notes from underground

In about five hours, I will be essentially done with college. I still have final projects due next week, in both animation (the “typebot” character design and rigging project) and my independent study (where I am redoing kadamwhite.com as a proper and more professional-looking portfolio website), but both of those projects feel very post-college to me. They are both courses that I took in order to better prepare for the work I intend to do professionally, not courses I took for their abstract academic value. Worlds of Russian Science-Fiction and Fantasy, for which I turned in my final project yesterday afternoon, and The History of the English Language, the exam which I will sit in two hours, are the last two proper liberal arts classes in an undergraduate career that has been heretofore dominated by humanities courses. For all that, I am going into art. It’s a strange feeling to realize how big a change this is, and yet how normal it all feels.

When I got to Brown just under four years ago, I was pretty darn convinced I was going to be either a history or an English major. If I’d taken Russom’s History of English courses a few years earlier, who knows? I might still have gone that route, and be applying to graduate programs right now. I could well have been planning to rely on my talents as a writer for my livelihood, rather than my visual side. Of course I chose East Asian Studies so I could do a bit of everything and then some, and I can’t precisely say that I am disappointed to be going into art–quite the opposite, it’s about bloody time! Still, as I prepare to leave this place I am only just beginning to realize how many other untapped courses and professors I am leaving behind as I graduate. Oh well… If there’s one thing I’ve gotten used to at Brown, it’s feeling like there’s never enough time!

Now, off to rock this exam. Back in a jiffy.