Life in A2

Hello general first month of college post. This is a list of things that pop into my head as I reflect on my first four weeks as a Wolverine living in the dorms of Ann Arbor. 

1. I never appreciated having my own bathroom until coming here. 
2. I didn't know how many rich people there are until I came here. 
3. There is a never-ending supply of delicious food in Ann Arbor. 
4. How you design your schedule is SO important
5. Having your roommate become your friend is an awesome rarity. 
6. There are 3 questions you ask and answer during Welcome Week: Name, origin,and major. You meet a million different people your first week here. 
7. The schools enormous size is a good thing 99.9% of the time. 
8. I really like blending in sometimes. I didn't know that until now. 
9. Focusing on only a few clubs is the best way to go. 
10. I never knew how many stereotypes and prejudices I carried. It's a process to clean yourselves of them.
11. Not that many kids here are on scholarships. That blows my mind. (see last post)
12. I am really lucky to live 40 minutes away. 
13. Dining hall food here is the bomb compared to CA lunches. 
14. Planners and weekly whiteboards are my best friend. 
15. Things the University says are "mandatory" are usually not.
16. You see the coolest, weirdest, most hilarious things everyday. 
17. Michigan is known as an arrogant school but we are very kind to each other. 
18. The preachers who visit the Diag are not so accepting. 
19. Democrats rule the land.
20. It takes about two minutes of knowing someone for a deep and intimate conversation to happen here. 

To be great is to be misunderstood

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion" - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
     Today I was working at my tutoring job and I had to read a passage from Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance." The bolded quote above is where the excerpt started.  I was reading it out loud to my student and every once in a while I asked her if she knew what that word and this word meant. This was partly to strengthen her vocabulary and partly to gauge if she was as affected by his writing as I was. His intelligence blew me away. This is what I thought after reading the opening sentences: Envying others is bad, knew that. Calling it ignorance stresses that only people who have never been told "It is bad to envy others" should do it. I have been taught that and I still am overcome with jealousy at times. That is ignorance. As for the second point, I knew imitation was not the best thing to do. However I would have never thought to compare imitation and suicide. Essentially though, that is a just comparison. Imitation is willingly killing your identity to replace for another. It is disrespecting the identity that God gave you, trying to paint over His picasso. The third sentence is a rock solid word-to-the-wise to love yourself as you are, one of the easiest ideas to grasp and the hardest to put into practice. Needless to say, I was engaged for the rest of the reading.
      Emerson said that "Whoso be a man must be a non-conformist." He stated that God uses brave men to do great things, not scared and hesitant people. "God will not have his work made manifest by cowards." He said not to be scared of being thought of as odd, as a freak, and to be outcasted. "To be great is to be misunderstood." His reasons were because some of the brightest, wisest people were thought as, well, weirdos. He named Copernicus, Galileo, Jesus and Newton. I was so inspired by that.  Being counter-cultural is sometimes the best thing you can do. It assures you of who you are. It is acknowledging that you do not need man's approval to understand yourself. We are so afraid to be disliked, but maybe that is the cost of magnificence.