notes from terminal B
Typed while waiting to board in the free-wireless-free zone that is LGA.
Here I sit in La Guardia airport at about 1:20 PM, this fine Monday afternoon, on the 19th of September, 2005. Today marks the close of my stay in New York City, and I will be flying to what I've lately been calling home, in Chicago. Honestly it doesn't really feel much more like home than anywhere else, such as Beijing or even the Columbia University housing system, only just a little. That is, in Chicago, I live in a room that is actually mine, rather than a guest space in somebody else's house or apartment, or worse yet a common area.
But, this was not supposed to be a write up on my lack of a place to call home. I thought I might spend the next hour or so reflecting on how the Summer has gone.
New York City is a fun place to be for the Summer. I don't know how well I'd like being there year round, though I won't say now that I think I wouldn't enjoy living in the area. I don't want to say something like "I grew up a lot this Summer" because I don't think that's really true. To say that there was a complete absence of personal growth, however, would also be a lie. Unfortunately, at the present moment, I can't really think of any particularly interesting or telling examples of such, so, never mind that.
Maybe it's too soon for me to earnestly reflect on my trip. Really it hasn't even quite yet ended, as I sit in this limbo of gate B7. There's a lot of people sitting here who are about to board a 2:00 PM flight to Chicago, while my flight isn't until 2:59.
So what did I do this Summer? Well the easiest part to answer is that I did a part time internship at Pro Bono Net. What do they do? Well they run these two families of websites. One stemming from probono.net and the others from lawhelp.org. On probono.net, lawyers and students and legal professionals and the like can sign up and coordinate their work, share information, take advantage of group tools like calendars and the like with the aim of promoting pro bono work in a variety of practice areas and regions. Lawhelp is the sort of public access version, in that on the various lawhelp sites, there is information available by state for a variety of legal topics and how to get help from local legal services providers and so forth. But enough about what they do, all this is easily readable on their "About Us" pages. What did I do? In short, a variety of tasks that one might typically associate with the title of "Intern", ranging from scanning documents to helping to coordinate events they were running by calling the invitees list, to finding contact information for people who attended this conference the Executive Director spoke at to helping to manage a listserv that was formed as part of their newly created Katrina relief and support site.
But PBN really only accounted for part of my Summer. Another big thing that characterized my Summer was meeting all these new people at Columbia. While my host, Ani is a senior now, and thus has pretty well established social circles there, I didn't really know anybody. Being on campus all Summer provided me with this fun experience of meeting a bunch of new people, largely through people I did know, though not quite entirely so. In addition to having met and briefly started establishing friendships in New York, this Summer my hand written correspondence has reached new heights and though it remains to be seen what will come of that, it's been fun for me anyway. And finally I also reestablished some old friendships which had been languishing due to a lack of communication. A friend of mine who I've known nearly since birth, but hadn't talked to for a few years, happened to be in NYC for the Summer, and though I didn't get around to seeing him until just before he left, it was a lot of fun talking with him.
Last Summer I feel like I didn't get as much of a chance to socialize in the same ways. Unsurprising, really, given that I was on a different continent, separated by a time difference of +13 hours and surrounded by people speaking a language I wasn't very good at. I still missed a bunch of people I would have liked to see though, and hopefully come Thanksgiving, I'll finally have caught up with everybody I've been meaning to.
Being witness to the lives of other people has provided me with a new perspective on... student life. I guess there's just a lot of things I hadn't really considered doing or not doing or whatever, and I think that my habits have been changed for the better as a result of that. Well, it's actually too early for me to say that, but, I like to think that in the coming month I will be able to do at least a couple things differently.
I have become a big supporter of fountain pens this Summer. In years past, I had considered buying one and trying it out, but never really did much research hand so didn't realize that I could have bought a cheapo pen to try out for as little as six bucks. After a couple months of that, I've now taken the plunge and made the next step up in terms of pens. Alongside my preference for nicer pens, I have developed a new appreciation of not-cheap paper. I suspect as a consequence some people will further get the impression that I am snobby or something.
More than a couple times this Summer, people have told me that both in person and online, I can be somewhat unapproachable, in that apparently my not being so forthcoming with details about my personal life somehow also gives people the impression that it's also not ok for them to ask questions. I guess that's not such an outrageous assumption, but I didn't realize that I gave such an impression of inaccessibility. Note that this is not a complaint. I certainly don't mind not having to put forth whatever details about myself. I was talking about this with another friend of mine who's a bit of a stickler on forming sentences properly and formatting them well too in instant messages. That is, proper capitalization, grammar, spelling and punctuation. Spelling not so much, actually, given that these days in-line spell checkers are readily available for all sorts of chat software. Wait, what was the point I was trying to make here? Something about how this apparently makes us inaccessible but it it's dumb that it should. Though it is fun to condescend.
Hmm it seems the flight before mine is boarding now, kind of late though, as it's 1:55 and the departure time is supposed to be 2:00.
Hahah there was an announcement asking for upgraders or something and the emphasis of the sentence was hilarious. "And you get unlimited snacks and beverages all the way to Ohio!" I guess you had to be there.
All right, I'm tired of writing this. There isn't really much I want to say, and I'm starving so I'm going to go pay out the nose for some shitty airport terminal snack or something for breakfast. Maybe I'll be able to eat and come back before the seats at the gate all fill up again with people waiting for my flight.
Here I sit in La Guardia airport at about 1:20 PM, this fine Monday afternoon, on the 19th of September, 2005. Today marks the close of my stay in New York City, and I will be flying to what I've lately been calling home, in Chicago. Honestly it doesn't really feel much more like home than anywhere else, such as Beijing or even the Columbia University housing system, only just a little. That is, in Chicago, I live in a room that is actually mine, rather than a guest space in somebody else's house or apartment, or worse yet a common area.
But, this was not supposed to be a write up on my lack of a place to call home. I thought I might spend the next hour or so reflecting on how the Summer has gone.
New York City is a fun place to be for the Summer. I don't know how well I'd like being there year round, though I won't say now that I think I wouldn't enjoy living in the area. I don't want to say something like "I grew up a lot this Summer" because I don't think that's really true. To say that there was a complete absence of personal growth, however, would also be a lie. Unfortunately, at the present moment, I can't really think of any particularly interesting or telling examples of such, so, never mind that.
Maybe it's too soon for me to earnestly reflect on my trip. Really it hasn't even quite yet ended, as I sit in this limbo of gate B7. There's a lot of people sitting here who are about to board a 2:00 PM flight to Chicago, while my flight isn't until 2:59.
So what did I do this Summer? Well the easiest part to answer is that I did a part time internship at Pro Bono Net. What do they do? Well they run these two families of websites. One stemming from probono.net and the others from lawhelp.org. On probono.net, lawyers and students and legal professionals and the like can sign up and coordinate their work, share information, take advantage of group tools like calendars and the like with the aim of promoting pro bono work in a variety of practice areas and regions. Lawhelp is the sort of public access version, in that on the various lawhelp sites, there is information available by state for a variety of legal topics and how to get help from local legal services providers and so forth. But enough about what they do, all this is easily readable on their "About Us" pages. What did I do? In short, a variety of tasks that one might typically associate with the title of "Intern", ranging from scanning documents to helping to coordinate events they were running by calling the invitees list, to finding contact information for people who attended this conference the Executive Director spoke at to helping to manage a listserv that was formed as part of their newly created Katrina relief and support site.
But PBN really only accounted for part of my Summer. Another big thing that characterized my Summer was meeting all these new people at Columbia. While my host, Ani is a senior now, and thus has pretty well established social circles there, I didn't really know anybody. Being on campus all Summer provided me with this fun experience of meeting a bunch of new people, largely through people I did know, though not quite entirely so. In addition to having met and briefly started establishing friendships in New York, this Summer my hand written correspondence has reached new heights and though it remains to be seen what will come of that, it's been fun for me anyway. And finally I also reestablished some old friendships which had been languishing due to a lack of communication. A friend of mine who I've known nearly since birth, but hadn't talked to for a few years, happened to be in NYC for the Summer, and though I didn't get around to seeing him until just before he left, it was a lot of fun talking with him.
Last Summer I feel like I didn't get as much of a chance to socialize in the same ways. Unsurprising, really, given that I was on a different continent, separated by a time difference of +13 hours and surrounded by people speaking a language I wasn't very good at. I still missed a bunch of people I would have liked to see though, and hopefully come Thanksgiving, I'll finally have caught up with everybody I've been meaning to.
Being witness to the lives of other people has provided me with a new perspective on... student life. I guess there's just a lot of things I hadn't really considered doing or not doing or whatever, and I think that my habits have been changed for the better as a result of that. Well, it's actually too early for me to say that, but, I like to think that in the coming month I will be able to do at least a couple things differently.
I have become a big supporter of fountain pens this Summer. In years past, I had considered buying one and trying it out, but never really did much research hand so didn't realize that I could have bought a cheapo pen to try out for as little as six bucks. After a couple months of that, I've now taken the plunge and made the next step up in terms of pens. Alongside my preference for nicer pens, I have developed a new appreciation of not-cheap paper. I suspect as a consequence some people will further get the impression that I am snobby or something.
More than a couple times this Summer, people have told me that both in person and online, I can be somewhat unapproachable, in that apparently my not being so forthcoming with details about my personal life somehow also gives people the impression that it's also not ok for them to ask questions. I guess that's not such an outrageous assumption, but I didn't realize that I gave such an impression of inaccessibility. Note that this is not a complaint. I certainly don't mind not having to put forth whatever details about myself. I was talking about this with another friend of mine who's a bit of a stickler on forming sentences properly and formatting them well too in instant messages. That is, proper capitalization, grammar, spelling and punctuation. Spelling not so much, actually, given that these days in-line spell checkers are readily available for all sorts of chat software. Wait, what was the point I was trying to make here? Something about how this apparently makes us inaccessible but it it's dumb that it should. Though it is fun to condescend.
Hmm it seems the flight before mine is boarding now, kind of late though, as it's 1:55 and the departure time is supposed to be 2:00.
Hahah there was an announcement asking for upgraders or something and the emphasis of the sentence was hilarious. "And you get unlimited snacks and beverages all the way to Ohio!" I guess you had to be there.
All right, I'm tired of writing this. There isn't really much I want to say, and I'm starving so I'm going to go pay out the nose for some shitty airport terminal snack or something for breakfast. Maybe I'll be able to eat and come back before the seats at the gate all fill up again with people waiting for my flight.
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