I am totally going to miss being on campus in the early morning. When I was an undergrad, I used to stay up until 4 AM pretty regularly... in fact, 4AM was kind of my defacto bedtime for about a decade. Anyway, back then it was playing Quake, or surfing the web, or who knows what; nothing all that productive, I'm sad to say. When I started working at NPU I pretty often spent all night long in the office working on some project or another. A little more productive, but I should have gotten a hold of myself the first time I considered putting a camping mat and pillow under my desk.
Anyway, I will always (hopefully) remember the early morning city sunrises with their purples and pinks and the birds starting to sing before the sun rose. Cool, early morning cities also smell surprisingly good. The birds starting to sing was always my signal that I had better get into bed or else. (Birdsong has never been so depressing.) This morning I was on campus around 5:45 to do some network upgrades, and it was just like one of those mornings, except the birds singing were encouraging. (alh complained this morning that a bird outside our window was "The loudest robin on the planet!" I had some kind of witty rejoinder but I can't remember it.)
[Haha... oh yeah. Our next door neighbor is a professional singer and she wakes us up pretty regularly with her warmups. I've had dreams where her warmups appear, specifically as a heckler in a crowd while I'm playing a show who won't stop making weird oohing noises. This morning I imitated a robin doing vocal exercises. Rimshot!]
I'm also going to miss being on campus when nobody else is around. I used to stay over many holidays as an RA because home was so far away. I used to love being the only person in the big, empty dorm, or wandering across campus not seeing another single person; especially during those Thanksgiving vacations. It was so crisp, and just for me.
I imagine that down the road whenever I come and visit, it will be when lots of people are around; who knows when or if I'll get to live those quiet Chicago mornings again?
Something I won't miss: bad city smells. I guess part of the reason I won't miss them is because I'll certainly experience them in LA. But as long as I'm talking, I just hate it when you're walking along and something smells rotten, or burning, or ozoney, or whatever. In the country, bad smells are usually just that -- bad smells. In the city, bad smells usually mean carcinogens or destruction, which makes me hold my breath as long as I can, but of course, you can't hold it forever. So then you start breathing it in, and at some point you think (or I think, anyway), who cares, I'm breathing this stuff all the time anyway. This just adds to my already developed sense of fatalism -- "I have to breathe, right? I might as well stroll out on to Foster Avenue in front of this oncoming car."
Coming up: Crossing Foster Avenue -- will I miss it, or won't I?
[1] http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/24/early_apple_sound_de.html
Finally, did you know that the Red-breasted Robin's latin name is "turdus migratorius"? I hate to think of the teasing they have to endure at Bird School. So the next time a robin wakes you up at 5:45, cut him a little slack.
