Journaling: I'm a fucking graduate!

Well, it's been an interesting last few days; it seems I'm officially a college graduate, now. For all that I'm pleased about that, it still seems a little underwhelming. I just don't really know what it means, where I plan to go, or really much of anything. It's nice to shed a lot of the stress of this semester; I've definitely been working too hard - I spent entirely too many hours disconnected from the world this summer, all the while just trying to keep up with all the projects I was doing. Last night saw some immediate improvement with a long night of hanging out with some friends instead of packing. I got next to no sleep because of it, and now I'm on my plane home. I slept through the entirety of my first flight and the whole layover, so I feel pretty good now. I killed the first hour or so of this trip messing around reading some of the papers for the galloping project. It got me thinking about aerodynamics and the causes of turbulence experienced by our plane (since there has been a fairly significant amount of it thus far). That led me to try working out a relationship between lift forces and possible in-flight variables. I didn't really come to anything conclusive, since my knowledge of aerodynamics is pretty minimal and based on pretty simplistic 2-D physics. I kinda wonder if I could do some Navier-Stokes fluids stuff with it to get better results; I think it'd also require some serious assumptions, including incompressibility of air. I mention that particularly because I wanted to know if variations in air composition (and thus density) had any significant bearing on fluctuations in lift forces. Anyway, that's just been my most immediate entertainment, just passing the time until I'm home. I kinda wonder if graduating will change my perspective of home at all, or even if simply time has changed it. I'm excited to be home, but at the same time, I know there's always a little bit of hovering stress when I'm back in OC. I like to think I've moved past the somewhat angry escapism that led me to go to school so far from home; I don't exactly want to be back in southern California, but I think I'm much more satisfied with the idea of visits now.

I moved into a new apartment this weekend. It's the first one I've ever lived in by myself, and frankly I'm a bit scared, both of living on my own, with its potential for loneliness, and of living in a new area which I'm not familiar enough with to feel 100% safe. It's hard not to think the worst of everything just out of paranoia, but I'm trying to keep a positive mindset; I think pessimism in this case is far more likely to hurt me than help. Bill helped me move out/in this weekend. It was fairly quick and painless in that regard, and the weekend with him was excellent. After the little breakdown last weekend, it was really good just to be with him and hold him. I've missed him a lot this summer, and this trip is going to be worse. I'm hoping he doesn't feel too lonely while I'm gone. I know he waits for me to call/come online, and trips home always mess with our communication because of the time difference.

I wrote those first paragraphs on the plane on the way out - and now I'm back and sitting out in front of the old house, trying to write my last paper of undergraduate (on the failure of my wind generator project). It's really pretty out, if quite warm, and I really want to like being here. Unfortunately, crazy screaming Gen-Rae brawls yesterday and the fact that I can't go 20 minutes without a fit of sneezing (after my first day home) make it very, very difficult to enjoy myself. It's gonna have me pretty mightily distressed if I'm a miserable allergic mess for my whole visit, though there's always the possibility that I'm just sick, since my sleep patterns lately have been pretty awful.

Oh well, heading up to northern California tomorrow with the sisters to commence some sweet hiking and camping and general fun vacation time. After this evening this paper will be done and I can more fully check out of the whole school thing for the next few weeks. Life should be pretty excellent.