I left the house at about 6:30 Saturday morning. It had been over 4 years since I had last made the 3 hour drive from the home where I grew up to Tuscaloosa. From homecoming at my high school the night before, I was driving to homecoming at UA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m beginning to realize that I really should have forced myself to write something right after I got home (even though it was 1:15 AM). I was about to launch on another narrative like my last post<\/a>. That\u2019s okay, but what I had so far was really beginning to feel boring. So, let\u2019s try something else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think the thing most on my mind after this last trip to Tuscaloosa can be boiled down to a single question: \u201cWhy do I go back?\u201d In a lot of ways, I can feel myself slipping farther and farther away from my connections there. I\u2019m not there very often, so people are usually a bit surprised to see me (that is, those that are left that know me). In the case of some of my EE professors, I think surprise actually drifted a bit into confusion. On Wednesday, I happened to catch them pretty much right when they were going to a faculty meeting. I\u2019m afraid I came off just a bit too eager as I said my hellos. I promise I\u2019m not a psycho stalker. It\u2019s just nice to see some of the people who helped put me where I am now. That\u2019s sometimes hard to express without coming off looking clingy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As for fellow alumni, fewer of them showed up for homecoming this year. That\u2019s to be expected (and some of them had mitigating circumstances\u2026AKA \u201cbaby Tsark”), but it\u2019s going to become more and more common the further I go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On top of all this is the growing desire not to be one of those alumni who hangs around long after his expiration date. I remember the awkwardness as a student member of my professional engineering fraternity not knowing exactly how to greet this person that no one seemed to know on sight. I don\u2019t want to make people feel like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So\u2026with all these reasons, why do I continue to go back? Well, for this year at least, I think I\u2019m pretty safe in saying that the reason is that people still there want me to come back. I began to have some inkling of this when I stopped by the fraternity house on my way out on Wednesday night. PJ caught me and made it a point to ask me to show up at a meeting on Saturday morning to discuss issues relating to the chapter and alumni. That\u2019s one of the reasons I left as early as I did. The meeting went quite well, and it gave me some confidence that I still have some useful part to play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to that, though, I really have to give special kudos to Patrick and Julie (members that joined after I graduated) for making a geezer feel welcome. We talked for a large part of the day on Saturday, and Julie even got to see my head explode as I realized that I was riding out for party supplies with someone not quite 3 years younger than my little sister. \ud83d\ude42\u00a0Actually, it bears mentioning that these are among the people who so openly invited me out for wings while I was in town last year (again, see the post<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n You know, it\u2019s a hard thing sometimes to know where the line is between healthy nostalgia and clinging to the past. I\u2019ve said before that I enjoy my life the way it is now, and it\u2019s true. I miss a lot of things about college, but I wouldn\u2019t go back and do it again. Because of that, I\u2019ve decided that if I ever don\u2019t have a good reason to go back, I\u2019m going to stop. If this last visit is any indication, though, that time hasn\u2019t arrived yet. Thanks, folks. It means a lot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I left the house at about 6:30 Saturday morning. It had been over 4 years since I had last made the 3 hour drive from the home where I grew up to Tuscaloosa. From homecoming at my high school the night before, I was driving to homecoming at UA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,4],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-deep-thoughts","tag-memories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1753,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions\/1753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}