Solomon's poetry

I checked three different calendars today, just to be sure. But it's true. I've only been in classes for two weeks. Yet, somehow, I feel like I've always been here and the people I've met over the past two weeks have always been a part of my life. I mean, it might have something to do with the 30-minute economics presentation last week, the 7-page statistics paper this morning, the marketing quiz on Monday, and the 5-page economics paper on Thursday. But I'd rather assume that it has something to do with what happens when you throw 100 strangers into the same journey together.

Just last night, I was hanging out with two guys from the Gang of 100 and one of them said, "I can't believe I just met you guys 3 weeks ago." True words. In just 21 days, somehow we've managed to share our lives together; many of us know about the others' aspirations and hopes, their pasts and their families, many of their strengths and weaknesses. We can already tell how to push each other's buttons and we have inside jokes. We've exchanged cell phone numbers and hang out on the weekends (which now start on Thursdays). There are people we get along with and others we'd prefer not to see outside The Duck. But we're journeying together for at least the next two years of our lives, sharing in each others' stress, joy, success and failure.

Don't get me wrong. I still miss Boston and my friends there. I still fall into in waves of loneliness and wistful thinking. But when I arrived in DC and walked into The Duck on the first day of MBA camp, there were people here who already knew me, knew about the choices I've made, who even asked about the (now) ex-boyfriend, who called me to hang out before classes even began. That's pretty darn cool. You know, one might even think that it's all been perfectly orchestrated by some higher power who happens to like me a whole lot ....

In other news, I think I'm going to die of e. coli. The New York Times tells me that the pre-packaged spinach that I bought from Trader Joe's is probably contaminated with the deadly virus. A woman has even died from e. coli of the spinach variety! It's a good thing I finally have health insurance again after four months of cautious, uninsured living. (Hopefully Mom and Dad aren't reading this). And it's also a good thing I can die with such a positive attitude. Let me explain. In Thursday's human dynamics class with a professor I'll call Gandalf, we were asked to complete an exercise where we had to rank our top five terminal and instrumental values. Out of the 30 or so students in my cohort, only three of us selected "salvation" in the top five. That got me thinking.

I mean, shouldn't eternity land somewhere near the top of people's values? Are we so caught up in our puny lives that we can't think in terms of eternity? Is it just too scary to wonder what happens after death? Are we so without hope that we don't even believe in eternity, despite the fact that we work so hard for comfortable, prosperous lives? What are we working towards if life just ends at death and everything we've worked for ceases to exist? As it's been said before, without a bigger hope, it all just seems meaningless, a chasing after the wind.