The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Apparently my grandma reads my blog, and when I don't post in a while she calls up my mom to ask why. So it's ok, Grandma, I've just been busy!

Let's see: what have I done? And where have I done it? Suffice it to say, I'm extremely well-traveled. Two Friday's ago, after class, I hopped on the T, took it to the airport, and got on a plane to California so that the next day I could go to Big Game. Big Game is the annual football match-up between Cal (UC Berkeley) and Stanford.

I've decided that I want to be one of the ancient Old Blues (Cal alums) who can claim to have attended 80+ years of consecutive Big Games. So far, with this year's, I'm at 12. It's a respectable number but my streak almost got broken a few years ago when my ex-boyfriend insisted that I forgo what was immensely important to me to instead attend his best friend's wedding. Fortunately, it turned out that the wedding was ACROSS THE STREET from the Big Game so I was able to do a wedding-football game double-header. Given that my ex now refuses to speak to me and I've had no contact with the betrothed friend since, I'm REALLY REALLY glad that my record didn't get compromised for nothing...

It might sound like a silly priority to try to attend a football game, but it isn't. It's not really about the football at all, although I do enjoy watching Cal play it. (And given Cal's until recently recent predilection for mediocrity, it's clearly not about the winning either.)

It's about being attached to the community. I've noted elsewhere how annoyingly hard it is to be a Yankee fan somewhere where it's completely incongruous to be a Yankee fan. Caring for a team makes more sense when you are in the community that the team plays for. With Cal, though, the community aspect transcends geography. I've been in far-flung places (e.g., a line in an American Express office in St. Petersburg, Russia) where I've run into Cal alumni. We greet each other with a hearty "Go Bears!" and are suddenly no longer strangers. The Big Game just gives us the occasion to all converge on the same place and reconvene with all of our friends.

It’s not that I’d want to relive my undergrad years: they were full of stress and angst as I learned a lot of (sometimes hard) lessons, academically and otherwise. But I still couldn't imagine a better place to have learned them. The gorgeousness of the campus, the vibrance of the town, the ambient desire for knowledge and discovery that hung in the air like the heavy smell of eucalyptus... these are just some of the things that I appreciate about my time there. Cal was absolutely the best place for me to have gone to school, and as I go out into the world I want there to remain a little tangible tether to keep me tied to her.

"To the University of California, then, cheer for her, it will do your lungs good. Love her, it will do your hearts and lives good."
- Benjamin Ide Wheeler, former University of California President, 1899