where I've been, where I'm going

My story of how I ended up at Rice is long and mildly hilarious. I won't tell it now-- I'll just say that it's a magical place that allowed me to completely break down from what I had been before I got there and rebuild into something else that probably didn't even really gel until I got to New York. (I remember being pretty awful towards the end of college, and definitely that first year afterwards-- but then again, aren't all 22 year olds awful?)


I used to give tours of Rice (I was really good-- I had a lot of jokes in my tours.) and I loved to give them-- the combination of joke telling, story telling and historical myth-making to a captive audience... it was great! There's pieces of history all over Rice. The Berlin Wall, Willy, The NASA stuff. One of my favorite things was that Kennedy delivered his September 12, 1962 "We Will Go to the Moon"" Speech at Rice's massive stadium. It was a great speech in that it talked about the infinites of where we would go, but never forgot where we were all standing at the moment. Bringing it back to the actual people he was addressing. From Rice to the moon. 

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

     We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

Full speech after the jump: