Inundated.

I watch the world with the mute button securely fastened inside my mind, and I like it that way. I experience things quietly, without the mind-blowing passion that seems to combust inside of you like an acetylene balloon. In this way, I find that college is making me more me than ever; in my most memorable moments of contentment, I sit alone on the blue couch by the window in my dorm room with a blanket, a novel, and a bowl of oatmeal. I understand that there is danger in pulling away from the social world entirely, and I do not plan to become absolutely introverted, but the truth is, I am simply happier alone. It is tiring, time-consuming work for some to read and study, but it is a task never left unfinished, because everyone knows the importance of education. My collegiate social life is an inverse product of the same formula.

The material that is beginning to pile up in my mind has tangible mass and volume. I can feel the turbid flow of information as the words swirl around each other, embedding themselves between my sulci. They travel in through a constant stream for absorption and processing, and in an effort to validate what I have learned, I fluoresce careful bands of refined light in an emission spectrum all my own. My developing capacity for quantitative analysis is dense and sturdy, expanding as it is applied every day in calculus and chemistry. I access last year's statistics knowledge to supplement my current biology lectures, tutoring those who don't understand to growing accolades; every day, more people come to me with questions, and I show them the answers. This is one area to which I have always had ready access: answers. True insights may be few and far between, sucking my concentration in a greedy desire to manifest themselves in a place where others can admire them, but answers have never moved from their space in my mind's statue garden: devoid of life, maybe, but beautiful all the same. I pull the simple facts from my mind's frothy soup and string them together to explain citations, chemicals, ratios, abstractions and methodologies. In so doing, the ideas flesh themselves out under my careful grasp, and the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.