Joe said last night, “I’ve decided that I owe it to my parents, and to you, to play less games and spend more time doing work and sleeping.”
Music swelled and glittering confetti showered down upon our shoulders.
Only time will tell how much men mean their words…he wouldn’t repeat them when I asked, tape recorder in hand.
Monday night, I came out of Philosophy of Education to find the quad powdered lightly with snow here and there. Haha, I said to myself, knowing what everyone knew. In the morning, all that would remain would be the slightly warmer apres-neige weather.
Wrong. St. Louis woke up to a world of white — and I’m trying very hard not to sound like a cheesy holiday children’s book here. What we were even less prepared for was the stuff that kept fluttering down from the sky. Then started pouring. And pouring. By the end of the day, there was probably about 5-7 inches of snow smothering all visible outdoor surfaces. Facebook statuses from all over campus welcomed the weather. People ran out for snow fights. But truth be told, I thought it was hell. Apparently, shovelling snow from the major walkways first means that the smaller walkways get shovelled not second, but never. Slip, slop, splat — right on the face. Almost, anyway, on more occasions than one. It was cold. It was wet. So I felt miserable.
To make things worse, I had to go on campus the next day for a meeting. I was not looking forward to another slippery, flippery wet trek on a day I did not have class. And like usual, I woke up late and rushed out the door. I power-walked as fast as my short little legs could carry me.
The faculties of the human brain will never cease to amaze me. Because as I was concentrating on minimizing the distance between my feet and the ground as much as possible, squinty-eyed and jiggly-cheeked Hiro style, I saw something else. The campus was all aglitter. The snow, in fact, looked pretty. It wasn’t grey (yet) or gloomy or somber. It made everything shimmer in the early afternoon sun. And all of the sudden, it felt like the Christmas season we didn’t have time to enjoy between a late Thanksgiving and winter break.
Then I felt very disappointed in myself. The angle of the sun threw formidable shadows behind scraggly trees. The wind had blown some snow into precarious waves that somehow haven’t collapsed. The dome-shaped caps on the little benches, the grassy ledges, and even the trash can lids were adorable. So many sights to see and so many frames to shoot — and, of course, I had left my all-new, 14.7 megapixel love of a camera at home. After the batteries died within a whole sixty seconds of making its debut at a dinner over the weekend.
But despite it all, I wasn’t whining. I wasn’t lamenting angrily about the cold in my head. I wasn’t wishing for spring to come with all my might (with more squinting eyes and jiggly cheeks). That in itself was quite the miracle, and rather shocking upon realization. And as always, I at least had my camera phone. Whew.
So even though we’re in the middle of getting through the worst of it — dirty slush, wet streets, dripping buildings — I’m surprisingly content. I secretly feel a little festive. That might sound latecoming and trivial, but with a semester of 10am-6:30pm days I’m taking nothing for granted. It finally feels like Christmas and smells like Sweet Violet. (Yankee Candle sale from Bed Bath & Beyond clearance. More details on the new candle obsession to come.)
At the Taoyuan International Airport, I was contemplating helping myself to a mudslide and blogging. Now, I am happy to report that I’m doing both 
For some reason, leaving Taiwan this time feels a lot like attending the class of 2005’s graduation four years ago — part sad, part somber, part sappy. Maybe it has to do with the fact that, once again, I find so many friends and myself at the brink of inevitable and drastic change. Four years ago, we were saying goodbye to high school seniors going off to college, both excited and apprehensive about our own turns to leave. Now, we will soon be saying goodbye to the same seniors again — except some of us will even be joining their ranks. We’re running out of time. We can’t put off really, truly growing up much longer. Yes, most of us still have three semesters left. But then again, it seems like we had just graduated and gone off on our exotic senior trips.
Naturally, the same ambivalence is there, but this time around it’s also kind of different. The Real World seems much more real, because we are getting closer to actually being in it. For me, this means deciding between starving as a journalist and starving as a teacher — or, eventually, both. But in the Real World, everyone will also be scattered in the four corners of earth. It’s only (or already?) the winter of junior year, and yet half my Taipei loves weren’t even close to Asia. How do we deal when our support systems just spread too far apart? What happens when goodbyes turn into byes for good? We still have time, but it seems like it’ll get pretty hard pretty quickly. I can’t wrap my head around it yet. I’m not sure I really want to.
But to end on a slightly less depressing note, aspects of Taiwan I have come to love on this trip and will miss dearly:
