Was it Odysseus? That guy that returned to Ithaca in some mythology after this long trip and all. The most egotistic portions of ourselves may feel a little like that, coming back after our weird or painfully ordinary Summers.

Things around here welcome you in ways only an Ithacan Summer offers. The dozens of moving vans in the freeway on your way here. The fog at night. Those vines that seem to be eating at everything, covering the backyards in surreal shadows that make it look almost dark in broad daylight. Parents and more parents and new students complaining a whole week of Orientation before classes start is ridiculous. Bills to pay, drinks and barbeques to be had quickly before this incredible weather withers away with September. Ithaca welcomes the ones who return, sometimes with pouring rain on your first day.

I welcome you too, undergrad or grad, staff, professor, alum. I’ll be around in this column to point out those trivialities in life that make it interesting, seemingly too little to notice. Just as the climbing vine on my backyard that greets me with a “I-was-here-before-you-and-you-have-no-idea-what-life-is-about-honey”-kind-of demeanor, I just happen to be an innocent bystander in most of what this community is.

My identity is made up of being mostly in the middle of things. I live the life between and “undie” and a grad, a foreigner and an almost-local, a student and an employee, a wife and a college girl, liberal and conservative, opinionated but somehow expectedly repressed. I talk here, hoping to provide, if not a very fresh, at least a different point of view about things that are trivial but have incredible undertones if we take the time to observe a little longer. And, before any sensibilities are hurt, I cannot stress this enough: I do not intend to offend anyone, but to open a window for dialogue and debate. Just an intellectual exercise and nothing more.

Which is something you might find difficult at times. We tend to get overemotional and closed about what we care about, which is one of the hardest things I have had to experience in my time at Cornell. Diversity does not only mean this pseudo-tolerance many people talk about (multiculturalism and interculturalism are extremely different things). It also means that your way of seeing things will be challenged and that, many of the times, you will feel defensive about it. You will sometimes have an urge to scream to the world who and what you are, because “you’re not like the others” — and of course you are. You just don’t know it yet.

In a highly individualistic and overachieving student society like this one (beautiful in itself just because of that!), our identities are trying to be built in what makes us different from each other, creating an emphasis on differences rather than similarities. In my process of coming back — after interning with dolphins, a root canal surgery, a sister moving out of the continent and making a New York-Florida-Mexico road trip (and back) — one of the things I am trying to observe about myself and those around me is how our identities develop throughout our lives at Cornell. As opposed to Madrid, in Ithaca I am quite more emphatic about my background and nationality. As opposed to other places in the world, at Cornell you’re not trying to blend in: you’re trying to stand out.

So, for this year at Cornell I’m wondering what new identities we will be looking at. In a strained economic climate, where identities will need more than capital to be created, and with more students in classrooms than there have been in decades, more people in co-ops, more people looking for jobs … How will these things affect our daily student lives?

Though the streets in the week before classes still look pretty much the same as last year, I’m expecting some changes around. Just as TV commercials have changed from JCPenney to WalMart, Enzyte to real estate, Ithaca may be changing too. Let’s see what this year brings … and enjoy all of it as much as possible.

Because, after all, some things at Cornell will never change: Free stuff at Orientation; exceptional professor introductions (Prof. Spivey saying Cognitive Science books are bullshit and throwing them in to the trash can is still in my head from my first day at Cornell); sitting on the grass and talking about nothing; the first days when you think Cornell dining is good, which will change soon enough; big, pretty grad parties; that desktop computer that has seen so many papers being written and that I missed dearly being out of Ithaca; waking up at eight instead of 12, building this new four month routine. And hardly believing Summer is over.

We are back. Changes and all.