Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

After the Rush Hour

A sober­ing flash­back to times past: a long week­end spent in the com­pany of old friends, and now just hours later, back in the Big Empty, listen­ing to the soundtrack that shaped my musical life more than six or seven years ago, and sud­denly, everything’s very ser­i­ous once again. No more drink­ing, no more rav­ing — back to the books; facing up to the harsh real­ity of why we’re here, once all the rev­elry is done. Time to once again try to face this mon­strous chal­lenge of academia.

Uni is a new world, and it can seem that everything in it is geared to high­light­ing that fact — that it is com­pletely dif­fer­ent from any­thing exper­i­enced thus far. Our past lives of sec­ond­ary edu­ca­tion — or whatever — are left behind for this one, and they become very sep­ar­ate: Uni time, and hol­i­day time, where hol­i­days are a return to the old world. But when they come together, we have this strange mer­ger; these rare moments of refresh­ing famili­ar­ity when two very dif­fer­ent states cross over — mix in lots of alco­hol, and sud­denly when they sep­ar­ate out once again, and we’re left with the here-and-now, the very real, very present New, it’s some­thing of a rude awaken­ing. And now once again the friends are dis­tant, in some remote place; the worlds diver­gent again.

I think that’s why it feels so euphoric at the time, because we are made to think that we’ve lost this past — that it is just that: the past — but when we’re reminded in such an overt way that we still have these con­nec­tions and these friends and these exper­i­ences, it’s a huge sub­con­scious jolt. But one for which I am very grateful.

“Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.” –Yeats