This is a reupload as part two was posted for both episodes 51 and 52. So, here’s part one, the intended 51. Now back to the previously siphoned summary.
All this is not to be annoying or boastful. What’s the point of bragging when nothing happens individually. I’m so flying-too-close-to-the-sun grateful for your having joined me on this weird, indulgent, documentarian, analytical, and community-forming journey through college’s end and post-college’s beginning. That’s sappy. Thank you for peering over this deep long abyss with me. That’s dark. In all seriousness, I spent years, as you did, in grade school and high school surrounded by humans. In college, for me at least, there were also several humans but I at times fled to spaces with many fewer humans or zero.
After college, having changed my major again, except this time it wasn’t a major as much as it was a professional direction or lack of direction and this time there was no security of deans and bureaucracy and privilege, I saw an opportunity. I saw someone my age, except wildly more successful, with a podcast. So, I thought I can do that. If there is one thing Princeton has taught me, it’s that the seemingly unlikely, those deep in the margins, so down hardly anyone can see them, can effect miraculous things. I also thought I could finally do what I had shied away from doing. From telling my story. It was one of those narratives that often came in or out of mind space: who would care about my experiences in college? Who am I? They can figure it out themselves. All the rationalizing was powerless against something I may have once thought grand, David and Goliath-esque, lore from the days of old, JFK and grayscale films: kismet. Kismet can be Mundane. Silly. Your seeing this emoji of a cat is kismet.
Kismet can be Inevitably Easy. Cheap. Conceited. Like a podcast. Some would say. Some would be wrong. For me at least, it’s been an exercise in empathy, connecting with similar and dissimilar minds. An exercise in tying an intransigently nostril-flaring, nose-twirling, sleep-delaying-because-it-realized-disk-storage-was-insufficient-after-who-knows-how-long-I-waited camel. This all is to say thank you. You nor I truly knows what this means.
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