Year 5

May 12, 2013

365 days to the date since I received my college diploma.

"I confer the degree of bachelor of [Arts] and be admitted into the company of educated men and women."

I've spent the past week trying to remember what I did during my last week as an undergrad. Everything is a blur except graduation day and the day before it. Oh, and the day after graduation is surprisingly vivid given that I hadn't sleep at all between the morning of May 12, 2012 and the evening of May 13th, 2012.

I've been listening to St. Louis' Wild 104.9 because the last half of the semester has been spent getting to know the people that I call my friends, and many of those moments we shared together have been underscored by pop music. For the next few months poppy music is going to be very sentimental.

I have worked in the same office, with mostly the same people for the last five years. Everything I know about writing, and especially about revising and editing, I owe to these people. This also includes most of what I know about baking from scratch, smiling through the worst of days, being an individual part of a team, and creating a family among your colleagues. :) (PS: That means that all grammar mistakes I ever make are not because I did not have a strong team teaching me better.)

It's interesting that I have grown to love the greater St. Louis area more in the last 9 months than in the four years before it. More interesting is how much I will miss this city. I spent four years trying to get out, and now I'm all sad and mushy about it. I look forward to being back.

365 days after graduation. I have learned, and I have grown. I made a few mistakes, and built stronger relationships. I failed some, and I won some more. Here's to the hopefulness of summer, and to another year as a post-grad.

xoxo

My Undergrad Regrets

Alright, now that that piece of mind-blowing advice is out of the way, I have to say that there are many things that I wish I did differently in college. I’ve found myself going over them more and more these last few weeks. And as much as I recognize that there's no good that can come out of reliving the past, I would like to note a few of these lessons in the off chance that someone who’s about to go to college will see this -- or even for my future self if ever I’m trying to repeat past mistakes.

1. I wish I dived right in.
I tend to be a cautious person, and I like to weigh my environment. Before jumping right into things, I need to study people, figure out their story, know how well we work together and what not. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad habit to have but I have a tendency to spend too much time on this part of the process and let myself be in the shadows too much -- the problem? I let too many opportunities pass me by! So anyway, for future me, it’s good to get to know the kind of people you have around you, but it’s great of you get more involved with things.

2. I wish I went on an abroad.
This is probably my biggest regret, and it kinda ties in with #1. I was so scared about how to set up an abroad (how complicated the visa process might have been for an international student, for example), that I never even tried to submit an application. During my four years, there have been abroads to New Zealand, Peru, Brazil, Japan, Nepal, India... Given how much I am dying to have someone stamp my passport right now, I think these would have been great opportunities. Additionally, they would have all been such enriching experiences -- but yeah, I let them slide. So for future reference, I’m looking for any loophole I can find to get myself onto a plane and across a border. For anyone in school, being a student is one of the best excuses that embassy officials take. I learned this too late.

3. Be less afraid.
The biggest reason behind why I didn’t do things in this list is fear. I was scared of coming across as pushy. I was scared of not being able to see my abroad plans through. I was/am scared of meeting new people, or scared of people in general. I was scared to switch to my second major sooner. There have been lots of times that fear held me back. Going forward, I'll keep that fear impulse in check.

4. Realize that I can begin anywhere.
After realizing all the chances I’d blown by being afraid I spun myself into a spiral of I wish I did this better without actually doing anything about it. But the awesome thing about life is that you can begin anywhere. There’s no set time to do something even though that’s what we are told. Want to learn a new language but you aren’t seven anymore? Who cares?! Wish you made better choices with you majors? What skills have you learned from your other majors that you can apply to a life with your new academic interests? Find them and apply them! (This is directed at me personally) Wish you were more open to people around you? Hey, are there not people around you right now??! And so on and so forth -- basically, you wanted to do it then, what can you do now to get you there? Okay, now go and do it!

5. I wish I sought more help.
Given that my undergrad transcript is set already, this final one may be a sailed ship. It might help somebody though. I wish I made more use of the resources available to me. Why? I sit at my office for four hours each day twiddling my thumbs waiting for someone to come and ask me for help with a paper or chat about ideas for a paper. And you know what? Not too many people do. Once in a while a professor will suggest that students come and see me and then they will. See, if this is how teachers/professors and writing tutors spend their days, i.e. longing to help anyone who seeks it, I should have been more willing to ask my professors questions after class or talk with tutors. Since I plan on going to grad-school, I need to remember this feeling and tap into it. For anyone still in school, seriously, people are paid to be there for you. Actually, it’s your money, make the most of it! (But also don’t be rude about it.)

I think that’s everything that covers my undergrad experience. Eventually I'll write up the things I definitely wouldn't wish to have done differently.

Do you have any regrets lessons to add to this list? Would love to hear them.

A Whole New World

I've been listening to a lot of Disney lately. Every once in a while I need to silence the outside world and focus on the task at hand and days like these I listen either to rap a la this, or to Disney sing-alongs a la this.

The thing that I am learning now, listening to music that I did when I was five, six, seven and what not, is how much the themes of cartoons match my life! As someone who's had to defend my cartoon-watching in adulthood on numerous occasions, I didn't expect to identify with cartoon characters beyond entertainment.

Let's take Pocahontas, for example.



To be safe, we lose our chance of ever knowing
What's around the river bend
Waiting for us just around the river bend
...

Why do all my dreams extend
Just around the river bend?
...

Should I chose the smoothest course,
Steady as the beating drum?
Should I marry Kocoum?
Is all my dreaming at an end?
Or do you still wait for me,
Dream Giver,
Just around the river bend?

Quarter-life crisis, anyone?

I'd argue that to fully understand Pocahontas, you need to have graduated and taken a gap year so that all your friends essentially get a head-start. Then you'll need to figure out whether to apply for a job, go try your luck getting a job in Kenya, or maybe some other country where you know no one, or take the "safer" option of applying to grad school, in which you have to figure out, which grad program matches your interests, what your interests actually are, where your best chances of being accepted lie... And so on and so forth. And this is as a single person, because if you are married you have to figure out whether or not the relocation is an option -- how good are job/grad school prospects in your vicinity? If you are in a serious relationship/heading toward marriage then you have to question if the decision will affect that... sigh.

What I have learned while watching Disney, which I'd essentially forgotten, is that these lyrics, these stories are written by grown ups, who've probably experienced this at some point in their life. They aren't written by kids, so I shouldn't be surprised at how much I identify with my favorite Disney characters. And Pocahontas was just a start.

Bonus: I think I played the song a little too loudly. I can hear my neighbour whistling it in the hallway.

For The Day I Move into My Own Apartment...

Now that I've graduated and I'm trying to figure out what next, the thing I envy most about being settled down is the ability to decorate my place as I would like it. A little paint here, a framed picture there. I find myself looking more and more lustfully at interior design magazines and tumblrs. I'm calling this part of  my life the research phase since I am internalizing all the information on the internet for future use. Yaaay!

Here's a post about a room I crave. Somewhere deep down, I'm a minimalist -- deep, deep down. I tend to be a little cluttered -- but Einstein's desk was a little cluttered too so... *shrug*. In a way, I see the appeal of minimalism as having something to do with my half-buried desire to be a better neater person. How else would you explain my being cluttered but loving that clean, free look?

Recently, I came across the very simple-looking bathroom of writer/stylist/social media manager Samantha Hutchinson. As far as I can tell, from the little that she showed, it's all monochrome with a splash of pink. Perfect! Her blog is aptly named Could I Have That. I stole some of her pictures to show them on here. I particularly adore the black and white rug.


 

Finally, happy new month! January feels like it's dragged on for ages! But I'm not particularly complaining. I tried to put the extra 60 days of January into good use.

"The Unwritten Rules"

This minority thing is still kinda new to me, after all, it's only been four years. Where I come from, everyone looks like me, speaks like me, eats the same food that I do, and so on, and anyone who doesn't is the weird one. In college, I got used to being the strange one, but given my college's high international student enrollment (my freshman class alone had 13 Kenyans) there were plenty other people with whom I could be the "strange one". As I move into the work place, I know that things will be different, especially while I am still in the States. It's quickly becoming time for me to get used to being the only Kenyan, the only African, or the only person of color in certain environments.

As always, YouTube is my go to for these kind of intimidating, never-have-I-ever-experienced-this-before-what-should-I-do? experiences. And even without actually looking for it, I found this web-series, "The Unwritten Rules" that speaks to the rules of decorum that black people find themselves having to follow within the work place. It's comical and mostly satirical but already with my six-months of post-grad working experience I can related to the episode about hair.




I found one of the later episodes, about the party particularly intriguing. Why are black women viewed as anti-interracial relationships? Where did this come from?

Thanks to the guys at InkSpot. I may not need to apply their advice, but I can laugh about it and maybe use it as an ice-breaker about those tense race-related topics if they ever come up at work? Maybe.