2008 Woodie Awards
'Gate-Way to Home
Deena Mueller
Issue date: 10/4/07 Section: Commentary
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I lead two lives: The life I live here at school and the life I live back home. I consider these two lives to be very separate entities that have no business intersecting with each other.
It's not that I have some secret life as an ex-convict back home, nor must I hide my actions on campus from my parents. I just prefer to maintain a separation between my home life and my Colgate life. Back in high school, when the school day ended, I drove home and had my personal time and space. None of my classmates were around and not everyone I encountered was a fellow student. Granted, I had many friends who knew me outside of school, but still, my home life was my own. When I first came to college, I felt like this separation had been destroyed. The short distances between dorms and classes, along with a living system that plops 200 students together in one building with paper thin walls is not exactly conducive to preserving one's anonymity.
However, as I've spent more time here at Colgate, I've realized that I still do have that separation. Only now, it is between my life here in college and my life back home in Chicago. Going home as infrequently as I do, has made it easy for me to prevent these lives from overlapping, and instead I focus on the life I'm living at the moment. Since I have come to Colgate, I have built myself a life from scratch; I have completely new friends, am in all new clubs and activities, and partake in new opportunities in everything from academics to social life. Although I am very happy with my life here, it takes a lot of effort on my part to manage it. I'd rather not have to split my precious time between that and maintaining the life I lived back home. To give more attention to my home life means I have to give up something from my life out here, maybe a homework assignment? Maybe the Jug?
I actually expect that I can slip in and out of each life as I need to. When I am at Colgate, I often refer to my dorm as "home." Yet, each time I land in Chicago, I smile because I think I am returning "home." When I was there over the summer, I quickly found myself reverting to my old habits. All my old ways of life came back to me and I felt like I belonged there. Yet, it took very little time for me to get into my routine here at Colgate when this semester began. I want to be able pick up my lives right where I left them the last time, and I don't want to work at securing my spot in my other life while I'm away. Why should I have to stay in constant contact with my high school friends while I am here? Can't I just hang out with them when I get home, even if we haven't talked in four months? I almost feel like a phone call from my home area code is an intrusion into my life here.
It's not that I have some secret life as an ex-convict back home, nor must I hide my actions on campus from my parents. I just prefer to maintain a separation between my home life and my Colgate life. Back in high school, when the school day ended, I drove home and had my personal time and space. None of my classmates were around and not everyone I encountered was a fellow student. Granted, I had many friends who knew me outside of school, but still, my home life was my own. When I first came to college, I felt like this separation had been destroyed. The short distances between dorms and classes, along with a living system that plops 200 students together in one building with paper thin walls is not exactly conducive to preserving one's anonymity.
However, as I've spent more time here at Colgate, I've realized that I still do have that separation. Only now, it is between my life here in college and my life back home in Chicago. Going home as infrequently as I do, has made it easy for me to prevent these lives from overlapping, and instead I focus on the life I'm living at the moment. Since I have come to Colgate, I have built myself a life from scratch; I have completely new friends, am in all new clubs and activities, and partake in new opportunities in everything from academics to social life. Although I am very happy with my life here, it takes a lot of effort on my part to manage it. I'd rather not have to split my precious time between that and maintaining the life I lived back home. To give more attention to my home life means I have to give up something from my life out here, maybe a homework assignment? Maybe the Jug?
I actually expect that I can slip in and out of each life as I need to. When I am at Colgate, I often refer to my dorm as "home." Yet, each time I land in Chicago, I smile because I think I am returning "home." When I was there over the summer, I quickly found myself reverting to my old habits. All my old ways of life came back to me and I felt like I belonged there. Yet, it took very little time for me to get into my routine here at Colgate when this semester began. I want to be able pick up my lives right where I left them the last time, and I don't want to work at securing my spot in my other life while I'm away. Why should I have to stay in constant contact with my high school friends while I am here? Can't I just hang out with them when I get home, even if we haven't talked in four months? I almost feel like a phone call from my home area code is an intrusion into my life here.
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