I'm at Stanford now, visiting.
Everyone was right. This is, for a million reasons,
the most beautiful place I've ever been, and i'm completely in love with it.
Palm Drive, Stanford Memorial Church
someone is cutting the grass outside my window. my corduroy jeans make my calves hot but a cool breeze is blowing through the mesh grate along with the sound waves, cooling off my body by conduction.
i'm trying to rationalize the hardest decision i've ever made to myself, and i cant help but thinking back to paris, where all the arches were held by prominent keystones. I cant help but think that this is going to be that keystone. The other stones are set, meticulously placed in ascending order [the heaviest ones on the bottom] rising in perfect parallel precision until fate decided that these two separate columns should bend in towards each other and meet. That is adolescence i suppose, our little microchasms wherein we struggle to find ourselves, to mesh our desires together with our faith and maybe find a little identity somewhere between the scrappy rocks.
i hear it echoing in my mind "its not that important" "go to a good grad school" "its money dude" and other miscellaneous propositions of people who really have no idea what they're talking about. i'm trying to be unyieldingly idealistic in this decision that i'm making. why? because i dont really know how to do it any other way. remember when john turned down a free education at Rice to pay it all and more to stanford? everybody was like wtff but honestly i have to agree with him. i'd have made the same decision, but i suppose now its not really a question between two different institutions of education which are [according to the ubiquitous us news and world extort] essentially equal. its just about two states of mind.
i was walking to the lake earlier. it is a dry hardpack trail not dissimilar from the ones i used to ride in the summers. when i look at them i still find my eyes tracking for the smoothest path and planning out a cadence for maximizing the stroke of each step. so just the thought of those things throws me back into a sort of a raw and unfettered state of mind, closer to the source if you will. the sand and dirt from the hardpack gets underneath my toes in my sandals and slides around until it slowly gets flung off with each step. and yea
yea i want to have a great education and i want to have fun. i feel that stanford would be more fun. and i realize how fun is such an overused, cliched, and ultimately underpowered word but i'm looking for something broad and encompassing and those three letters do sufficiently well.
and i mean, its not to say that i wouldnt like duke, but i feel that idealistically from a rah rah social standpoint, isnt what i want to make out of myself. I've always felt like a bit of an iconoclast at my high school because i speak more formally and wear clean clothes and dont really like to watch college football and etc and i feel like at the stanford community that uniqueness which stems not from my inherent traits but from the characteristics of my surroundings would be lessoned whereas at duke i would still have to perpetuate that.
and i feel a different community sense emanating from each school. i get letters daily from stanford, personalized letters from important people offering me tips and what not. i feel so comfortable with them, as if i'm conversing with an old friend about meeting up in some foreign place. whereas my relationship with duke is far more strained. its the you're my ex-girlfriend but still have my shit relationship. i need my stuff but we dont talk so i cant get it.
And one of the most important things for me and my high-school experience has been a sense of comfortable belonging both in the GT program and through our orchestra. theres always someone there when you're down and you make real, long, serious, deep friendships that arent just single serving snackpacks but lifelong understandings.
so i feel as if i end up going to stanford, both of those pillars (which i now liken to my dichotomous academic and social personas) would be strengthened and built upon, that the keystone would infuse each with immense strength.
(Plus the weather is GORGEOUS and this place is beautiful. i've decided that i'm going to retire as an old doctor teaching in the medical hospital here when i'm old.) but that's a different entity entirely.
so from the duke standpoint things are significantly different. its a very sweet down-home southern feeling which is something that i was honestly attempting to avoid. i feel as if duke is a replication of somewhere else with its stolen architecture and etcetera, where as stanford is distinct and stanford. I realize that the academic environment at duke is probably similar. I dont know much about the faculty teaching there but i'm sure that i'd be impressed by their qualifications and etcetera.
i feel at times that their undergraduate assistance programs like career and etc aren't as committed as they are here at stanford, but i suppose its one of the make what you can out of it dealy dos.
But despite all these general shortcomings at duke there are things that they are offering me, particularly through robertson program, that i cant get anywhere else...
one of the things that really amazed me as i was walking through the dully unexciting durham-raleigh airport was this girl i was talking to. she had spent her past summer in south africa teaching children aids awareness and things like that. and i guess it sounds like an "oh thats nice" thing but all these kids do it. thats what they're there for, to learn what it means to serve, and thats something that i want to reach for with my life.
i feel that the most important thing for me when i was deciding what colleges i wanted to attend was not the kind of student there and how well that matched me, but rather what kind of person they produced (for each university leaves its unique stamp on their products) and how that person matched the person i wanted to become. now this is difficult because both schools produce wonderful intelligent and successful people, but the robertson program is new, and their first graduating class is just this coming year. but what i'm seeing is that these people have experiences in these four years that many people never get in their lifetimes. not juts chances and opportunities to do good things in the world but they are surrounded by it, peer pressured into trying to save the world.
so i guess this is the ultra long and round about way of saying it but i will be attending duke next year with (as a perk of the program) concurrent enrollment at unc, and i'm not doing this for the money because i'm sure i could have extorted lots of schools into giving me even more (i still have to pay about UT price for duke) and i'm not doing this for me (because then i'd just come back to stanford), but i'm doing this for who i'm hoping that i will become, and even if i never make it there; atleast i'll have done some nice things along the way.
so in essence, yes. this is the cornerstone of what i will become. but what i will become is not the cornerstone or the pillars or any part of the arch, rather it revolves around what i will spend my life carrying upon that arch, for why should i seek such strength, if i will not use it to hold up the sky or move the stars?
I'm in Palo Alto now, visiting Stanford.
I'll be in Durham next year, attending Duke.
yea. It's pretty too.
Chapel Drive, Duke University Chapel | 
