this is kinda weird

So this is the sort of thing I do all the time: forget to write about the big, important stuff while saving my words for the little (arguably even trivial) things. This, the first paragraph, is used to skip over all the big stuff; the weird is how big the big stuff is. So: I graduated. College ended fine academically, I got a chance to see a lot of people, start to let go, etc. I also started to figure out who I want to stay in touch with. Don't worry, though--if you're reading this, and you aren't someone random who hit the 'next blog' button, you're almost certainly on that list.

Over grad weekend, I managed to rather aggressively and clumsily assert My Asianness in front of the fam, for whom I'm pretty sure it was kind of but not totally expected. First, I took them to API Commencement Dinner the night before the ceremony, which was really wonderful and full of good people. Then it was them plus my cousin to grad dinner at Happy Family, a chinese-vegetarian restaurant with no liquor license, which was pretty far from what I think any of us would consider a "traditional" grad dinner-type meal (see: My Sister's Grad Dinner Selection). Well, I suppose I'm happy to thwart expectations, and it was certainly tasty. I guess in a way it was also a way for me to take some of the edge off of the finality of a post-graduation meal by making it less about the occasion and more about making everyone eat taro (and teasing my sister for not realizing she liked mushrooms). This is the same coping strategy that allowed me to put off doing thesis--because I didn't feel entirely prepared to do something so "important", even though it's really just like a class for which the grade is just one paper--and to put off finishing my grading work-study until basically the moment grades were due--because it was my last "academic" work before the end of college. It's easy to make "lasts" over-important, and turn that into a reason not to start them, I guess. Witness everyone's last-minute packing, etc etc. I feel like closure on an era in your life shouldn't come before you're actually done with it; even if there were times when I deeply resented the place (the institutional framework that governed it, the small number of people with whom all interactions took place), mentally leaving it before the physical deadline for leaving it was too hard.

So I've introduced that word "closure" into the conversation. As a hypothetical, future state of mind, sure, but as an accurate descriptor of where I'm arriving now, no. I tried. I took a semi-roadtrip with Krys and her brother Alex to see the Grand Canyon on the way home. It was big, and caused us to contemplate our own mortality. Definitely recommended for in-person viewing: photos and words may even perfectly describe the Canyon, but your mind will take those photos, those words, and rationalize them, try to make them something that seems real. This is not that kind of place. Any mental image you have of the grand canyon from reading about it, seeing our posed photos at its lip, staring at the Grand Canyon placemat I had as a kid over dinner, whatever, it will be insufficient. So that was pretty cool. We also ate at some interesting restaurants: Mandarin Super Buffet in Flagstaff, AZ, as well as that pizza place that put a spinach-and-artichoke dip on instead of pizza sauce, which was pretty terrific.

But yeah, that was all the big stuff. What I really intended to write about was the feeling of being back in Denver. Mostly the air. Although I'd kind of been aware of the corrosive particulate-laden air of SoCal and its effect on my lungs, after a while it becomes easy to forget that there's an alternative. Friday was a perfect May day here: right around 80, sunny in the morning with some thunderheads appearing in the afternoon, clear and clean and oh-my-god not choking my vascular passages with every breath. This city has a smell, like what used to be called "fresh" before they invented scented laundry detergent, like trees and breezes blowing in off the mountains and grass from the extensive and well-utilized denver parks system. I could see how people would want to live here.

Of course, there are minuses, too. I've developed a taste for Korean food, and I have no idea where to get any... the internet has some unverified listings in Aurora, so I guess an excursion is in order. Also, Blue Scholars are playing Friday, and I don't know that I have any friends not-from-college who would want to go to the show with me. We'll see how that turns out, I guess.

For the moment, I'm gonna go back to catching up on reading: for senior week, I re-started Midnight's Children, a book I had barely begun on my flight home in January and then set down for four months. It feels good, being able to get through a long book in a short enough time that everything stays cogent.