And So It Goes

Back in the day, I would sit at my friend's kitchen table and tell him what a different person I was after my summer experiences. "It's really weird being back," I would say, staring off into the TV and fingering my hair. He would laugh, and reply, "Nah, man. You're still the same."

The idea of change and improvement obsessed me. As I packed for college, I thought of the life I would forge for myself, full of high-fives, relationships, and meandering adventures around the city. No more would I spend my Saturday nights watching movies, or driving with friends around Syracuse's boulevard, wishing we were somewhere else. And so I strived to be more outgoing, to approach people with a firm handshake and a smile. Arriving at college, other people seemed to change as well. The kids on my freshman year floor tried on and chucked identities: from the over-achiever to the lush, from the attached to the free.

So college danced by, and a month ago, cleaning my room in Syracuse in preparation for moving on, I uncovered two essays I wrote to get into Columbia. Two hundred and fifty words each, they flirt with language and concepts I never understood, but approach knowledge and exploration in a wide-eyed, earnest way. Are these still me? The first one discusses my encounter with "a green alien with three eyes who spoke only in prose poetry," who commanded me to "'Make a camera and take a snapshot of your soul.'" I will spare you the rest of the piece, but I used the line, "I sing Carrols of Coleridge, and Bellow out Borges." I had never even read Coleridge.

My mother read the essay to me over the phone a few nights back. I kept giggling, and murmuring, "Oy vey, oy vey" with each line. But she still thought my words were beautiful, and I hope I am such an undiscerning critic to whatever my children produce.

Even though I see my parents grow older, I cannot understand that they change as well. I know my mom stopped dying her hair; it is now gray. My dad stopped doing karate, stopped seeing patients. She sang, "Que Sera, Sera" to me the night before I decided where to go to college. He took walks with me down the street in the brisk April air, listening to my anxieties and offering advice. They would still do the same now, and that was four years ago. How can I be the only one who has changed?

My second essay concerns my languages, my traveling, and my ambitions. My high school girlfriend, after reading it, said, "I think I understand you now," with eyes that suggested her comment was not entirely complimentary. I claimed to speak Chinese, when people barely understood my "Where's the bathroom?" I talk about the natives, of giving bouncy balls to children in remote villages. Still, I say "I now understand a little better," and after that high school trip abroad, I did. I learned that there are many different ways of doing things, and after spending four years in college, I learned there are many more. It's like when you sleep over at a friend's house, and see the parents lumbering around the kitchen at midnight, or eating dinner amid the din of television, and you realize that the way you were raised is not the only way.

I end my college essay unrolling to the reader four possible future paths of mine: a businessman, a philosopher, a politician, or a poet. The philosopher surprises me. I forgot that I desired that, and I still do not know what a philosopher is. I wanted to be a poet because I felt no one understood me and I wanted to capitalize on my alienation, turning angst into buttery lines of poetry that I hid about my room (and that had been rejected from a few poetry journals). I went around spurting lines of poetry, "The Walrus and the Carpenter" and what not, but people did not care. In college, people seem to appreciate it, on a park bench or on the Staten Island ferry, so I no longer need to be a poet.

Have we all changed coming into college? We cannot all be valedictorians. Drug use wears thin over four years, or intensifies. Goals are reached, modified, or discarded. Have I changed? I smile more, I actually speak Chinese, I forgot my Hebrew and Spanish, I shy away from the word "native," I am less angry, I am less idealistic, I have real friends, I drink, I throw eggs and dive into bushes. My hair is just as curly, my feet smell worse, I am closer with my brothers, I am farther away from my relatives. I am still a smart-ass dreamer who hates dogs and walks around with his mouth open. I guess through it all I just grew more comfortable with myself.

Isaac Stone Fish is a Columbia College senior majoring in EALAC. The Sounds of Isaac runs alternate Thursdays.