The Oakland Center is meant to function as a central hub on the univerity campus. The building is pretty new, featuring many empty corridors and passageways which intersect between study nooks, food courts, and places to hang out. When I first set foot in this place, I was really struck by the architecture here. Very modern industiral flourishes, hella exposed steel beams and channels leading through multi-layered floorplans. The whole interior has a sort of pseudo color palette, with the carpeting and paneling matching with the weirdo modern furniture, all overlayed within the boilerplate beige drywall. I think the design choices in this space make for a slightly more interesting look in what would otherwise constitute the usual generic 'modern' university space.
I never attended a university, nowadays that path seems like an absolute surefire way to delve into irreverisble debt. As a chronic underachiever, I always strive for the bare minimum, and my associates degree serves as a badge of honor, representative of the unfocused dirtball soul I embody. Probably not going to get any education higher than that degree, it seems like you hit diminishing returns with the cost/benefit scaling. Something about school doesn't click with me either, even though I really feel like it should. I consider myself a smart fella, everyone in the world considers themselves a smart fella - but there are definitely some gaps in my learned understanding bestowed by public school. Also I think my cellphone gave me the ubiquitous mass psychosis attention deficit syndrome around middle school, but I can't be sure. The technology is a pretty easy scapegoat to point at when feeling a general lack of focus and drive, but talking to my peers it seems more like a generational trauma thing.
Let it be known - I never wrote essays, straight up couldn't do it. Didn't matter the word count, subject matter, page requirements, due date, none of that. Something about the way my brain had been developing made it impossible, or at least extremely difficult to articulate any original thoughts by the written medium. Every mental breakdown I've had so far in this life has been the result of, or at least tangentially related to, this horrible incompatiblity between my inner world and the articulation of those thoughts into reality. Around 10th grade I stopped writing my own essays altogether, and just tanked the grades or paid others to write them for me, retreating into the familiar abstract and rule-bound worlds of STEM. I've kinda been feeling that aversion with this quaint little website project as well, it can be hard to even crank out these modest paragraphs on the blog sometimes. I do think my brain is healing though, as I grow older the desire for understanding and connection becomes stronger. Sort of beginning to un-learn the mental associtation between writing and stressful agony over due dates and grading, I find it easier to write nowadays, and I hope that one day I can regain the energy and focus to actually be proficient with it, and others can gain some value from my own little ideas.