mediocre but arrogant

I went to play Racquetball today. It felt so good to swipe my new student-id card and walk into the spanking-new Ratner Athletic center, after all those years of sneaking into Stanford's dilapidated Racquetball and Squash courts with a totally smudged-out id-card. I ama student again!

Turned out that the rball courts weren't in Ratner though, so I walked a short distance down 55th to Henry Crown. It's a beautiful road -- broad and clean. My walk took me past some rather nice looking (non-Gothic, new; not that Gothic+old = ugly: to the contrary) undergrad dorms. I reminisced about undergrad and even grad-days. Upon sober reflection, I realized that this time around, it wasn't*quite* like being in school again.

These past few days, I have really grown to like Hyde Park a lot. We biked from Hyde Park to Navy Pier yesterday, all along the lake. It was SO beautiful. The city is SO pretty. 53rd and 55th streets in Hyde Park are really quite nice! On a bright, warm, late-summer day like today, there's nothing to dislike in Hyde Park, and of course, the campus itself is quite pretty (though, very small.) (And I'm beginning to get really annoyed withthe few people who continue to belittle Hyde Park. It's quite nice. If you really don't like it, move to Doral!) So anyway, I've quickly developed a sense of "home". I haven't been missing the bay-area much at all. But -- I don't have the sense of euphoria that I thought Iwould have, the minute I became a student again. Why not? Why not?!!

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm older. Sorry. That ain't it. I have more energy to party than a lot of other 22 year-olds I know. I'm married. Getting warmer. But Deepti's a trooper. Always ready to party. That ain't it either. I have a car. I drove to the Racquetball courts. Okay, that's pretty sad. (But we did bike 15 miles yesterday, so give me a break.) I live off-campus. That's sacrilege. I think that's 20% of the answer. Now if I was living in I-House, in a 10x10 room... I'm
really not kidding.

But the rest of the 80% answer is this: it's an MBA program, stupid. People DON'T act their age. They act older. They go drinking at jazz-clubs instead of opening up beer kegs in people's
bath-tubs-full-of-ice. For some reason, I'd hoped everyone would just be themselves, TP rooms, and eat only pizza. Unfortunately, it looks like everyone has their eyes on the ROI for ($80000 + opportunity cost.) That sucks, I suppose.

My only hope is what my friend at Wharton had told me, that everyone realized that this is their last time in school, and they were going to make the best out of it (ie. party.) Of course, that was Wharton, and this is where "fun comes to die." We'll see.