Being a college student means that at some point you get into a groove and it becomes an item about your life that is pushed to the background instead of being at the forefront of everything you do. Especially if you’re not 18 getting drunk sleeping in someone else’s bed frequently. You are a working adult fulltime college student, and other things in your world supersede the topic of college. But it also becomes a love affair that is happening in the shadows of your world.
You’re the one that’s sneaking a look at your syllabus during the strangest times. You’re the person making mental notes 24/7 about how to plan out one’s time to fit in a paper you won’t care about until it garners an A. You lament often that there are no red letters at the tops of any of your papers and what you will remember most about your education is the endless time sitting in front of your laptop with a window open so you don’t feel stranded. Your eyes are always tired and you’re nearly always in front of a computer. You read your coursework printed out in big sloppy reams shoved into manila folders. You get great glory out of throwing those big stacks in the trash after every class. It’s killing trees and yet you can think of no better reason to live to excess. The words stay with you long after the city dump owns them. You haven’t taken a “go green” course yet but you did do that tutorial for work. Work training and college courses blur together when you work where you attend. Your entire world is surrounded by those three letters. You consider having them tattooed on your flesh but you wonder if you’ll regret that choice one day if you attempt an education from somewhere else in addition to the paper you are chasing now.
You still read novels but you can’t help but find similarities sociologically and psychologically and even religiously speaking to what you are studying. You read magazines and when the author mentions Maslow’s theories for the fiftieth time since you learned about it, you smirk. You wonder if you are somehow running out of things to learn or if it’s like how when you buy a Honda you see every other Honda like your’s in the world the next day.
You run into fellow students that are brilliant and you wish you could have coffee with them. Then there are those that disagree with everything you say and while you chalk it up to it being because you are strong willed and open minded and write with intention and conviction and this is threatening to others. You piss at least one fellow student off in every course. However, you always send that student a message at the end thanking them for the “debate” so that should count for something, but maybe not.
You buy books about topics you never considered before. You find yourself engrossed in political articles and statistical articles that must be statistically longer than any other type. You write papers with a cup of coffee and a dog and little else to concern yourself about. You wonder how this became the person that you are. You wonder who you will be, what identity will you have when it’s all over. Does it have to be all over, you ask this question silently day after day as you see the day’s for this quest are diminishing compared to the number you started with.
You are on an A- streak that sometimes pisses you off and then you remember tenth grade, being grounded for a D- in World Cultures. You remember lying on your pink frilly bed, aged 15, wishing you were anywhere else. You remember missing your boyfriend, writing down lyrics and crying your eyes out. You wonder what you could accomplish now with that type of energy and time. Time freezes and yet it never stops. It’s cold and callous when it’s difficult. But you quickly remember you are no longer in 10th grade and when people ask you what year of college you are in you have to think too long for an answer so you respond, “I’m closer to done than to starting.”
When asked what you are studying, you think “everything I never knew existed” but the words you say are something else. The words are culturally acceptable, socially accountable and psychologically normal. What you want to scream is, ‘I’m doing it..fuck..I am really doing it.”
The only person that stays in the forefront of your mind is your mother who said you couldn’t, you wouldn’t and you send her smoke signals about how wrong she is. But you know it doesn’t matter because the only smoke she sees comes over the top of her soda cup from her Marlboro. She’s still living where the bathrooms echo early 70’s swirled marble and the living room is velvet gold forever. She’s licking the dust from her finger waiting for perfection to make her happy. And Daddy is watching her from the woods of misconception. Some knowledge comes from the book of time.
You blow your bangs out of your eyes and pick up that Sociology book again…. You’re not the girl from their world. You’re the girl on a longstreak of A’s. The minus is the plus. Perfection is a fucked up goal.
