Things I Miss About College: A Rant

           Taking a break from a wicked inspiration burst with my Demetrius and Chloe project to wax nostalgic. Well, not really nostalgic, it hasn’t even been a year since I left my college town, but…yeah, I’m going whine a little.

            April marks the eighth month I’ve been in the dreaded “real world”, beginning the endless cycle of work, bills, and monotony that seems to be the fate of most in this country. Even if you’re like me and like your job, the thought that this is your life for the foreseeable future is a downer. The amount of existential breakdowns I’ve gone through rank somewhere in the double digits, and I’ve talked postgrad friends about their own quarter life crises at least a hundred times. Ours is a generation of ambition and lofty dreams, especially in my social circle of actors and writers and artists, and for Millenials graduating in a frightening economy (see this article GG showed me a while back), the transition into the real world has been…well, let’s just say the shine is off the apple for a lot of us.

            I remember friends of my parents talking about how their years in high school were the best of their lives. Graduation songs still belt this proclamation over cheesy slideshows. But I think for my generation, college was our high school. It was our first time away from our parents, somewhat on our own yet comfortably sheltered with dorm living and meal plans, unleashed and unsupervised most nights and weekends. Our biggest worries were finals and papers, and our academic advisers (well, those of you who had good ones, anyway) held our hands through big decisions.

There’s a reason I call BG my Neverland. Minus one terrible relationship, my college experience was like that of a child let loose on a playground, making new friends, learning things, running amuck. I loved every minute of it, even when I got stuck with nothing but general eds and started to slack off. After a particularly rough day, I definitely have the urge to run back, not really to college, but to BG. Things might not have been simple, but I was surrounded by friends, and there was still a sense of waiting for my “real life” to begin. There are times I miss that, a lot. In a way, it’s the same weakness I have with writing: I’m very excited when it comes to beginning and endings, but the middle—the work between the dreaming and the payoff—is the hard part. When I was a child, I daydreamt of meeting my established adult self, Grown Up Dee, in some kind of time travel situation, and talking with her about who I had become. I still don’t feel like I’m ready to have that conversation with Little Girl Dee. I still feel like I’m waiting to become who I’m “going to be.”

Hang in there, little hellion.

It isn’t just the dreaming I miss about college. It sure as hell wasn’t my one year of dorm living, and I took more advantage of the dorm kitchen than my meal plan. It isn’t really all about the college institution itself, either. My academic college experience was mostly boring or frustrating with maybe 40% of the classes I had to take being interesting and influential for me. It was more the culture of the place, the fact that so many learning minds were together, that created my Neverland. When I break it down, there are some poignant things that the real world lacks for me that I took for granted in college.

Ladies and gentlemen, the aesthetic paragraph break. Please hold your applause.

One of the biggest gaping holes in my life as it is is the lack of intellectual conversation. Now, I’m not saying that the intelligence level drops once you get out of college. I’m not that stuck up. Everybody has gone to college in this day and age. Practically everyone I work with at Booky Wooks has a degree of some sort. College hasn’t been some institution of privileged, pretentious intellectualism for quite some time. In my freshman gen eds I had classmates (on sports scholarships, sorry, truth) who couldn’t spell and could barely fucking read. I am not making this up. They could. Not. Read. In college.

But I digress, like usual. Anyway, there aren’t smarter people in college, per say, but it is full of young students who are absolutely desperate to prove how smart they are. Let me be clear, this is not what I miss about college. That is something I celebrate having left behind. If I hear another tired Nietsche quote from some douchy philosophy major in hipster glasses, I will go fucking postal. However, with so many ambitious young people around, it was very easy to fall into intelligent discussion. I once spent four hours at the campus Starbucks debating the legend versus the historical fact of Alistair Crowley. I constantly fell into discussions of the criminal mind, the dangers of ethnocentricity while studying other cultures, what it meant to be “white” in the late 1800s versus now, neurology versus nurture in schizophrenia, etc, etc. In the “real world”, I learned very quickly that there are three main topics people want to talk about: Politics, weather, and celebrities. A quick fourth, if you know them fairly well, is what sucks about their life and your life.

Yeah, yeah, this is a big simplification of life in general, I know. But the point behind the simplification is that in the real world, nobody really cares for intellectual discussion. There’s more of an emphasis on what’s current, what’s directly affecting (fuck, affecting, effecting…Google, assist me!) their lives at this moment.

Oh, and old people like to talk about Downtown Abbey.

Anyway, I miss spontaneous intellectual discussion. It is not to be confused with forced intellectual discussion, where somebody is “testing” you on their own pretentious scale of what intelligence is. That happens a lot in both college and the real world and all it makes me want to do is punch somebody in the throat.

This is kind of along similar lines, and maybe it’s because I work in a store within this vein, but…is it just me, or is Shakespeare treated like some kind of plague in the real world? I’m serious. I got a little of it in high school, when my entire class bitched and moaned about having to read Romeo and Juliet while my only thought was “Aw, I like Midsummer more.” I know I’m going to sound like a total snob for ranting about this, but fuck it, I don’t care. I don’t think Shakespeare is hard to understand. At all. Some of his shows, like the histories, get a little rambly, but if you understand Mojo Jojo from The Powerpuff Girls, you can fucking understand Shakespeare. You just need to, oh, I don’t know, fucking focus for once. Maybe throw the occasional weird word like fishmonger or riggish on your precious Google search bar. You know why people don’t like Shakespeare? They don’t have the attention span for it. They see thee and hark and names like Mercutio and Cressida and they say, “Fuck that, what’s Stephanie Meyer written lately?”

From TitusAndronicus

There’s nothing pretentious about Shakespeare. There are fucking fart jokes in Shakespeare. There are guts and grotesquery and sex and deception and everything we’ve always loved about fiction in Shakespeare. In college, at least in my social circle which included both literature and theatre, Shakespeare was slipped into casual conversation constantly. I’ve been in five of his shows and I was nowhere near a theatre major. Hell, Shakespeare even showed up in my psych classes. Shakey is all the hell over campuses. But in the real world, the only time I ever hear about Shakespeare is when some teenager is complaining about having to buy it for class. This is a true tragedy for me. You’re talking to the girl whose anesthesiologist told her she had muttered a monologue about wildflowers just before going under for surgery (I’m positive it was Oberon’s monologue about Titania’s sleeping place, it’s one of my favourites). I never really realized how much Shakespeare was around in my college years until I got out here and he was treated as a plague on the real world’s houses.

Okay…moving on…hopping right off of my high horse…

I also really, really miss learning things. Yes, I’m a giant nerd, but my life feels stagnant unless I’m expanding my mind in some way. It’s an odd quirk of mine. College was obviously very good for that. That one’s pretty self-explanatory.

This is a short one, but dear sweet Zombie Jesus, do I miss drinking and being out at bars. In BG I lived in walking distance of the bars, and I took advantage of it. I was never a partier by anyone’s standards, really. I drank maybe once a week, twice for an eventful weekend, went out and danced on Mondays (80s Night at the time) and Wednesdays (my beloved Ination). I wasn’t exactly a frat guy. But something about bars and clubs makes me light up. The energy, the atmosphere, I don’t know what it is, but I just become…me. Bouncy, happy, huggy, friendly me. It’s not really a “real world” thing to not go to bars, I guess, plenty of people still do, but my personal situation renders it nearly impossible to go to a bar and let loose, whether it’s due to lack of money, time, a designated driver, company, etc, etc. But the more I dwell on this particular aspect of my real world, the more I fall into a pathetic self-pity, so we’re going to move on quickly.

I’ve already mentioned this one before, but I am a restless girl. If my life becomes too routine, I get discontented almost instantly. I’m like a dog left in the house too long who chews up the furniture out of boredom.

...

“I’m like a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it!”

Get out of my head, Puddin, I’m writing!

Sorry. I’m insane. Moving on.

Yes, I’m easily bored. And as I said, I’ve mentioned this earlier, so I won’t re-rant, but in college, your entire life’s schedule changes every couple of months. New classes, new people to meet, new everything, and it was awesome. The real world is, oh, so not like that. The real world is a hamster wheel. Unless you pepper your life with some awesome hobbies (and I do), you will be doing the same thing. Every day. For years. Gah! Jesus Christ! No wonder we go fucking crazy!

But when it all boils down to it, the thing I miss the most about college is the community. Creative Writing major? Sweet! We’ve got workshops full of peers just waiting to read your work, off-campus poetry slams, open mic nights, book clubs, and published professors with the wisdom of experience to bestow upon you! Go forth and be inspired!

In college, social people are everywhere. This was the single most fantastic and influential thing for me in college. I’ve always been a social creature, and something about college just brings out the social butterfly in people. Maybe it’s necessity; you’re on your own for the first time, without old friends who’ve known you for years, and few people are truly happy in complete solitude. Either way, I met new people every semester. Good people. Fun people. People I still keep in relative touch with today (as I’ve mentioned before, I’m not great at keeping in touch, but I still love and care). I also met some of the best people I’ve ever known in my life off campus in non-college situations, like DJ Audioflesh, St. Jimmy, my buddy and former roommate Swarley, and my sweet and enigmatic semi-mentor whom I’ll call Maleficent because of her love for the character and the fact that she possesses similar poise and elegance. I also met The Boyfriend in an off campus situation.

Miss EVERYBODY in this picture too.

I’ve met new people in the “real world”, many of whom I like very much. But I’ve had a grand total of five friends in my new apartment, all of whom I knew before moving. I love some of my new friends quite a bit, but for some reason or other, I haven’t bonded with anyone as deeply as I have with my college friends. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m always kind of restrained in CBus. I have to be Professional Dee here, and Professional Dee can’t pet my coworkers’ hair or go on a 20 minute rant about serial killers in front of her dance troupe. Hopefully that’ll change (not the restraint, heh, the bonding) but there is some part of me that’s really afraid that college was the last chance I ever had to truly be myself as often as possible. In a lot of ways that’s just an unfortunate truth. I won’t be able to wear fishnets and booty shorts all my life. I won’t be able to sweat off stress on the dance floor without someone eventually going, “Uh, sit down, Grandma, nobody wants to see that.” A lot of my favourite past times and personality traits are time sensitive, and that scares me. The college experience is time sensitive, and though I sometimes wish I could race back to BG, that my biggest fear was getting less than a 3.5 gpa, and that I could get by working 10 hours a week, I know I couldn’t stay that way forever.

I just hope the real world ends up being more fulfilling than it’s been thus far. Until then, my time travelling conversation with Little Girl Dee will have to wait. I don’t want to bring the poor little monster down.