lights at the end of tunnels

Via email, today, I discovered that I’ve passed my first class at Caltech!

Now, with Math 1a under my belt, I can go forth and…take Math 1b.

Good luck to everyone on their finals.

 

tabula rasa.

“There are so many freaking whiteboards here,” I said those first days, which seem an age ago, “and all the teachers hate them.”

And so they do, scorning and cursing the slippery white surface, the endless rainbow of colored markers thrown into trash cans, dead.

“Knowledge,” my philosophy prof writes on the whiteboard in impish yellow. We squint and protest, plot to kidnap that infernal marker and replace it with new black ones, green ones, anything.

“Can you see it now?” as he traces it in pale, dying red.

Professors favor the warm black or green of a chalkboard, the dusty white chalk, the pleasant staccato scratching punctuated by the occasional keening screech. A TA holds chalk awkwardly, delicately, like a quill, coaxing out thin even lines–the professor wields it like an artist’s charcoal, hand curled, scrawling across the board with graceless speed that nonetheless never leaves a smudge. A pause, a tap on the board, give the pencils a chance to catch up.

“If only I had colored chalk,” he muses, taps, and we sigh.

* * *

There is a whiteboard on every door in my House, perhaps on every door in every House. They are adorned with pictures, names, quotes; they tell whether the inhabitants are out or in; they deliver messages; they offer colored markers for passers-by to add their various thoughts.

Each year, the boards, like the rooms, are filled, are adorned, reflect those who live within. Each year, like the rooms, the boards are wiped clean and empty; life moves on, they remain.

They are, like college, like life, the epitome of ephemeral, of changeable, of possible futures and irrelevant pasts. Days and weeks of moves and changes settle like sand into a certain peace, a groove, a temporary permanence, only to be shaken again and resettle.

I’ve never been able to help walking into the first days of something thinking about the last. It’s comforting to know that some things never change.

* * *

There are two whiteboards in my room, one which was affixed to my wardrobe, and one which I deemed my roommate’s. It is now on the floor, a piecewise function sketched out disjointedly in black ink, fingerprints dulling the edges of the Cartesian coordinate plane.

My board is bisected by a horizontal line just slightly above middle, dividing the unintelligible red squiggles above from my neat blue printing below.

We use our whiteboards as our idol diagnostician does, a canvas with which to solve problems, a communal brain, an easier and safer place to experiment than in the operating room, palpating the innards of some composite function as it breathes, even and slow.

And just as Cameron’s carefully-formed letters are trumped by the hastily-scribbled passion of illegible inspiration, so do the neat blue x’s sit subordinate to the red, aligned in contrived patterns that emulate understanding.

Above, is understanding. Above is how the world works.

* * *

(…I can’t write anymore. Sigh. I knew that would happen here, but so quickly?)