Side Of Fries: Lafayette

On Sunday around 3pm, Erin looked at me and said, "I gotta get out of this 'house.' Let's go somewhere."

We had been planning on driving to scenic Colfax, Indiana to purchase a composter that Erin found on craigslist. (This is, in itself, a whole other blog. Sometimes I'm married to Betty Crocker. Other times I'm married to freaking Tipper Gore.) In the end, God intervened and gave the composter to some other poor sap, leaving us without a Sunday afternoon destination. I told Erin I was disappointed, not to lose the composter, but because I'd been thinking about getting a burger slathered in peanut butter up at the Triple XXX in West Lafayette, a short drive north of Colfax.

For those who remember, I spent the longest five years of my life in engineering at Purdue. West Lafayette is the surrounding community that turns its blind eye to the human atrocities taking place at Purdue, most notable in EE201 or the Physics building.

After contemplating the burger for a bit, Erin decided that we should go to Lafayette anyway and check out their little zoo at Columbian Park.

We arrived in Lafayette around 4:00pm, and the temperature was right around 100 degrees. It. Was. Hot. We spent about an hour wandering around Columbian Park, which turned out to be very nice for a small town park. It's strange that in my five years in Lafayette, I never made it out to the park. But given that I was trying to get out of Lafayette whenever possible, I guess it's not all that strange.

After the zoo and a ride on a train around the park, we made our way over to West Lafayette and the Triple XXX -- a restaurant name that is now un-Google-able in every possible way. Erin, Grant, and I got our cheeseburgers and Grace got her eggs. (You can't fight genetics. I'm sure it's the only time "Do they have wice?" (rice) has been yelled at 95 dBs in the Triple XXX.)

It's always very strange for me to return to Purdue's campus. By all accounts, it's a much nicer place that it was in the mid-90's. Largely dilapidated sections of West Lafayette have been renovated and now feature eateries, outdoor shopping malls, and nice, new apartment buildings -- things all sorely lacking during my tenure on campus.

I have little sentimentality for my college years. I know a lot of people look back at those years as their last gasp of youth, but to me, it was more like the first gasp in the coffin. I went from feeling like a relatively successful high school student to someone who understood virtually none of what was being presented in my engineering lectures, in part due to language barriers and in part due to absolutely horrible teachers.

As an adult, I can look back and see that me getting a 17% on a Physics exam (a "B" in that particular class) was not a failure all my own, but also an indication of a professor not doing his job...at all. But as a student, I basically decided that I had to be an idiot since I couldn't do any better than 17%. I think those experiences had some long-lasting negative affects on my love of learning and self-confidence, which is unfortunate. So while I'm thankful for my career, I also wonder, in the end, if there wasn't a better way to get from point A to B. But alas.

In some ways, returning to Purdue with my family is cathartic. I can walk around campus without my stomach in knots, and I can just enjoy being out with the kids. Here are a few pics from the afternoon.