This is my last post.
I know, I know, it's days after my graduation, technically I probably shouldn't even be posting right now, but I wanted a better sense of closure than I really provided in my last post. For the past two and a half years, this blog has been a big part of my life — I know that for you, dear readers, it probably hasn't been more than a set of occasionally diverting words on a page, but you're also not the ones who have spent two and a half years thinking, "Oh, I could blog about this!" And you know what, I like to think I've left my mark — mostly in the fact that some of my ridiculous tags show up in the "most used tags" thing on the sidebar over there.
Writing for you has been a blast, ducklings, even if most of the time I don't actually know if anyone is even reading this. (If you have been, though, and you'd like to continue reading, feel free to keep up with my twitter, @alasallama. If I set up another blog, I’ll put it in my twitter bio.)
More than that, though, my four years at Wesleyan have meant a lot to me. But you know what, even that sounds like too much of an understatement. Certain songs mean a lot to me. Todd VanDerWerff’s reviews of season 3 of Community mean a lot to me. When friends of mine specifically seek me out to talk, it means a lot to me. Wesleyan, in contrast, has structured the past four years of my life. I have lived in Wesleyan, made friends with Wesleyan students, eaten at Wesleyan, taken classes at Wesleyan, worked at Wesleyan, been influenced by Wesleyan faculty and staff, watched plays that were funded by Wesleyan and performed in Wesleyan buildings, railed at Wesleyan policies, applied for internships through Wesleyan. For better or for worse, Wesleyan was my world, even when I was at home for break. And now, it is a place that used to be my world.
So what do I say to wrap up something like that? It’s been two days since graduation, and I’m not entirely sure I know. For a while, I thought about taking all the buildings on campus, and listing the best memories I have from each of them. Or maybe, I thought, I would take the question they asked the senior commencement speaker applicants to answer — “What has your Wesleyan experience meant to you?”, in a neat 200-250 word package — and write my own spin on it, like the commencement speech I could have given if I had bothered applying to be a commencement speaker in the first place.
And I started writing that, and then I started again, and then I started again, and then I gave up for a little while and went to sulk on the sofa and drink tea and try not to cough up most of my lungs, and then I deleted most of what I’d written and wrote other stuff about Wes being my world and my difficulty summing that up in prose form, which has gotten me this far.
[Under the cut: I try to figure out this whole "closure" thing. Also, pictures of fluffy animals.]
