Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

4/15/2024

Week #3 Journal Entry – Sara Schibuola

When we were prompted to think of a place to put our radios, my mind immediately went to somewhere in Revelle College, for it was the place I inhabited for my first two years of college. Now I avoid it like the plague, only going on that side of campus if I have a class. In those moments I take the quickest route through the plaza, departing off to the side, down to the bus stop. I limit my time there. I haven’t gone into Rogers Market since they changed it to an Amazon marketplace – I haven’t purchased dining hall food from Wok or 64 degrees, not that I ever really did. And, most of all, I haven’t sat at the tables outside Rogers Market.

Both freshman and sophomore year, the tables were a sight of the ebbs and flows of who was in my life, the friends and the relationships. It was a place where I would pull over from my walk home and talk to people I had to run into; it was a place where I would sit surrounded by eight or nine people I had met only three months prior, hungover and eating breakfast burritos. The sun always seemed to shine brighter in spite of us and our squinting eyes. Sometimes a friend or other would rise and go take a COVID test from the vending machine in Argo Hall across the way, taking precaution because we had all hung out without masks even though we weren’t supposed to. Eventually we would go our separate ways – some down to the bus stop to head to the beach, others back to their rooms; often the people who drank a little too much. I would return to my room anyway, even if I felt completely fine.

Too much social activity, especially freshman year, drained me easily. I was constantly surrounded by people that I had known for such a short time, and it often rendered me exhausted. I would return to my room with the overpriced coffee I had purchased from the market and sit and text my mother and ask her to come pick me up. I would pack up my belongings and go out to where she would always pick me up, amidst the construction zone of Eighth College. Looking back now, I realized that perhaps it wasn’t my introverted self that led me to go home, but my homesickness. I had this idea that you couldn’t be homesick if you moved only thirty minutes away, but someone who was enjoying their time in their new home wouldn’t constantly be calling to get picked up, right?

After being home for a weekend, I would return refreshed, ready to do school for the entire week, to be social from sunrise until sunset, almost excited to return to those tables outside Rogers Market and do it all again.