see my closest friends only a few times a year.

Let me tell you about the incredible thing that has made all of that so much easier: the phone. I still text and snapchat and message my friends a lot. It’s a great way to send things and make plans and share memes, but I also have a core group of friends I can call up and talk to. It’s like hanging out except I can’t hug them. My best friend erin and I call each other so much that her phone now suggests it at 5 PM when I normally get off work. I feel like it’s such an underrated thing for our generation but it’s such a simple way to connect. I have a lot of friends with phone anxiety and who don’t really like it, and that’s cool, that’s there thing, but the ease of being able to have a friendly voice on the other end is so comforting. I think we should bring it back.

Having regular meetings with friends is also great. My standing game night and d&d group has brought stability to my social interactions and I can now count on seeing friends twice a week without having to plan something. Gosh, planning things is about as hard as actually socially interacting.

So in many ways I’m so so happy. I have two poems being published next year. I have a good job, Igreat friends, a loving family, two adorable kitties… my life is actually kind of stable.

But I don’t know where it’s headed. For the first time since I was six, I don’t know what I want out of life. And that’s left me kind of floating when I want to be swimming. I have plans to talk through it with my mentors and friends, so I’m hoping that will help, but it’s also about accepting that taking it one day at a time is okay for right now. The days are pretty good. College feels so close now and yet so far. It’s hard to believe it’s been a year and a half. I’m so grateful for everything Washington College gave me and continues to do, and I think I’m ready to move forward.

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journal entry: looking ahead

it’s been almost a year since graduation. in ten days i’ll be going back to chestertown to watch as friends graduate and indulge in some of my favourite chestertown treats. it’s been a whirlwind of a year since graduating. i’ve lived in two different places, had three roommates, two jobs, and thankfully i live close enough to my family that i had a support network that carried me through.

against my better judgement, i deleted my last update post. i could go into the reasons why, but it essentially boiled down to bureaucratic tape that i am no longer tangled up in. it was a great first job, i learned a lot in eight months about offices, about process, and about myself. the most important thing i learned was how necessary it is for me to be a part of a community. small companies are great when you’re in the industry, but as an admin, it was important for me to find a team of people i could learn from, people who would support me, people who would appreciate me.

and i found it! i’m on a team of five core admins, all women, all empowering, and all so much fun to be around. i can tell that the staff we support appreciates us and all we do and even on days where i just want to go back to bed because it’s so warm and comfy and i’m so sleepy, i don’t. because i have things to do. it’s weird sometimes that you don’t know how much you’re missing until you have it.

for those getting ready to graduate i want to emphasize important looking at the culture of a company is when looking at jobs. you can be doing exactly what you’ve always wanted at the company of your dreams, but if the people around you aren’t your people, it’s not worth it.

for those getting ready to graduate with arts degrees, read this article.  don’t let anyone make you feel guilty for taking a job to pay the bills. it may benefit you more than you imagine.

from this point on, you and your peers will be at varying places in your life. some of you will be getting married, some will be working high powered jobs, some will be living at home, some will be travelling the world, some will be having kids, some will be doing things you can’t possibly imagine doing but that’s okay. life moves differently for everyone. the kindest thing you can do is refuse to compare yourself to other people and support your friends at whatever place they’re at.

a lot of people talk about missing college; that you’re leaving some of your best days behind you, but that’s not the whole story. i miss college for its seemingly endless resources and free events, for its proximity to friends, and for the things i got to learn every day. but i don’t miss papers. i don’t miss the 24/7 anxiety that i’m not doing something i should. i don’t miss the rollercoaster of emotions that come when you combine stress, no sleep, mediocre food, and a thousand other kids feeling the exact same way. college was great, but there are also great things ahead.

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“the thing about mental illness is sometimes I try to find the bottom turtle, but that doesn’t work because it’s turtles all the way down

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from Zig-Zag Girl, Brenna Twohy

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journal entry: the first weekend

summer is almost over and this is the first time in four years I won’t be at washington college in the last week of august.

this weekend all my friends who are still at wac finish moving into their dorms, though most of them are there already. this weekend I move into my first townhome. it feels like a much bigger step than the 3 month lease on the dingy apartment I signed back in may. it feels much more... adult. my stuff will be out of storage for the first time in almost three years. and all of my belongings will be in one place. no choosing what to leave at home, what to leave in storage, and what to bring with me. my books are all together. I have various utilities in my name and rent to pay. it’s a new beginning.

and I miss washington college so much. those first couple weekends are always my favourite. you get to see friends you haven’t seen all summer, throw get togethers, attend start of semester activities like club fair and campus picnic. and the campus is so beautiful in the late summer early fall. all my best memories happen around then. that part of my life is over and that’s still hard to think about. I can go back and visit, sure, but it’s not the same.

don’t get me wrong, I’m super excited about this chapter in my life, but it’s also hard and scary and a little lonely at times. there’s something about your friends living so close that’s easy to get used to and hard to leave behind. 

happy moving to all the students! take advantage of everything washington college has to offer you because believe me, you won’t regret it.

best, olivia

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A story that may have relevance for others, or then again, maybe not:

When I was in college, about ten or so years ago, I was a history major. I wanted to learn to dance, so I joined a swing dance club on campus. To my surprise, this club had about twice as many men as women (in high school, the last time I’d tried dancing, the ratio had gone the other way–lots of girls, and boys only that you could drag by their ears).

But apparently, there had been some kind of word spread specifically to the STEM guys that dance was a way that they could meet girls.

So anyway. I joined the swing dance club, and met a few guys. And at one point, when socializing with the guys outside of dance class, one of them asked me what my research was on. (I had already established that I was an honors history student doing a thesis, just as he had established that he was an honors… I’m not sure if he was CS or Math, but it was one of those.)

So I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my research. Now, to be clear, an honors senior thesis, while nothing like what a graduate student would do, was still fairly in-depth. I had to translate primary sources from the original late-Classical Latin. (My professor said, basically, that while there were plenty of translations of my source material, that I’d only be able to comfortably trust them if I had at least made a stab at a translation of my own. And he was right.) And there was so much secondary material, often contradictory, that I had been carefully sorting through.

But I was able to sift it into a three-sentence summary of my senior thesis work, you know, as one does.

So I gave him that summary, and then asked–since he was also an undergraduate senior doing an honors thesis–what his research was on.

“Oh,” he said, “you wouldn’t understand it.”

Reader, I went home in a frothing rage. Because I had thought we were playing one game–a game of ‘let’s talk about what we’re passionate about!’– and he had been playing another game, which was, one-upsmanship. I had done my best to give a basically understandable brief of my research–and he had used that against me. As if my research, my painstaking translation, my digging through archives and ILLs of esoteric works, my reading of ten thousand articles in Speculum (yes, the pre-eminent medievalist journal in North America is called Speculum, I’m sorry, it’s hilarious/sad but also true), and then my effort to sum it up for him, was nothing. Because his research into some kind of algorithm or other was just too complex for my tiny brain to conceive of. Because I just couldn’t possibly understand his work.

Now, the important note here is that the person I went home to was my senior year roommate. She was a graduate student–normally undergrads and graduate students couldn’t be roommates, but we’d been friends for years, and the tenured faculty-in-residence used his powers for good and permitted us to be roommates that year. Anyway. My senior year roommate was basically… in retrospect I think possibly an avatar of Athena. She was six feet tall, blonde, attractive in a muscular athletic way, a rock climber and racquetball player, sweet but sharp, extremely socially awkward, exceptionally kind even when it cost her to be kind, and an incredibly brilliant computer science major who spent most of her time working on extremely complicated mathematical algorithms. (Yes, I was a little in love with her, why do you ask? But she was as straight as a length of rope, and is now happily married, and so am I, so it worked out.)

(Still, yes, she is my mental image of Athena, to this day.)

Anyway, I came home in a frothing rage to my roommate, the Athena avatar. And I said, “He made me feel like such an idiot, that I could sum up my research to him but his research was just too smart for stupid little me.”

And she shut her book, and smiled at me, with her dark eyes and her high cheekbones and her bright hair, and said, “If he can’t explain his research to you, then he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.”

Now I hesitated, because I’d be in college long enough to have sort of bought into the ridiculous idea that if you couldn’t dazzle them with your brilliance, you should baffle them with your bullshit. But she said, “Look, I’ve been doing work on computer science algorithms that have significantly complicated mathematical underpinnings. What do I do?”

And I said, “Genetic algorithms–that is, self-optimizing algorithms–for prioritization, specifically for scheduling.”

“Right,” she said. “You couldn’t code them because you’re not a computer scientist or a mathematician. But you can understand what I do. If someone can’t explain it like that, it isn’t a problem with you as a person. It’s a problem with them. They either don’t understand it as well as they think they do–or they want to make you feel inferior. And neither is a positive thing.”

So. There.

If you are looking into something and have a question, and someone treats you like an idiot for not understanding right away… here is what I have to say: maybe it isn’t you who is the idiot.

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no offense but money would solve literally every single one of my problems. like all of them. i dont have a single problem that money wouldnt immediately solve

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I, for one, like Roman numerals.

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journal entry: thoughts on graduation

its been a little over a week since I graduated from washington college. that feels really weird to say, especially on this blog. I don’t think any of you have been following from the beginning, back when I got accepted, back when I was posting my thoughts on graduating high school... and here I am, four years later and so much has changed.

I owe so much to washington college. I learned so much both inside the classroom and outside it. I have friends I already miss. I have professors I’m excited to keep in touch with. I have a degree that I know has prepared me for the world outside a place I called home. 

four years ago, I didn’t cry at graduation. honestly, I was glad to be rid of high school. I had a lot of social problems and lacked a passion for the kinds of things I was learning. I felt kind of lost. the difference between then and now is astounding. I had to hold myself together as I walked up the steps on the green. if I’m being honest, I’m still not sure it’s entirely hit me that I don’t get to go back in august. I’m looking for jobs still, but I have my own apartment (that I share with another wac alum) and I’m making my way in the real world and I’m not as scared because of washington college. our commencement speaker talked a lot about how it’s okay to not entirely know what you’re doing right now, that things will work out. I’ve got a great community of family and friends and most of them are part of goose nation.

thanks wac, for everything. especially this blog. which, by the way, isn’t going away just because I’ve graduated. I want to post more of the things I didn’t have time to say, and the things that have yet to come.

cheers! olivia

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When you take a 10 minute writing break and it accidentally lasts six months

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