Home Away From Home

No, this is not some philosophical insanity about where your home is or touchy feely piece about being far away from home.

I happen to live in Hacienda Heights, California. For the non-locals, that’s about 30 minutes drive southwest of Harvey Mudd. San Gabriel Valley region. As such, my perspective on the whole living in the dorms and away from my home and family is pretty lightweight. In fact I go back at least once a month since I have duties running Powerpoint for my church.

Since the school year has ended, the dorms shut down for everyone except the summer researchers and Summer Math kids. Summer Math is an opportunity to take your entire sophomore year of math in about six weeks. I personally thought it was intense, awesome, but not for everyone. Especially if you mess up your sleep schedule on Monday and have to wait until the weekend to reset it. Back to my topic, the dorms shut down. So, everyone has to move somewhere else. For me, that was back home to Hacienda Heights. For others, it was off to apartment for jobs or internships or summer camps.

It’s a weird transition moving back. One of the best things about college, at least for me, is the freedom; the ability to set your own timetable, your own rules, and reap what you sow. As I discussed in a previous post, you have to set priorities about how you spend your time. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), Harvey Mudd College is not a place where you can have it all; unless you’re some weird mutated genius protégée who can do all the homework for all the classes for the whole the week in one hour.

Coming back home to where you live by the rules of your parents, the bills, the chores, the siblings, and of course no more college high-speed internet, which I might add is very important for some of us, can be a little jarring. I can’t stay up until midnight anymore, although that’s from the requirement I wake up at around 6am for work. I can’t just walk down the hall and check out what the lounge is doing. I can’t take a bike ride down to the Motley or see a performance from an orchestra.

On the other hand, it’s back to the real world. Yes, there are such things as rising gas prices; and they’re rising like WHOA. There’s this thing called money which you’ve been hemorrhaging to pay for tuition that comes in handy for stuff like food and electricity bills. Oh right, and you will not live perpetually in a world where all your friends live about a five minute walk away. Sorry. And no more F&M means you have to vacuum the house regularly.

So, I’d have to say it’s a blessing and a curse. I get to do more real world stuff like make money for a change and learn to cook, but I can’t chill at 2am in the lounge watching people get drunk. Wait, that’s a plus as well.