At age 2 and a half, my mother sat me down in the laundry room and asked me, "Do you want to learn violin like Auyon, piano like Arnob, or another instrument?"
"Auyon. Violin."
Short, clear, decisive. The guiding philosophy of my existence was borne.
At age it's not important, I started Tae Kwon Do, like Auyon.
At age 11, I ran cross country in middle school, poorly, like Auyon.
At age 12, I began playing tennis, like Auyon.
At age 15, I began singing, like Auyon.
At age 16, I wrote my college essay about working as a custodian, like Auyon.
At age 17, I came to Williams College, like Auyon.
At age 18, I joined the Williams Octet, like Auyon.
Some would call this copying. Some would call it lack of personal identity. I like to call it love. Love of copying.
Over the summer, to keep family and friends updated, I began a collection of crude, poorly-structured office-dialogues called "Confessions of an Intern." They charted my work, if you can call it that, in a high-powered investment bank wherein my major weekly duties involved getting bags of fried chicken from Popeyes. I spent the rest of my days in the office sleeping on the john, taking 3-5 lunch breaks per day and making ludicrous amounts of money. Sending out multiple emails, however, was intrusive and inefficient. I have thus decided to do the thing I always do--the thing I know best: copy Auyon, or "chouah" as I call him. Thus, welcome to aroop.vox.com.
The purpose of this blog, however, is not to copy my brother. It is to chronicle a journey. A journey to a foreign land, where trash cans are called 'dust bins,' where bathrooms are called 'loos,' and where cell phones are reffered to as 'mobiles.' No, not Africa. I'm talking about Oxford, England. Stripped of identity and place, I will begin life there without any sense of my surroundings or local customs. My bath and hand towels will be washed only once a week for free at Oxford. At Williams I have no hand towels. I have jeans. And I've come to appreciate the thick layers of dirt and crust upon which I slumber after a semester of not washing my linens. It will be a difficult adjustment, but I am confident that with the support of you all (i.e. care packages), I will survive.
My adventure begins September 22nd, 2007 when I will join Jake Gorelov, Harris Paseltiner, and Alex Zackheim '09 in Heathrow Airport to dive headfirst into the lotus-eating bosom of Europe. We will be joined in Oxford shortly thereafter by 24 other friends and classmates, who will attend Exeter College with us for the year. We will drink tea, frolick on cobblestone streets, and, most importantly, mess up our teeth and get ass-pale.
For the first term I am signed up to take a course on International Relations and a half-course on English Lit (Tennyson, Dickens, and Wilde). My political science professor wrote to me a few weeks ago, introducing herself and giving me a reading list of 3 books to look over before arriving. I started one and two are on their way. Still stuck in the summer mindset, getting through 3 pages of IR theory has taken me all of the last 5 days. I can't wait for my first tutorial meeting.
Anywho, I will try my best to fill this blog full of mindless musings, stories, and dialogue from lands afar. To note, though, this will probably turn into a more poorly written, less funny, and less frequently updated blog than Auyon's, but I'm okay with that, because that's what she said.
Love,
Aroop
