as the walls come down
I guess I’ve sort of always been a night person. After the sun goes down, I am the most alive I will be the whole day…and I suppose this is one thing I share in common with quite a few members of my TIC family :P. Nighttime is when I get the most done, and the day’s events finally catch up to me, as if the daylight itself is a dream.
The day felt nothing like a conclusion. I even watched the students hugging their TA’s fiercely before walking out the door, but to me another part of my day was just beginning.
Having come home, I sat at my computer for five minutes, the cursor blinking, blinking, blinking…the title box empty. Unable to think of anything to type. How do you title on something like this? How do you summarize, in one phrase, the happiest and most amazing things to ever happen to you?
What phrase could possibly, even remotely, say how much I love these people and the time I spend with them?
Today over dinner, as we all cheered Trev with an enthusiastic ovation that drew the attention of the whole restaurant (I am proud to say), I seriously considered asking everyone to go around the table and share one of their fondest memories of TIC. I stopped myself, both because I was not sure how to ask the question…and because I wondered how people would go about composing something to say.
I have never truly known how to explain the contentment that TIC brings. In thinking of one of my favorite moments of TIC, the first to surface was an image - perhaps not a visual image, but a different, equally vivid kind - of eleven of us in the topmost room of the Tactile Dome. No light by which to see each other’s faces, no pictures by which to capture the sight of us sprawled over the cushioned tent…but that was the beauty of it.
Going back to dinner. Something else happened at the same time, which I think is the closest I have ever come to explaining what TIC is to me. I tried to think of a moment which truly showed what TIC is…and I thought of a memory that was not there. I have been able to, for a while now, think of things that have not happened, so realistically that I can confuse myself as to whether or not they actually took place.
After all, we have never found ourselves in a living room on Christmas Day, enjoying the warmth of a fireplace and crowded together at the foot of a vibrant green tree, heavy with the weight of ornaments and false snow. And yet in this setting, I can find a place for everyone - Jamie, Janvi and Sarah breaking out in bouts of laughter as they slap down cards on the floor, Brandon carefully poking a marshmallow on a stick into the fire, Tansen sprawled on a sofa playing DS, Allison neatly and carefully stitching a Plushimal and observing Brandon’s smoldering marshmallow, while Max and Frank spray fake snow ceaselessly onto the tree as Kass keeps a careful direction on them, making sure they avoid the large group of board-game players led by Quad and the observers seated in front of the tree…and etc.
That’s the sort of happiness that I find in TIC, and my TIC friends - though these past two years, they have become, to me, more than friends. A family.
After dinner, in the midst of us milling about outside of a frozen yogurt store I was surprised to find my cheeks…wet. I haven’t cried all day - my face was soaked by water balloons exploding across my face and glasses, not tears. Things change, and we move on…but there’s nothing wrong with crying for thing past, so long as we remember to look forward again.
The Internet Classroom - though we are not a classroom, we are from this place. A classroom without walls is not, in technical terms, a room…no, I have found from experience, in the past two years, that TIC expands as far as you can take it, there are no bounds, no walls, to keep you within parameters. This year, we expanded out of Tolman, up an entirely too-steep climb to Soda Hall, where an entirely new experience took place, in the form of Introduction to Java. And perhaps we spent a little too much time in our close-knit group, when we should have been socializing with the rest of our classmates (ahem), but it was thrilling to, for six weeks, work together in a new setting, with a teacher and TA’s we knew and trusted.
Nonetheless, with new memories imprinted in that place, we find ourselves back at Tolman on the very last day, eager to hurry down to Pat Brown’s where our friends (and ammunition) are.
Every year, it is painful to say goodbye, but we are not tied here. I have unconsciously put up my own walls, thinking that after six weeks, it’s over. But it’s not over. Not yet, and not ever.
We are The Internet Classroom, a classroom without walls.