A Disconcerting Uplifting Feeling

Yeah, down by the river, down by the banks of the river Charles,
That's where you'll find me, along with the lovers, fruggers, and thieves.
Well I love that dirty water,
Oh, Boston, you're my home.

--The Standells, "Dirty Water"

So I have a big announcement! This is the first (but certainly not the last) blog entry that I'm writing from campus! More specifically, from the very nice but vertigo-inducing Stata Center, which to me looks like a massive pile of crushed McDonald's burger boxes. Asthetics aside, it's a great building for grad students...it has a gym, a cafetria, library facilities, common areas, about a hundred winding staircases, a complete lack of square angles, and luckily for the purposes of this blog, abundant wireless access! I guess that's not so impressive though, since the campus bars also have high-speed wireless access points (but no hard liquor).

I've only been back for a couple of days, but I'm already very concerned about how I'm feeling about the city and the school...I'm feeling very, very good. The problem is that I spent so much time and energy worrying that I'd hate grad school again, and now I'm worried that all the worrying was in vain.

It's very strange feeling happy and at-ease in this city...so strange, that I almost feel afraid and not-at-ease. There are still plenty of things that I know will stress me out, like the workload in the lab and the not being able to watch Hockey Night in Canada every week. But the lack of HNIC will probably make Annie happy, which will make me happy and therefore not stressed out. And who knows, maybe learning how to build a laser (especially a frequency-domain modelocking laser...oooohhhh, sexy) will actually be good for me. For those of you who don't know, I'm totally joking when I say that I play with lasers all day. I actually don't know anything about lasers, other than the fact that you shouldn't stick your hand in front of the 10-Watt pump beam, and that you need to kick a 5-femtosecond Titanium-Sapphire laser to get it to start pulsing. I'm not kidding about either of those two things. But now I'm supposed to learn a bit more than "fire is hot" and "kicking is good", which was temporarily stressing me out, but upon more reflection it will probably be fine.

I don't know what's different this time...maybe it's that I've got more of a big picture view of the world now, so I realize that OCT isn't the most important thing in the universe. And maybe it's because I've learned to say "no" to my advisor (already did it once last week...you are officially reading the blog of the person who WON'T be TA'ing nonlinear optics this term!). Or maybe it's because when I looked out at the skyline as I was taking the T from Boston into Cambridge, I realized that this really is a beautiful and unique city, and I'm enormously lucky and blessed to have a second chance at things here.

Whatever the reason, I'm happy, and I know things can change but it really does feel different this time. Maybe this is one entry to keep in the archives, so I can look back on it in 8 months and say "what the hell was I thinking????" :)

Do you have the time to listen to me whine

About nothing and everything all at once?

I am one of those melodramatic fools,

Neurotic to the bone, no doubt about it.

--Green Day, "Basket Case"