Summer Session at Fairmont University

Ah, hot days, warm summer afternoons! Lazy lazy lazy. What a summer it is going to be. I've got two main things I'm up to this summer, and a number of goals.

I'm so glad to move onto summer. Watching all of 2010 graduate was very difficult, and then I had to move all my stuff a very, very long ways all by my lonesome, which was made particularly difficult by the fact that I claimed an enormous amount of furniture from SWAPR (a Vassar program which reclaims all the furniture students throw out, stores it for the summer, and then resells it to next year's students) all of which was very heavy. But now that I'm moved in and all my stuff is safely stored away, this summer is cruising.

All my stuff on the lawn of Fairmont where it remained and I quietly prayed for no rain.

For the first half of this summer, a Ford Scholarship with Jeff Walker, an awesome professor of Earth Sciences, one of a handful of experts on our project (John Burroughs), and a remarkable human being. He is one of those people who you want to be: if all the dice were rolled, and I ended up like Jeff Walker, I'm pretty sure I'd be a happy man. He is a legend around campus, highly respected, extremely knowledgeable, and a titan of sustainability and locavore mentality. He lives on a farm nearby Vassar known as the Walker Family Farm, has a huge family of talented, good-hearted children (two of whom I've had classes with; they really are remarkable people) who all play music together in the Walker family band. This is a rare, wise man to get the chance to know. I am lucky.

Then, for the second half of my summer, I'm headed off to Estonia (via Berlin, where I will take a day to see Shinkel's Altes Museum, and whatever else I have time for—probably just a day or two) where I will take intensive Russian courses for three weeks in tandem with a culture program that guides me all around the city museums, and even to the outskirts of the little country. At the end of those three weeks, I'll be getting on the trans-Siberian Railroad from Saint-Petersburg (where I will have another day or two) all the way to Vladivostok by way of Irkusk, Lake Baikal, and numerous other spots. The best part about this whole scheme is it is completely free on account of me winning a scholarship. I've been inspired to apply to every scholarship under the sun from here on out, because my luck is downright absurd and I need to keep capitalizing before my well runs dry.

I've matriculated into Fairmont University, which is absolutely the coolest place to live at Vassar. I've learned the value of porches on a house—so shady for hot summer afternoons, fresh lemonade, crushed garden grown mint, a splash of rum (or two), kicking back with my bad guitar playing; I'm in Evan-heaven. Fairmont University is off campus with my best pal Misha – and what a pal he is. He is an amazing chef, and is going to be teaching me as we cook our summer away. So that's the first goal (and the rest, in no particular order of importance):


1. Learn to cook; do it well.
2. Plant a garden. So far, I have some 25 tomato sprouts, three or four sweet pepper sprouts, and am looking to plant a hedge of sunflowers to block some of the more or less unsightly sides of our college house.
3. Work on my Ford Scholarship work, transcribing the Journals of John Burroughs.
4. Get my essay published. And the other one too, if possible.
5. When in Saint-Petersburg, organize a way to get into the basement of the Hermitage and see if I can't find the missing Rockwell Kent piece in their collections (more on this later).
6. Exercise a bunch; soundness of body : soundness of mind – consult Bruce Lee's Art of Expressing the Human Body.