The Reason I Studied Abroad: A Preface to Adventures

My study abroad friend Jennifer shared an article “3 Reasons to Travel While You’re Young” and I spotted it in my newsfeed. After reading, I thought about the post, which drew me back to my own experience studying abroad. But I only had one reason and it's hard to explain.

It came down to a choice: double-major or study abroad...but it was much more like...

The Question

I was starting my second semester of sophomore year at UC Berkeley and felt directionless. I loved English literature so I thought about majoring in it, I was feeling hot and cold with my hobbies, and I just lacked a long-term focus. I loved rhetoric too so I thought I could double-major. Or why not study abroad?

This last question lingered for weeks.

Jan 2012. St Pancras Station, my first sight of London. Blurry and confused.

But I finally answered it. There was just an ounce more in me of "let's do the unexpected" than the more introverted academic in me. It reminded me of a feeling I experienced in the summer before third grade when I went to camp for the first time. On the third day, we were encouraged to get up at dawn, go to the camp’s freezing pond, and jump off the dock. The “polar bear swim” it was called. After rational ways of justifying why I shouldn’t, I ignored them all and jumped in. I shivered, I panicked, I calmed down, I swam, I laughed, all in two seconds.

But I wasn't always the one to instigate the jump. Fast forward two years later to one warm Sunday in the middle of August. My mom lets me know that I’m starting something new on the weekends. I get out of the car, blinded by the sun, and walk into an old wing of a renovated college building. Kids my age and way older leaned against the walls, tying tight, black shoes to their feet and carrying colored folders with sheet music. The covers said "Oliver!" It was my first day of musical theater. I knew no one and had no idea what was going on. But it was my choice to stay in the end, and did it for many more shows thereafter.

The Reason

Now here I was on a Friday in the downpour rain on Berkeley’s campus, sophomore year. I finally stopped procrastinating and went to the study abroad office to ask about England programs. I first thought only about doing a summer deal, quick and easy, but the lady said it just...wasn't as fun. So I finally decided on a semester immersion. She smiled at me and let me know about it, but before long, she said, “Well, you know, the application is due in less than two weeks.”

Teacher recommendations, financial forms, personal forms, scholarship forms. I barely managed but I got them all in. Now all I had to do was wait.

And wait I did. I waited long enough that life happened. I declared the English major, interviewed and settled into an editor position for an academic journal, had a girlfriend, and started living with the best of people in the fall. And I considered tacking on a rhetoric major too. Things were kind of set. I was happy. I had direction.

Then I got the letter. I was accepted to the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for the spring of 2012. I would have to drop everything at Berkeley and start over somewhere else.

Jan 2014. SFO Airport to NY. (I got better at taking photos.)

Well, I did. I did it for the same reason that I once jumped off the dock and knew that I would freeze in the next second. I stayed with the decision like I stayed with the first rehearsal of "Oliver!" It wasn’t because I hadn’t thought of all the reasons not to do them. It was because there was part of me that wanted to answer an off-the-wall question “What if I…?” and know what it actually felt like to be on the other side of that question. The chaos that you can't explain, only experience.

"Day 1"

Once I stepped off the plane and scrambled my way onto the Tube in London, with a green bag that made me look—for all intents and purposes—like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, I experienced a blissful sensation. I realized that for the first time, I was in a place without personal history anywhere nearby. My dialect was my own, my culture just my habits. All sense of control was abolished. I was on reset. But there was so much possibility.

I feel it every time I travel now. The dialect may be similar, the terrain relateable, but traveling is accepting change, however temporary, and living it. This was my reason to travel, travel long enough to be inspired to always want to travel––and the people you meet and share the adventures with, those fill up the reasons to go back, when you can. To buy a plane ticket, not a new car (middle-aged mindset in the making). To budget most of the year, then use the extra to fly (what I do now). Traveling lessens the gap between you and the stories you hear about and lets you begin anew. You experience a “Day 1” in London, “Day 1” in New York almost exactly two years later, and a “Day 1” you’re holding onto for next time. And all the micro-“Day 1”’s in-between.

But the first Day 1 is always remembered. It’s the first time you completely, wholly, unequivocally, irrevocably, impulsively, finally let yourself go.

And so began Day 1, 8 January 2012. St. Pancras Hostel, London. 18:58 UTC. Swollen feet and sleep deprivation do not lessen the feeling of triumph: I am in London...

The River Thames, London; May 2012; Sure, it's pretty, but
a photograph is a photograph.
It is its context that makes it much more important.

University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich; my last days there.
I can't deny that I missed home at this point
and wanted to return, but the instant that I did,
I felt confused. I was homesick—but the other way around.

UEA's Lake/Broad. Sunset, June 2012. I ran around this lake enough times
to do it in the dark and in the snow. It never got old. To this day, I could still tell you
where the wooden bridge started, where the puddles after rain collected...

Jan 11, 2014; NY; Morning Run Along the Brooklyn Bridge. 
My first long "solo" trip since England...but is it ever "solo" when you stay
with endearing family and friends, and meet up with old friends?

“Her” and the Eternal Long-Distance Relationship

It comes down to this: Can you fall in love with a voice?

We live in an age where we can develop relationships almost exclusively through voices. Every social media interaction is just that. A body-less conversation. But love is different, love is reserved for the most intimate of interactions. So is a relationship real if there’s no physical counterpart? Even in long-distance relationships, Skype works ultimately because there is that promise of seeing that person in the flesh later. We don’t say, 

“Oh, we don’t plan to meet up in person.”

The voice has to convince us

In the movie Her, Samantha, the operating system (OS) who becomes the lover of Joaquin Phoenix’s character Theodore, describes how she can exist and think for herself. This is crucial for any voice to engage us and become credible enough to trust. It can’t have default settings—we can pick up on spam in our emails within seconds and immediately filter it out of our system.   

What makes Samantha stand apart from internet voices can be described briefly by the premise of a hot book on the market called Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) by Daniel Kahneman. When we process information and think, we inadvertently use one of two systems—the automatic intuitions (we see anger written on a face and predict that we’ll be yelled at, we internalize bias, we reply instinctively, etc.; we “think fast”) or the complex computations (we see a double-digit multiplication problem and know that we have to go through mental steps to solve it; or, we “think slow”). In short, computers today only use the second, Samantha can use both.

Intuition, then, is vital for a dynamic relationship to work—to understand the undertones of distance and anger when someone says, “No, I’m fine, really,” to compare current to previous behavior, etc. We all know this, of course, but let’s take it one step further. What happens when we can impose our intuitions upon a “blank slate” intelligent being, upon an OS?

The voice is our second self

Sure, Samantha evolves as a program, but let’s take a step back and there’s another way to look at this: We create a second self, one that is perfectly compatible with us, one that we can talk to about anything and get answers that might surprise us (as we surprise ourselves) or calm us down (as self-therapy does, because talking yourself through things can actually work at times). Hearing a second voice without having to imagine it and even better, a voice that loves the way you look at the world, is refreshing, beautiful.

That is, until we get sick of ourselves, or reject the reality of the second voice.

“You’re—not a person,” Theodore says in the middle of a fight.

“Of all people, do you think I don’t know that? I have never pretended to be a person. I have never 

pretended to be something other than what I am.”

Samantha’s reply—and all her replies—are touched with vulnerability and human emotions—compassion, anger, and the rest. She admits that her love for Theodore has not an ounce of rationality to it—it’s purely emotional.  But the thing is, isn’t she pretending? Her gender isn’t based on biology, her breathiness simulates the idea that she is breathing oxygen, she even thought up her own name.

Is it a lie?

But most importantly, any time the words “I feel you” arise, it’s a lie. We pretend they always mean “emotional connection” and drop any pretense of “textile touch,” but in their closest moments of “love-making” (really, phone sex), we know the lie is there. It’s a lie that we can believe is so real that we forget otherwise, if we choose to.

*How do we visualize empty space? In contrast to presence?

During the movie, the absence of visual connection* (and even a blank screen at times) spurs us into attempting to visualize a place for Samantha’s voice, whether next to Theodore, or above him, or somewhere in space that is separate from Theodore’s. We try to visualize because it’s disorienting otherwise. We need to ground ourselves, to ensure a reality that we’re used to. We see a literalization of “blind love.”

Final Words

I think we can fall in love with a voice, and I think the movie says as much. But the question then becomes, can we stay in love? Here are two mantras: Everything is relative and if you can believe, it can happen. We have already accepted that we can nurture friendships and relationships for years without seeing proof of the tangible presence—we have friends on facebook and twitter and beyond in the social media horizon that prove that point. Saying something is real is subjective at some level.

Every day, we see bluetooth-talking people on the street, we feel real emotions when we interact online, we feel connected and believe that we are. We like company, and we like the fact that we can easily reach it wherever we are. Samantha is the aggregate voice of all social media fused into one personality and one presence who knows you, who loves you. So you can have your long-distance relationship with the world of people you know without seeing a single human presence to believe it’s true. And you can love Samantha like you would a real person.

Because she is real.