Author: Corrina Lee

My freshman year ended suddenly. The last morning was a rushed, desperate attempt to collect everything- lost sunglasses, books, and suitcases- before I left Ann Arbor for four months. Even though I was one of the first to finish with exams and leave, an emptiness already pervaded the dorm. The last week had been an extended game of Tetris for everyone in the hall, trying to cram a full year of life into a few cardboard boxes. The storage vans had come and gone. It was time for me to leave too. One chocolate croissant later, I was on a plane thousands of miles above Ann Arbor.

Four months later, I was on another plane, landing in Detroit. Again, my mind was occupied with practicalities. First, I had to escape the airport, life and luggage intact. Then, there were new roommates to meet, an orientation to attend, and a seemingly endless amount of unpacking. But as I watched the sun rise over Ann Arbor from the bus window, the pressure of so many unfinished tasks gave away to a feeling of déjà vu instead. Here was the IM building where I had spent hours pretending to exercise. There was my old dorm, quickly filling up with new residents. Someone different would be living in the room that was no longer mine, yet the room would remain the same. Everything was just as I had left it, awaiting my return. It was as if there had never been an ending. Instead, the ending blurred with the beginning and formed a strange purgatory in the early morning light. The world was in limbo and I was the only moving wisp among closed stores and empty sidewalks.

In a strange way, it reminded me of watching a television show. No matter how much I changed, the characters remained preserved behind the screen. Time passes differently in that dimension. It moves slowly. Sometimes, it even moves backward instead of forward. Characters can be rebooted and storylines can be recycled. Shows can be extended for lifetimes, in the most extreme examples with new actors replacing the ones who have left. Sometimes, a franchise can even be revived thirty years later for prequels or sequels to the original story. Returning to the status quo is good business. New wallets emptied for old material. Sometimes, I wish my life could be as free of consequences as one in a sitcom, where both triumphs and disasters are easily erased in a week. As my bus made its slow progress to its final destination, I realized that I had returned to where I had begun. My life had been renewed for a second season, sophomore edition. It made me feel small, a component of a much bigger production beyond my perception. Some things may have changed, new classes at different times; the essential components remained the same.

Our lives are filled with these constant structures. There are of course, the immovable buildings that tower over us. But there are also ones that are not even physical, such as familial relationships, or consequential, like the television show, revisited again and again. They are stabilizing forces that tether us to a certain place for a certain amount of time. When that time comes to an end, we may leave for different pastures, but the same structures will remain if we choose to return. We can point at those structures and excitedly describe our former lives. In a few months, my sophomore year will come to an end. In a few years, my college experience will come to an end. A permanent end to one series and the beginning of a spinoff. Life blending into a life-like imitation.

It is finals time again and there is a distinct sense of panic and stress. It is expressed in the groans after a new paper is announced and in quick steps of a student running from class to class. In the libraries, it pervades like a suffocating heaviness in the air. Everyone is intently scribbling and just as impatiently flicking eraser dust off their papers as if they feel the pressure bearing down on them. In an environment such as this, it is almost obligatory to feel stressed when you see everyone around you in a similar state. It suffuses even the brief moments of relaxation. Immediately, I feel guilty for letting my guard down even for a moment, as if sitting outside and enjoying the breeze could kill. As college students, we expect stress, even joke about the dread. Yet, there seems to be a consistently unasked question: Why are we stressed at all?

Perhaps, unconsciously, I want to feel stressed. Stress, after all, is self-inflicted. It is not my teachers or even my parents that are forcing me to meet some arbitrary standard of performance. It is only me behind the judge’s table. It is paradoxical and illogical. Somehow, I’ve become both the man dying of thirst and the shifting mirage he chases. The freedom and independence of college is a double-edged sword. Now, there is no one left to blame. There is a trap in setting these impossible expectations. We get stuck in a perpetual cycle of disappointment and stress and often don’t even know why. When that stress vanishes for even a second, I question why, instinctively creating more. Stress is so effective at drowning out everything else. But it is also a shallow feeling devoid of any meaning, but panic. It is as if all we chose to hear was the drone of the alarm instead of music. It becomes a buffer against feeling or thinking about anything too deeply. Then, when the homework is gone and the tests are over, all we are left with is an inexplicable emptiness.

Yet for all the stress, this weekend was an unexpected joy. People crowded the Diag, relaxing on hammocks, flinging frisbees in open defiance of the foreboding libraries standing guard over them. Perhaps they had found the solution after all. We often take stress for granted. In the end, it is really a choice we can choose not to make.

It seemed like a simple enough assignment. I was to write a one page cover letter for my Comparative Literature class by Tuesday morning. Yet, it was also somehow 11 pm, Monday evening, after hours of staring at the computer screen, and still not a word was written. My mind felt bloated by all the uselessness it had consumed. It seemed to me that the blank Word document was peering back into me, judging my incompetence, my weakness. It asked the same question that I kept returning to myself, “Why wasn’t I motivated to do this earlier? And what can I do about it?” But of course, by then, it was too late for those questions. It was too late to think about much at all, especially the unfinished paper sitting in front of me.

Procrastination is so restless. For me, it stems from wanting to do too much, not less. I am constantly focused on four things at once, each one more important than the last. Sometimes it feels like I am listening to multiple songs at once. All the rhythms and melodies clash, but I can’t bear to turn them off either because I don’t know when I’ll find the time to listen more carefully. Sometimes, I wish that we could have an infinite amount of time. There would be no more urgency or worry about upcoming deadlines. Most importantly, there would be no such thing as procrastination because there would be no such thing as wasted time or time at all for that matter. The tendency for delaying one task in favor of the other is a misplaced hope that we might stretch time itself to suit our desires. It is the belief that we can do everything and ignore limitations. When the night finally hits, it is a return to a disappointing reality that solemnly points out that we are simply mortal after all.

Yet, it always seems that, it would be equally disappointing not to procrastinate. A singular focus on only one task is dreadfully boring as if out of all the winding roads, one always chose the one that led straight. It is living a life dictated by the markings of a personal planner and only doing things when they are scheduled. It is not entirely our fault when things work this way. University life especially is structured around constant, unavoidable deadlines. It is too easy to live deadline to deadline and lose track of what matters. I don’t want my entire college experience to be dictated by when my essays are due. But it is also impossible to pretend that they don’t exist. Procrastination doesn’t seem to be solution to this either. The last hour before a due date is anything but relaxing. It is all an attempt to find balance between what you want and what others want of you.

Of course, I got the paper done in the end. Typing frantically without a thought for meaning or connection will typically achieve that goal. After clicking “Submit”, there was no question about what I had to do next. I opened YouTube and started watching another video.

It has been two years since the final episode of Mad Men aired on AMC ad I still don’t think that I fully appreciate all the show accomplished in its seven-season run. By turns it was a story about one man, Don Draper, and a larger narrative about the radical changes throughout the 60s. Many times, Don was not even the most interesting character on the screen. That role shifted constantly from Peggy’s dynamic journey, rising from a lowly secretary position, to Joan’s search for balance between work and the traditional notions of womanhood. Unlike many shows, there was no separation between the office and the home, brought together by the men and women who lived and worked there. This resulted in characters that were never caricatures or simply symbols. They often held contradictory beliefs, acted against their own self-interests, or relapsed into old behaviors. Don and his cohorts at the ad agencies may have called themselves, “mad men”, but in the end, they were simply human, with human vices. Thus, the show never needed to resort to depicting anything more dramatic than real life and all its messiness.

Often glimpses of the past are solely produced to make the present seem more palatable. We smile at their backwards ways and smugly assume that our lives are better, our morals purer. Yet, these productions only serve to peddle the false notion of ceaseless forward progress. Some changes are simply old beliefs returned under the disguise of advancement. Even real change is not always for the better. It would have been so easy for “Mad Men” to fall into one of these traps. It would have been so easy to point at the people of the 60s and laugh at their boozy, sexist, racist views and called them lesser beings. The show, instead, sought to examine the system that produced those men and women, the one that shoved them into tight suits and beautiful dresses, and ask how those roles had come about. The assumptions and unseen regulations of the 60s drove these characters and their reactions to it defined their lives. Don Draper, as first introduced, seems to be an exemplary member of the system. He is wealthy and successful, handsome and with the slick hair and the beautiful wife to prove it. His life inspires envy in those beneath him, such as Pete Campbell, and even his equals, such as Robert Sterling. It is a veneer as shiny and false as the ads that he produces. We do not cheer for the characters to see them to succeed at their jobs, find love, or achieve any of the other traditionally accepted markers of happiness. Instead, we are left hoping that somehow, some way, they will find the self-understanding that seems to elude all of us. Over the seasons, those working at Sterling-Cooper became our companions and our personal mirrors, their struggles reflecting ours. “Mad Men” will continue to be a cultural phenomenon, far past the era it portrayed.

         Over the years, I’ve discovered that I’m afraid of many things. When I was young, it was the instinctive fear of the dark. All the associated phobias of monsters or killers in the night were still unformed. That came later, after watching too many Chinese television soaps. Instead, fear began undefined and nebulous. The dark was its own being that could reach out and grab me right out of my bed. Then, I was afraid of my parents. Their disappointment was always palpable when I did something wrong. These fears pursued me in the daylight at school and the darkness of my room became my shelter instead. They also became more concrete. They were the grades on my report card, the group of girls that always shared a table, and the feeling in my stomach right before a test. They multiplied by the day and I began to yearn for the day where all I ran from was the boogie man.

Fear is a gift. Without fear, a sabretooth tiger would have torn apart the last of the human species an ice age ago. We learn from what we dread the most. In fact, many of our fears are manifestations of previous wounds. Perhaps it was a bee sting or a scraped knee. Perhaps it was a particularly awkward third-grade presentation that creates a life-long aversion to public speaking. There is always something that prevents us from achieving our full potential. Even when the entire affair is forgotten, that twinge of pain casts a shadow upon our aspirations. Other fears are instilled by society. By the time high school began, I had even learned to fear my own body. There was too much fat here, not enough there. Suddenly, I started fearing the prospect of walking through life alone. It was the terror of never meeting someone that truly, intimately understood me. And so, I fretted over outfits, over parties, over a thousand little things, because now, there was a new formless fear, love, or more specifically, that I would never, ever, ever, ever find it.

FDR, of course, would come to say that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. What is often forgotten is the extension of that idea. That we should fear that fear keeps us from achieving our true potentials. That we will let fear control us our entire lives and never truly live or be ourselves. This is the fear spawned by the inevitability of death. The last and greatest despair is that we will leave nothing behind and be forgotten without a protest. Perhaps that was what I saw as I considered the dark all those years ago. But I think the worst thing that you can do in the face of fear, is refusing to acknowledge it. Fear is as legitimate and useful as any other feeling. After all, there is no love without fear. You love someone because they alleviate that fear of loneliness, because they can accept you for all your vulnerabilities. It is only when fear overwhelms everything else that it becomes something to be afraid of. Confronting fear is easier said than done. But it also the only path to a truer understanding of self.

……Just kidding! But when the sun does burst out from behind the grey clouds, it is not only the sky that seems to get lighter. Even my daily walk to the dining hall was shorter with the sunshine streaming down. Every breath becomes a phenomenon, a spectacular gift from nature. Then there is the increased awareness of motion. Up and down, left and right. I am suddenly aware of the motion of my arms and my legs as I stroll along the sidewalk. How am I doing it? When did I learn this? Half of my hazy memories stem from static ridden home videos alone. My path to South Quad leads me past the Cube and the people populating the square. The children are reveling in action too. Their joy illuminates the complete lack of fear to their movements. Their parents move in a completely different manner, following different rules. They move their cameras up and down as helpless as I to capture the complete transformation that has occurred before our eyes.

As a person that has always loved winter, it feels like a betrayal to admit that I love this weather. But as much as I like the coziness of a knit-wool sweater and the warmth in the bottom of my stomach after a cup of hot chocolate, all of that is manufactured as a response to the weather. You can never truly embrace winter without keeping at least two layers in between you and the cold. Everything is open and free under the sun. We expose ourselves in t-shirts and shorts without concern. Our fears evaporate in the clear air and leave us with minds liberated from responsibility. Perhaps that is why I can move in such child-like wonderment today, all those adult burdens have simply vanished.

This is not an altogether original observation. When I proposed this blog post to my roommate, she may have rolled her eyes, and responded with a “duh”. But I think she unintentionally proved my point. This weather unites us, tempting us to all come out of our separate houses and dorm rooms. Sunshine is universal. Even on the coldest day in Ann Arbor, when the wind temporarily robs you of the ability to breathe, it must be sunny somewhere. Then, there is the comfort, that in a few months the sun will return with all its suffocating, summer humidity. Wherever you turn, you cannot escape the influence that the sun exerts. It is a constant reminder of life, fueling the processes that allow everything on Earth to bloom. I glance at a shrub and am reminded of eighth grade biology without the boredom of the classroom. Thousands of little pancake-like granum are hidden in that leaf, unconsciously saving the world by using the power of the sun to fix CO₂ from the air. I feel the heat on my skin and think of the expansive, cold space that surrounds this tiny planet. Out of millions of floating rocks, this is the one with the star at the correct distance to create life, rather than burn it out of existence.

The sun has become more than simply the physical fuel for our lives, but also the inspiration of art and mythology. Every day, Apollo traverses the sky in his glowing chariot. Every night, Ra enters the Underworld and fights his eternal battle against Apophis, the god of Chaos. In Aztec legend, Huitzilopochtli is the sun and the moon is his sister’s decapitated head. Again, the sun is universal from one end of the hemisphere to the other. Akycha hails from the Inuit mythology and Inti from Incan legend. It is not just ancient history either. One of the most enduring symbols of America, after all, is the Washington monument, an enormous obelisk. Everything is built to optimize the sunlight, even the new buildings currently being constructed built for the University of Michigan business school. Its influence is omnipresent. You would have to move the Earth out of the orbit of the sun to escape its presence.

It is hilarious to think that the Earth was once considered the center of the solar system when our lives so clearly revolve around the sun. The warmth of the sunshine is always there even when it is not sunny in Ann Arbor.