I seem to have Harry Potter on the brain. This probably has something to do with having recently read the latest book and caught a bit of the first movie on TV the other day.
Wednesday night I went to a local bar with other incoming law students. (It turned into karaoke night. I regaled my new classmates with my usual rendition of "The Power of Love." The Huey Lewis and the News version, of course. None of this Celine Dion nonsense.) There was a second year law student there as well, freaking out the other students with tales about the bedside manners of the professors. (She was very apologetic, repeatedly saying, "I shouldn't be telling you this," but then telling everyone anyway.) It suddenly struck me that the various law professors mapped to the professors at Hogwarts. One was clearly Snape, one was Dumbledore, etc.
The other similarity I noticed was at Thursday's orientation, when I spent a morning with that dazed sense of disorientation that J.K. Rowling described the new Hogwarts students feeling. It started with getting sorted into our sections (no sorting hat though - it was all determined earlier), filling out forms, getting a student ID, buying books, buying xeroxes, getting my locker, losing my student ID and then finding it again where I bought the books (that part wasn't on the standard orientation schedule), and sitting through lots and lots of orientation meetings. I remember walking around doing all these chores with the bewildered realization, "I CHOSE to do this???" It wasn't like I was fated to be here and am simply living out my destiny. I voluntarily put myself in this position, of paying a gazillion dollars for the privilege of doing incredible amounts of work. Months ago back home in California this all SEEMED like a good idea...
But here I am, for better or worse, not at Hogwarts but at Boston University. Yet another university with an unknown nickname outside its region. I went to the University of California at Berkeley as an undergraduate, but that name is quite a mouthful so we all called it "Cal" for short. At least everyone in California did. No one in New Jersey had a clue what I was talking about. The shortest name I could get away with using back east was "UC Berkeley," because even if I just called it "Berkeley" they all thought I meant the Berklee College of Music in Boston. But it appears that the reverse is true with Boston University, or BU. I was telling someone in California where I was planning to go to law school, and told him I was going to BU. He looked perplexed, "What do you mean, be me?"
All day yesterday people were asking me where I was from, and as you've read here (and here and here and here...), the accurate answer takes a while to explain. But it turns out that the geographical diversity in my biography may serve me well, because I realized I can speak both East Coast and West Coast. And as we've seen in the above example, sometimes that translating ability can come in handy.