Senioritis?

So, it's been a clear two months since my last entry. In entry time, that should have been four entries ago, but it's just the latest one. My deepest apologies, my faithful readers, for not keeping up to task. Ironically, instead of working on my thesis, the very thing that has kept me away from blogging these past two months, I am now writing to procrastinate.

I can't say that anything particularly profound has happened to me over the last two months. Perhaps the most significant, and most scary, has been the fact that I am slowly realizing that I am, bit by bit, being pushed out of this place I have come to call home. I suppose it started with indoor winter training for rowing, the time of the year that no rower wants to face. It calls for 6AM wake-ups, and long mornings in the erg room. Still, it's a great time to build fitness and see gains in strength throughout the winter. It was my last winter season ever, and it was bittersweet. I started to think back to my first winter season in sophomore year, right after I joined up as a novice. It was just as tough, and as my captain, Gregg Orton, had done that year, telling me what I should and shouldn't do and how to erg properly, I took the novices aside and gave them some pointers. I felt like the old veteran, even though I had only been rowing for two years, one and a half of which had been at Vassar.

My thesis, which I wrote so extensively about starting to think about maybe beginning to write perhaps, began to get underway. My original plan was to write one page a day, and that worked out well for the first week or so. Then, things started to fall apart. Work happened. Other commitments got in the way. The one page a day turned into, "I'll make up my page a day for the last 4 days in one day," which just turned into the regular old Sunday procrastination. I ended up with a solid draft of 34 pages, the comments of which were returned to me just under two weeks ago. It's a solid body of work, and something that I am extremely proud of, especially considering that I only really started, in earnest, this semester.

I've also managed to over-commit myself academically again. Along with my thesis, I'm undertaking a Chinese senior project, my last unit before completing the major. I've managed to get a hold of my family history/genealogy, also known as the 謝氏家譜 for those of you who can read Chinese. It documents my family's 30 recorded generations. There were 20 before them, which is wild just thinking about it. It's been a huge piece of work that I started over spring break, and it continues to rob me of sleep.

Speaking of spring break, this marked my second and last spring break training trip to Florida with the rowing team. We made some good progress coming out of the winter season, but we still have a long way to go before our first race at Knecht Cup. On the bright side, we got some great training days. My double partner, freshman Vince Marchetta, and I got some awesome time in the double and even rowed it at our inter-team race on the last day of training. Managing to beat one VIII in the newly-dubbed, "Clarkoff-Tanatee," we were on quite a high for the rest of the day. On our one afternoon off, a few of us headed down to Blue Springs State Park to observe some manatees. There were eight of them chilling in the springs that day, and the actual spring itself was closed off for a few hours, owing to the fact that a calf and his mother decided to dive down into the boil of it for some warmer temperatures. Once they had enough, the spring opened up, and I actually dove down into it. It was my first time in a natural spring, and it's really cool. The water is light and fresh to the taste. You feel absolutely pure in it, and opening your eyes underwater is painless.

Now, back up at Vassar, I've finally found time write all this down. We've just held elections for next year's executive board for the Vassar Boat Club/Rowing Club, whatever we decide to be called. My role as a captain is slowly being phased out, and I am being pushed into the real world. It's quite exciting, but at the same time, a little sad knowing that this is a chapter of my life whose final pages are being written. I hope this one ends well. Stay tuned, and I promise that I'll write often leading up to the ever-looming graduation day.