I will really miss driving home from Chicago. It was just the right distance to be a real trip, but not so far that I couldn't do it very often. Plus, I think it's a beautiful drive that grows more rural and more familiar to me the closer I get to home. Once I get past Eau Claire and I'm sailing through those woods alone, at night, it really is a sort of magnetic feeling. LA is a little too far away for that to work, and flying into Duluth is expensive. Getting home will become something much longed for and probably not that often attained. That bothers me, especially as my family only grows older.
One thing I won't miss around here is the legacy I've left behind. I don't mean about being in a band or plays or personal relationships or whatever other footprint you leave behind as a visible person on a small college campus; I mean the trainwrecks and failures. Last night and today I spent a substantial amount of time organizing my files and personal stuff as I prepare to leave, and let me just say that the vast majority of my academic work in college was embarassing. Sometimes just because I was an undergrad student who was hasty, but more than that... it was really embarassingly bad and neglected. I did my homework as fast as possible so I could get to all those other things, being in a band, writing songs, making web pages, whatever. "Jack of all trades, master of none," as my piano teacher once said.
Nowadays I find myself really trying to pare things down to the minimum; the things that I really want to work on. In my class (Calculus II) I am really trying to put in the time that I need to, but that pushes everything else aside. "Ah ha," I think... so this is how I had all the time to do other things when I was a student before. Well, I can't handle that anymore. If you're going to do something, you might as well do it well.
I couldn't bring myself to delete the files; but I won't miss the way reading them made me feel.
