The Unfair Trade and the Increasing Probability of a New Life in the South

Well, it’s been 4 days since my last post, and before that it had been 6 months. So consider me as inconsistent as Old Faithful…isn’t.

Anyway, it’s been a pretty crazy 8 days, as I’ve been home for about 2 of them, and I’ve been everywhere from Wautoma to Tampa to here in Columbus, Ohio. I suppose that would do well as a segue to the first part of the two-part title that hovers a few lines above this very sentence.

So, to explain the unfair trade, and also why I am in Columbus, Ohio…

The last day of the Camp New Years retreat, I got a call from my mom asking how soon we would be home. I thought it was altogether a little bit strange that she would be calling so early about us coming home, but I didn’t ask about it or think too much of it. Then we dropped off Heidi, Kath, and Ashley, and got home to hear the news.

It turned out that for the second year in a row, one of our relatives had passed away while Evan and I were at the New Years retreat.

This time it was our Aunt Donna, on the other side of the family than the Grandmother whose death inspired the post “I put the ‘I’ in ‘I hate Indiana…etc’”, and this time it was unexpected.

Not to reveal an exceptional amount of personal information, but she was alone at the time of her death and we found out afterwards that she had recently taken herself off of Anti-Depressants without a doctor’s recommendation. This, obviously, can cause someone’s mind to work against them, so that makes her death all the more difficult to work through.

So that would explain why I was not able to go to Mike and Amber’s wedding and why I am currently in Ohio’s largest city. I refer to it as the “unfair trade” because at face value, I’m trading a celebration of two lives and a new beginning with friends for a somber tribute that comes with a funeral of a loved one. It’s far more important to go to my Aunt’s funeral but this weekend went from a happy one to a very sad one in what seemed like a moment. Thusly, the unfair trade.

I’m never sure how to take a death. I never feel like I’ve suffered through a very serious one, even though I’ve lived through the deaths of an aunt, an uncle, and a grandmother all at an age where I could fully grasp what was happening (I think I was 11 for the earliest).

Perhaps we’ve just never been as close to our relatives as we could have been, maybe because we are the outcasts in Wisconsin and everyone else is in Indiana or Ohio.

Aunt Donna was one of my favorite relatives, but I still didn’t know her too well. I’ll miss her, but I’m more so sad for my other family members, especially my mom, what with having lost her sister. I know this death came in one of the cloudiest of fashions, but I also know that God will work it out for the good, and I hope it can help bring my extended family a little closer together.

Now would be a good time to change gears. For those of you following along at home, there were, in fact, two parts to the title, so the second part would hopefully be a little cheerier. In it, I make reference to a “New Life in the South.”

This, of course, is an even further reference to the most recent post, in which I stated that I was fairly likely to post about the events of a campus tour for the University of South Florida. Well here goes.

First of all, even though we were in Florida on the shores on the Gulf of Mexico, Old Man Winter refused to stop hassling us and we had got to experience the one of the 3 days for Florida winter – temperatures resting at about 40. Anyway, once we braved the weather (which had everyone down there freaking out, but was “long sleeve weather” for us), we headed to campus to just walk around. We didn’t expect anything more than that, what with the school on break, but we got considerably more that we bargained for.

When we got there, we found out that we could get a residence hall tour, which was fairly nice, and we got to marvel at how new everything was – nothing built before 1956, and many built 3 years ago.

Once we went through that, we decided to stop off at the scholarship office to get some questions answered, considering the scholarship was the only thing that got me considering USF in the first place. We entered the building and got a surprisingly warm welcome.

We talked to someone that looked important, and I guess she was the right person to talk to. Once I introduced myself and explained that I was a Merit Scholar, and she noted that Evan and my dad were wearing Wisconsin sweatshirts, she got all excited.

“We were just talking about you!” she exclaimed as she ushered us into her office. Turns out that they had been speculating, that very day, about the status of a Merit Scholar from Wisconsin, apparently the only one they had ever had and one of two Wisconsin students they had applying from the class of ’08.

I might add, at this point, that one of my gripes with UW-Madison was that their whole admissions process seemed kind of cold and impersonal, and I feared, to, an extent, that USF, a larger college, would be similar. Obviously, though, the fact that they were thrilled to talk to me and get me pumped about their college, allayed that fear and caused a pretty big paradigm shift.

The nice scholarship lady, and her friend, the other nice scholarship lady, then answered all our questions, and tried to arrange an impromptu formal welcome for us. They contacted the Dean of the Honors College, who was on vacation, and got me into his office to talk with the Associate Dean of the Honors College. The associate dean then told me about USF honors (which I would very likely be a part of), which included absolute first priority housing, first priority class selection, all on top of the full tuition, room, board, laptop, and semester abroad (and free pro hockey tickets [and I love hockey…go Tampa Bay Lightning] !) already offered to me if I were to go to this college, which is in a climate averaging highs of 70-80 most of the time.

All of this, in addition to another tour of the beautiful campus given by other nice scholarship lady, was enough to get me a step away from pledging all allegiance to the University of South Florida. I commented to Evan that South Florida made UW look like a “mean old lady” and it’s safe to say that, as of right now, I love how the future looks if I go the Tampa Bay way.

Yes, there are cons – leaving friends behind, 3 hour plane rides, but right now the pros outweigh them and I think it’s the best way for me to grow in a lot of ways. Here’s to the hope that it will all work out and I can properly fulfill New Years Resolution #2.

So it’s been, as I said before, a wild couple of days, and I could use a break…too bad it’s all fast-paced for the foreseeable future. But we’ll try a toast once more – here’s to less tragedy and more excitement in 2008.

So you were born
and that was a good day
Someday you'll die
and that is a shame
But somewhere in the between
is a life of which we all dream
and nothing and no one will ever take that away
- "Somewhere in the Between - Streetlight Manifesto"