Reflections, Part 1 of 4: Pittsburgh Positives

This blog was inspired by a secret journal that my mom maintained for about 25 years, between her years in grad school until late 2007. The principal goal here, as I'm sure was hers with her journal, was to record my opinions of the world developments around me, as well as my personal opinions and growth during this pivotal period in life.

I think I've done a fairly good job with that.

As I stated earlier, I'm not going to update this during the coming summer, with posts recommencing in mid-August and lasting under I finally graduate in December. So I have about three weeks of updates left before heading back "home" for the summer, and I wanted to include a sort of summary of first year experience here in addition to winding down my series on African American homophobia and covering some other points. I've decided to dedicate four updates ("Reflections") to this purpose, and this is the first!
____________________________________________________________________

Even if you've only read three or four posts from this blog, you've probably been able to ascertain that my first year experience at CMU was largely negative.

Well, that's the truth. I would be telling a first degree lie if I said that I had largely enjoyed my time here. Of course, time will be the ultimate discerner of the wisdom of my decision, but if I had to go back to March of 2008 and redo this choice, I would have either stayed at UF or selected another more culturally appropriate state university such as Illinois or UCLA.

But I would be telling an equally egregious lie if I stated that there were no positives to this whole experience. Reading over what I've written here since last September, it became clear to me that I really haven't touched on very many of the positives at all, so I'd like to establish everything (to my recollection) that I've enjoyed about Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, and the Heinz College:

1. Mid-August through September. Some of the nights were downright cold, but the weather during this period was just divine overall. I remember a whole week or so in mid-September when we had high temperatures right around 78 degrees and lows in the high 50's to low 60's - in other words, the type of weather seen in Southern California nearly year-round. And there were actually a handful of legitimately hot days during this period as well! Although, alas, Pittsburgh has not reached 90 degrees a single day that I've been here, and it probably won't. And then October arrived, and the rest is history regarding the weather here. Though I must say, if our current streak of weather in the 70's and 80's holds up - which appears to be the case - I might as well add "late April and early May" to that list as well.
   
2. Oakland (particularly South Oakland). Ironically, I would have hated this neighborhood back in 2005 when I entered UF as an undergrad. That particular Adam, of course, is dead and gone. Ten years from now, I know that a large majority of the fond memories that I have regarding Pittsburgh will center around my experiences living in South Oakland, the city's prinicpal student ghetto. I'm aiming to stay in this area for my final semester in Fall if at all possible. Yes, it's loud here. It's disorganized. It's somewhat...immature. Sometimes, such as after the Super Bowl victory (or many other random Saturday nights), it borders on anarchy. And I, frankly, loved it all.
3. Pittsburghers: I may largely dislike their city, but the Pittsburghers themselves are, as a group, among the most down-to-earth and agreeable people that I've met. I think this is the biggest reason why some people tend to categorize Pittsburgh as more of a Midwestern outlier than an East Coast city. Everything from their driving to their manners is truly the polar opposite of the way people behave in South Florida, and it's something that really spoils you over time. Now of course, their are some general characteristics of the region's inhabitants that are not so tolerable - the somewhat old-fashioned nature and widespread lack of travel and exposure to other parts of the world being principal among them - but the good far outweighs the bad among Pittsburghers. And fortunately for the rest of us, Pittsburghers have been fleeing their native land in droves for over half a century now (if you hear somebody refer to a rubber band as a "gum band", you've definitely found a Pittsburgh expatriate.)
   
4. The down-to-earth, social people at Heinz. They know who they are. I've bashed the Heinz College so much that no more bashing is necessary in this particular category. But of course, my commentary on Heinz should have never been taken as a categorical damning of the whole system, although at times it may very well seem like it. Hanging out with you guys has truly been a pleasure, and I'm not sure I could have endured the just awful process (socially, at least) of being a Heinz student without you!
5. My job with Alumni Relations. I was fortunate enough to land a job with the Heinz College's Alumni Relations office, and it has turned into one of the most rewarding experiences of my admittedly brief professional career, in many ways quite similar to the experiences that I gained as a teenager working in a public library. Not only have I once again been fortunate enough to have been placed into a role that afforded me a degree of responsibility and power not typically seen in my age cohort, I got the pleasure of working with two of the nicest ladies I have ever met (see the earlier comment about Pittsburghers which, in many ways, could be extended to Western Pennslyvanians as a whole.)
6. Growth: Larger than the others for a reason! Every change in life should inspire a certain type of growth, and it is often through those negative changes - job loss, unpleasant relocation, difficult/trying circumstances, loss of a loved one, disease - that truly forge our character. I have been through a plethora of changes over the last year - most of them negative - and I have truly grown into myself as a result. So much in my character has changed (and I believe, improved) as a result of being forced to live in a series of realities extremely different from those to which I have been accustomed for most of my life. Positive, indeed, has flown from the negative in this way. I want to emphasize pretty forcefully that this is much, much more than gaining a greater appreciation for those things in life that you value. True, that's a huge part of what I'm talking about here - as attested to by my recent list of things I'll never take for granted again - but the real growth process here is centered on seeing the world through a more refined lens. To me, this will always be the principal differentiator between the well-traveled urbanite and the isolated redneck - so much of the cultural conservatism that emanates from small towns, such as the one in which I grew up, stems from a remarkably profound ignorance of the world outside of any one particular fiefdom.
   

Hopefully that rounds out my image of this year a bit and makes it clear that not everything has been horribly torturous. From hanging out with chill Heinz people to inevitably growing through the process of adapting to a very different new environment, there have been many positive sides to this process, and I would be remiss to neglect to mention them as part of my journey.