Bike Like Mike

Living across campus from the cafeteria and most of the classrooms, I started to make good use of my bicycle to get around, and started using it instead of the golf carts to do most of my work for the IT dept.  Most of the staff there had graduated the previous year, and the new student supervisor wasn't very reliable, so I was given that job within a few months.  I pretty much worked for them whenever I wasn't in class during normal business hours.  I was granted exemptions to most of the usual rules for student jobs, in regards to hours and pay, and it was essentially was my first real job.  Most other workers used golf carts to get around campus, but I stuck with the bike, which gave me a much faster and more flexible option.  Being the only guy to regularly use a bike to get around campus became a part of my identity there.  Even my screen name was BikeLikeMike, and everyone got it.

That bike probably also had a significant impact on my social life.  I didn't have the patience for the ten minute walk that everyone else took to the cafe for every meal, so biking there and back probably saved me an hour a day.  But that means I missed out on an hour of social time everyday that I would have gotten from walking to the cafe with my friends.  And showing up on the bike means I didn't just finish wandering across campus, collecting people to eat with.  I rarely ate alone, but it did lead to less random social interaction than my freshman year.

It was only a couple weeks into the school year when I got a call from my dad, informing me that my grandfather had passed away during a trip back east to his brother's funeral.  That was the first time someone close to me had passed away, so I had never really dealt with that before.  After my roommate’s deep analysis of the situation "Bummer dude, see you later," I went to go see Lindsay for comfort.  When I arrived, she was on the phone with a mutual friend who had transferred away over the summer. Before I could even say anything, she immediately handed me the phone and said "say hi, while I go to the bathroom."  That resulted in a very stuttered two minute conversation that I was not focused on at all.  Once I was able to communicate what had happened, she elegantly passed me off to her roommate J, who had recently lost her Grandmother.  That led to a little heart to heart talk that evening, and a few more over the rest of the week.

I caught a ride north with my cousins from Orange County, to get to the funeral that weekend.  It was a quick trip, less than 24 hours up there, and pretty intense.  I was conscious by now of the fact that my cry reflex was fairly suppressed at a subconscious level, and expected that this event would probably change that, and wasn't fighting that.  But the only time that I really felt the urge to cry was thirty seconds before I was supposed to go up to do the reading at the funeral service.  That was the one moment that I DID consciously suppress that reflex, but it never returned when I was done.  Probably the combination of the situation AND the public speaking in a stressful environment was the reason that was the most challenging moment.  We left early the next morning, and I made it back in time for the 10:30am Sunday service at the school.

I ended up editing a video of the memorial service together with pieces of family videos and pictures, and put together a DVD that was distributed to the rest of the family.  My mom was probably the most affected by it, and I am told would watch it repeatedly over the next few months as part of her grieving process.  Probably the most emotional piece of work I have ever put together.  I may make another DVD with footage from my Mom’s service, but I am not sure who it would really be for.