#144. Trip to the Mall (Saturday, October 31, 2009)

#144. Trip to the Mall (Saturday, October 31, 2009)

What was your best day…of living inside a brief positive period amid extended negativity?

As hinted at in #52 (and a few other places), the two-year period from Summer 2008 to Summer 2010 was undeniably the worst extended stretch of my life. Yet, in between all that, there was a four-month period—the Fall term of my second year at Waterloo—where things weren’t actually that bad.

Life was fun again. I was living off campus with my high school friend Brian Cao (#93) on a pretty nice apartment deal1. I was past the horrors of first-year advanced sequence math (#98, #24)2, and was genuinely enjoying most of my classes (besides the proof-based linear algebra, which I expectedly did pretty badly in). And I was socializing more regularly with my classmates. And most notably, I was flying through the chapters of a new novel that, by that point, I was sure was going to become something (#128).

So, on this day, Brian and I go to the Conestoga Mall—a pretty sizable mall, especially given the modest Waterloo region it serves (and literally the only place outside campus I ventured to prior to third year, #31). We start with getting lunch at the corner food court, but all the shops there have all been closed with their signage stripped off. What the hell?

Well, apparently in the one month since we last went, the mall had completed a major remodeling (completely unnoticed by us in prior visits). And the new food court took up this massive new wing of the mall that was five times as large as the previous area. Completely unexpected, and awesome.

So I had my overpriced Mediterranean fast food, Brian had KFC, we got our groceries, and I stopped by the newly-opened Lids. I had been dying to get a legit baseball cap, and ultimately I picked out… a Colorado Rockies cap. (Recall my Lids purchase of a Cardinals cap in Philadelphia eight months later, #140. I swear I was a Jays fan back then.) And after that, we took the bus back home. That was the trip.

What made this decidedly ordinary trip a bit more special was the night that followed. No, neither Brian or I had gotten invited to any Halloween parties (#140)—parties or drinking or having a college social life was still not in my vocabulary at the time. Rather, in our spacious apartment living room, he just watched a full season of American Dad! on his laptop while I just wrote. And wrote some more. I must’ve gone through two (extremely rough) chapters that night, one of my most productive writing days ever. Yet, somehow, between all that, I also watched the entirety of Game 3 of the World Series between the Yankees and Phillies—in Mandarin (Greg had suggested it, and it was the highest-quality stream I could find).3

Before my social, academic, and career environment (and confidence) collapsed again at the start of 2010, these four months were a merciful reprieve. Not amazing, not even good by many objective measures. But a reprieve. And this quiet Saturday, with a simple trip to the mall, captured that more than anything.

  1. Thanks to his family friend Greg, who was extremely overweight and obsessed with cougars, but was a very nice and helpful person otherwise.
  2. Which I literally did not understand at all in the second term and only barely passed because of the substantial curving in that class.
  3. The Yankees won as Cole Hamels choked for the third time that postseason (after winning LCS and World Series MVP the year before. The Chinese announcer literally described his pitching as “all over the place”.