Symbolic Systems has a way of making you feel like your brain is being slowly rewired, which is either the point of the degree or a symptom I should mention to someone. I am mid-way through the Stanford program on a messy path: a Naryn degree, an autumn quarter I attended from my own kitchen at three in the morning, then a visa and a January flight once the paperwork and the scholarship finally lined up. Nobody's timeline looks clean in a pandemic. On the bad-weather days I take the bus out to the bridge, because the fog eats the towers, the tourists give up early, and for twenty minutes the view is entirely mine.
I am not a photographer. I do not have a system for this beyond: cold hands, one photo, back on the bus before the fog burns off and the crowds return. Getting here from Bishkek in January took a charter to Istanbul, a night on a plastic airport chair, a negative test that expired while I slept, and a second swab in San Francisco that finally stamped me into the country under the student entry rules then in force. Today's version has a paper on ternary logic circuits still open in my bag that I have not started, which feels like it should mean something and probably does not.
I keep coming back to this railing more than I can justify academically. Some places just agree with you before you know why.