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What do you want? Do you want yet another witty propaganda sheet from one
of the nebulous entities called Houses? My apologies -- I fear you won't
get it. Are you looking for a statement of purpose, a clinical dissection
of the upcoming year or a dissertation on what it means to be part of the
community? If you look hard enough, you should find it; it's always there
if you want to see it that badly. Do you prefer a Rollins-esque harangue,
the soap-box stand preaching of a would-be compatriot turned guest lecturer
on the validity of your life, a bulging vein and muscle furor of the same
ideas spouted by everyone else? I might drift into that, much to my chagrin
and perhaps yours. Are you expecting instead to find some entertaining
anecdotes of life at Caltech, the recollections of the people you could nigh
well end up living with? They're spikes in the continuum of days, or more
accurately bites of everday life turned to mythic proportion, taken in by a
person's mind and enshrouded in his thoughts, sculpted around his ideals and
ordained with some cosmic importance. Any expectation of the above is unrealistic. Not that unrealistic is bad. In fact, I hope that's what you do want. It seems to me that people spend to much of their time these days trying to convince themselves that they should want something realistic, that they focus on the everyday stuffing of life and not on the more entertaining possibilities. It's a shame. To seek actively, finally, that which you know is possible is to limit yourself; it is an admission to a lack of imagination. Unless I'm mistaken people don't actually like reality -- cynicism is the fashionable stance of the age, ubiquitous enough to convince those brooding, self-proclaimed pessimists sulking in the corner of the local espresso bar that they actually are cynics and not closet idealists clinging to this omnipresent, prefabricated concept of life. Why should you want something you don't like? I think the problem lies in an overlooked distinction between desires and expectations, an obvious one when you consider it. (Semantics? There are reasons for semantics. (Why have "thoughtless" and "careless" come to mean the same thing?)) Expectations have to do with the real world, with what is likely, with probabilities; desires lie in the scope of possibilities, in the idealized environment of your mind. It's unlikely, if not impossible, that you think exactly as the world runs, and if you ever claim that you understand the way the world works, you should probably check into a hospital right away. Your thoughts are exclusively yours since they lose some meaning in translation, through any medium; you cannot turn your thoughts and hence your desires directly into reality. Nor can anyone else do it for you, for he cannot understand exactly what you're thinking. Expecting to get what you want is the problem, not the desire itself. So, again, what do you want? Not what you tell yourself you want, not what you think you should want, but what you actually want. You probably can't get it, but why depend on statistics? Figure it out; I want to know. You don't need to know who I am. You know who you are. So do we. Dabney House
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