No Sick Days

When you're a kid, being sick is almost more good than bad.  As long as it's not a life-threatening illness, you get to skip school, people feel sorry for you, and your mom brings you ice cream in bed. The Game Show Network still makes my throat hurt a little because it's all I watched for a week in sixth grade when I got the flu. 

But getting sick in college is an entirely different experience. Nothing stops for you to rest and recover.

On Saturday, I woke up with the familiar seasonal ache in my throat, meaning the next week was about to be hell.  Sure enough, as the day progressed, my symptoms increased.  Despite the gallons of orange juice I drank and the Vitamin C supplements I chewed and all the home remedies I subjected myself to, I got sick.

Instead of just burrowing myself into my bed, I was forced to continue interacting with the public. Deadlines looming, I was forced to push myself to the Carrboro Music Festival.  The bass drums thumping from every corner of the tiny town pulsed inside my head.

I was supposed to be interviewing people, but the unfortunate state of my face precluded my efforts.  I would approach a happy concertgoer, all smiles and sunshine, happy babies and tail-wagging puppies, and ask "So what do you think of the festival?" with a barely-there voice and a nose full of disgusting, dripping snot.

People would glance at me with a moment of disgust before social propriety contorted their faces into a more pleasing expression. "I think music, is, uh, great," they'd say. "The festival is, um, great." And then disappear into the crowd.  Clearly, my article suffered (but they do not make a Walgreens brand medicine to cure that).

I sat through all the classes, mumbling about the importance of the heroic code in Beowulf and whether or not you should anecdotal leads, while dreaming of the Nyquil waiting for me beside my comfy blankets. My presence in class was beneficial to no one.

I hope my cold hasn't damaged my GPA too much.  Can I attach an addendum to my grad school applications for this?

McCormick Family Commandments for Sundays

1. Thou shall not rise too late to prepare for the 1:00 games.

It takes a long time for five people to shower, get dressed, and eat breakfast. All of these activities much be accomplished by kick-off. It does not matter if your water or your toast is cold. Get it done. Game time is upon us.

2. Thou shall not wear civilian clothes.

What team are you supporting anyway?  Do your laundry on time.  Get that jersey on. If you must, a tshirt with proper logos is acceptable.  But you must be committed. Your team needs you. Show your support.

3. Thou shall not pass in front of the tv during a play.

They last six seconds on average and will be followed for several minutes by Matthew McConaughey Lincoln commercials, so you can wait to get your beverage. Nothing in the kitchen is worth missing the results of this 3-and-5.

4. Thou shall not move the pig.

The pig sits at a place of honor beneath the television and faces the direction the Redskins are advancing down field. He is an important part of their game strategy and tampering with him can bring sadness to thousands. Please, hands off the pig.

5. Thou shall not give up defeat before defeat is certain.

The game isn't over til the clock ticks down.  Your job as a fan is not to proclaim defeat the slightest setback.  You are to find the one way in which victory can be obtained.  There is no place for pessimism.

6. Thou shall not wash your jersey for the duration of a winning streak.

It must remain washed with the sweat of victory.  But upon a loss, the stains of disgrace must be removed with April Fresh Tide.  Don't dry it, though. You'll mess up the numbers.

7. Thou shall not switch teams.

This is the ultimate blasphemy, punishable by removal of NFL Sunday Ticket subscription.  You have one loyalty. Choose wisely.

8. Thou shall not speak of the team as 'we.'

You are not employed by the organization or on the field or drinking by yourself at the Hooters bar. Refer to the team in third person pronouns only.

9. Thou shall not flip channels during the fourth quarter.

No amount of commercial avoidance makes this sin pardonable.

10. Thou shall not spoil the game for those that must DVR.

It is tempting to send the text. Refrain. Nothing removes joy from the game than prematurely knowing the outcome.

The SOUL of Reporting

My fledgling little organization, SOUL (Student Organization for Undergraduate Literature), hosted a Banned Books event Wednesday night.  A reporter and photographer from The Daily Tar Heel covered it.

This semester, I have gained hypersensivity to reporters since I'm having to do an insane volume of reporting.  As I saw him typing all resigned on his Macbook, dreaming of what his Wednesday night could have been, I felt much sympathy for him.  He just seemed so bored by our little event.

SOUL events are tiny, nerdy affairs.  We have them every other Wednesday night on a topic we can somehow construe as literary. Next week, our topic is super heroes.  Previously, we've done fairy tales, Harry Potter, Coriolanus, depression themes in literature, feminism and Disney... the list goes on.

The discussions are famous for going in the direction of Marxism or colonism or strangely enough, how evil Disney is.  People bring varied expertise to the talks and we can rarely guess how they're going to go.  Attendees are primarily English majors (though one of our co-presidents is history and comparative literature) but anyone can come. The unifying factor is caring about literature and learning and cultural issues or phenomena that go along with it. Sometimes we bring in an (un)lucky professor to give a guest lecture and eat free pizza.

Since I've been with SOUL since the beginning, and I've been the secretary for three years, I'm very attached to it. So I was excited when the reporter showed up.  We could use some more publicity and get outside our niche of people.

I thought he was getting into it.  He even contributed to our discussion (by telling us about book banning laws in his native Algeria) and he kept pulling people out in the hallway for what appeared to be intense interviews.

So I looked up the article today.  My favorite section:

“Everything, regardless of your opinions on it, deserves to be discussed. Even if you disagree with it,” she said.

Sophomore political science major Stephanie McCormick agreed.

“You have to recognize alternative viewpoints than your own,” she said.

Sophomore physics major Emma Dedmond agreed. 

 The most interesting point about that is the fact that Stephanie is my cousin, and I didn't know she was majoring in political science. 

The article makes us sound like we just sat there and agreed for two hours. I suppose essentially that is true, but it just didn't really hit at the essence of the event. I am too involved in it to to view it objectively. 

But this experience re-invigorated my approach to reporting.  Doing so much is making me jaded. I start to hate the people I'm writing about because I had to get squished on a bus for thirty minutes, get to my car, navigate an unfamiliar city and get lost for another thirty minutes, before finally arriving flustered to the thing I'm covering.  But that's not their fault.  They still just want to be accurately represented, just like I wanted SOUL to be accurately represented, ruined Wednesday nights be damned. 

Or I might be just be bitter that he didn't talk to me. I don't know.

 

Pit Stop Scene

The Pit Stop is sleepy on weekday mornings.  The workers stand behind their registers picking at their fingernails and gossiping.  An older employee scans barcodes on Tylenol boxes.  Every now and then, a customer will glide through, grab an energy drink, get his card swiped, and toss the receipt in the trash can beside the sign that says not to throw the receipt in the trash can.

But one customer lingered.  He inspected the display of cast-off Krispy Kreme donuts, the candy-store throwback bins of so many Swedish Fish, the many varieties of off-brand deodorants. After searching the tiny store for about 15 minutes, he selected a bottle of soda and a candy bar, totaling $3.97.

The cashier, a younger student with freshly curled hair and a persistent yawn, stuck out her hand to accept OneCard payment.  She was halfway through "Flex or expense?" when she noticed he had deposited a one hundred dollar bill in her hand.

She popped open the register and examined the few bills inside. "I don't think we can break this..."

The customer did not answer.  He just slid the bottle closer to the register.  The cashier began counting money. 

"10... 20... 30... 40... 50... 55... 60..."

"Do you need some more cash?"

"I don't know. I lost count."

"10...20...30...40..."

After several more attempts, the customer finally had his change and his purchases. He stuffed the wad of cash into his pocket and left, sipping the drink.

The cashier's drawer was practically empty.

"This is the most excitement we've had all year," she said, to no one in particular.

The other cashier picked up a walkie-talkie and mumbled some technical codes into it. "Can we have some more 10s at the Pit Stop?"

Hanging Out in Carrboro

Carrboro residents have intriguing hair.  In a single brief pass down Weaver Street, I saw a grandmotherly woman with blue, pink, and purple streaks in her grey hair, a woman wearing a convincing electric pink wig, and countless bountiful dreadlocks glistening with sweat in the mid-afternoon heat.  Most colors of the rainbow were present, combs were optional.  

            The attire of the Carrboro crowd was in a similar vein, varied in cultural origins, degrees of shabbiness, and age appropriateness.  The median age appeared to be higher than I expected.  A remarkable number of older people sat around shopping and eating, a few accompanied by people of other generations but many alone.  They all seemed healthy though, despite the wrinkles and greyed hair that leads people to suspect walkers and after-dinner pills.  This makes sense though because Weaver Street Market, the seeming thoroughfare of town, sells organic groceries, including biodynamic grapes.  Basically nothing in Carrboro mirrors the flavor of anyone’s local Walmart.

            Carrboro just seems to have its own set of priorities.  The sides of businesses include huge murals—which I suspect might be protested in other towns—including one depicting all the Japanese Zodiac signs.  The murals add character and dimension to the buildings, and emphasize a priority for art.  The various shops follow suit, with many focused on artisans or selling unique wares.  The shops appear mostly empty though, and their keepers eye you eagerly if you linger too long in the doorway (and if you’re holding a notebook and pen). 

            All of the people seem to know each other—many greetings as people walk down the street—and the atmosphere is very friendly.  In Elmo’s Diner—a very busy place on a Sunday afternoon—the bus boys sing and laugh as they clear tables.  The waiters and waitresses good-naturedly implore diners eating on the patio to place heavy objects on their receipts after diners helped them hunt down a few blown away by the wind.  A hostess remarks to her co-worker after an older woman walks away that “They come here every weekend.  They always order the same thing.”  There’s a sense that many places in Carrboro have “regulars,” and the faces, while eclectic, are familiar.  There’s hominess even about the businesses. The patio at Elmo’s is adorned with the classic fly remedy of Southern porches—bags of water tied to the awning.  It’s hard to imagine such a device utilized in chain restaurants. 

            The traffic patterns also seem non-conformist, with roads intersecting at unusual places and stop lights difficult to determine what areas they govern.  The sometimes-confused cars mingle with many cyclists and pedestrians and joggers, creating a bit of chaotic harmony that tells you these people navigate these areas consistently.  It is only to the occasional outsider that the roads seem confusing.            

            Overall, Carrboro feels united in its uniqueness: all the shops and restaurants and people feel distinct but together produce the same feeling of rearranged priorities, favoring the less than mainstream and embracing alternative lifestyles, but doing it together. 

Leslie Profile

(Practicing profiling on my roommate)

Leslie's days are punctuated by cereal.  She climbs from her bed each morning and eats three bowls. She does not change clothes, chat, or even check her emails first.  She has the sugary-to-plain ratio down pat, creating the best texture and left-over milk tastes. 

Then she chooses clothes based on whether she's meeting her friends-with-benefits for lunch that day.  If she is, she puts on a brightly colored shirt of minimal fabric, short shorts. She brushes shimmery powder across her eyelids, curls her lashes, straightens her hair.  If she isn't, she puts on gym clothes and scoops her hair into a ponytail without even brushing it.

She usually forgets one of three essential items: her OneCard, her keys, or her wallet.  She's purchased $40 worth of replacement student I.D.s throughout her time in college, and keeps the old ones for when she loses the new ones.  Sometimes she can play dumb when the card doesn't work, and the dining hall staff will let her in anyway.

She doesn't talk much during class.  During the boring ones, she doodles microscopic dancing penguins wearing bowties and cows with speech bubbles saying cow-related puns.  She will study the  material later though, and probably get an A on the test.  Sometimes she gets a B, and gets mad at herself for not paying better attention.


Her days are filled with fussing at people for not recycling (she's an EcoReps coordinator), helping people get into dental school (she's present of the dental fraternity, and also afraid of not getting into dental school), and worrying about the environment for her classes (she switched from a biology major to environmental studies because she hates chemistry).

But then comes home, sits on the futon, and eats three more bowls of cereal before bed.  She buys a new gallon of milk at least twice a week. But she never goes to bed hungry.

Freedom Summer

(I taught a local Freedom School this summer--a program for at-risk or under-achieving kids sponsored by the public school system.  I am using that as fodder for scenes to practice writing.)

Lee Hunter swore the buses would be rocking when they rolled in, but at 7:45 everyone was still asleep.  Interns held up the "Good Morning" banner, but the glitter falling off in flakes was most energetic part.  Some interns appeared to be dozing standing up.

Children stepped off the buses at random intervals, holding the random things kids deign necessary to bring with them, hesitating at the school building they'd vacated a month before.  Some went to Freedom School the previous summer and weakly chanted "G-o-o-d M-o-r-n-i-n-gGoodmorningGoodmorningGoodmorning" with sleepy rhythm.

After being sorted into their classes, the 130 children made their way into the cafeteria to dine on a school-sanctioned, government-paid-for breakfast of a single strawberry Poptart and a carton of grape juice.  Interns stood around eating and attempting to facilitate conversation.  The tables were naturally segregated by gender but not by race.

The kids were dressed by poverty and prepubescence.  Pink and orange plaid shorts a size too small paired with an older brother's yellow polo shirt.  Shirts that were once middle-school-cool now out of date and threadbare.  Tennis shoes with popped open soles.  Sandals with brittle bands.  One sweet little girl with a long black ponytail and big brown eyes wears a Goodwill shirt that says "$tacks on $tacks on $tacks."

They left a landfill of silver wrappers and smashed cartons behind as they zigzagged down the hallway toward the media center, where the day would really begin.

What to Write?

I have always struggled with coming up with story ideas.  I mean, I can think of things. But I always have trouble deciding what's "important." I know the academic answer to that question: think about your audience, what is interesting to them?

But I also can't help but care about what's Important.  This weekend, I confronted that capital I.

On Friday night, I went to a dinner organized by a fancy English professor. He has degrees from what seems like every prestigious university, and he speaks like twenty languages, and he's so smart he thinks it's unnecessary to match his pants to his shirt. He's a nice guy, but his world is not really my cup of tea.  He is constantly trying to assemble a group of Very Important Students who will one day put a picture of him on their mantles because he helped make them Rich and Famous and Important.

My boyfriend is one of these people.  There is tension in our relationship over his desire to be one of these fancy people and part of this fancy world, and how squirmy I feel at that prospect.   But I'm also somewhat drawn to it.  I used to dream of becoming an English professor, attending a fancy graduate school and getting my fancy English graduate degree.  But those dreams slowly faded as I realized I'm bad at schmoozing and feel weird inside an academic cubby hole all the time.

The next morning, one of my journalism classes went on a bus tour of rougher parts of Durham.  We were hit with a litany of sad stories: people evicted from poor neighborhoods, hopeless but plucky efforts to turn it all around.  I know these things matter, and I care about them.  But I think I used to care more.  I'm starting to get numb to it.  I've been hearing the sad stories over and over.  I taught elementary schoolers with terrible home lives all summer, and volunteered in countless places before that.  There's a certain capacity for sadness and empathy, and I may be reaching it. I watched my my classmates see a sad person, instantly jot down contact information, and think "yes, that's sad and Important enough for an A!" 

So I am torn.  Is it okay to write about things that concern the people privileged enough that they don't really need any further coverage?  I sometimes feel guilty about my desire to expound upon the patriarchal cycles in The Awakening or about homosocial relationships and racism in Huckleberry Finn, because who really cares?  The furthest any writing on such literary, academic topics are going to go is into a dusty library or digital archive, where no one will ever care enough to search them out.  What does that contribute to the world? It doesn't often feel like much of anything.  But sometimes, that's what makes me happiest.

I brought this all up to my boyfriend when I got back from the bus tour.  He plowed into my occasionally-expressed desire to teach high school to satisfy my sense of privileged guilt.  I feel like I should use my UNC education to do something not entirely self-serving.  But he thinks that because me--just one person--cannot change the school system, I should take to my cubby and write about three hundred year old texts in isolation. I'm too idealistic.

But I feel so idealistic and so jaded at the same time.  And every single time I must think of a story topic (and in three journalism classes, this tends to happen quite a lot), I have this crisis of priorities and identity.  Perhaps I'm just overthinking the whole thing, and I should just write whatever seems interesting to me in the moment.

But I want to write the right things. To care about the right things.  So what am I supposed to write about?  Topics are hard.

The Temporary Twitter

As if on cue to my rant about social media, twitter is insisting on making themselves into Facebook.  Social media is perpetually moving toward becoming a homogenous blob.  They may begin with a specific, innovative purpose but eventually they all start becoming like whatever is most popular at the time.

I know this must make some business sense for economic reasons beyond my grasp, but it doesn't seem to be logical.  Whenever a social media outlet changes into another one, I tend to quit using one of them.  If twitter becomes a replica of my Facebook feed, goodbye twitter. Maybe most people don't think this way and continue with both of them, but I doubt it.

The article even acknowledges twitter's reluctance to alienate its current users, but it desires to suck up gigabytes on previously #twitterless people.  However, I don't see "being more like facebook" as a draw for those people.  But again, I'm no expert.

I'm sure some new, Yik Yaky thing will come around to replace twitter's place while it makes itself irrelevant (looking at you, myspace). 

But all the changes also make me sad on some weirder, emotional level. Whenever they update, you lose all of the old posts and pictures and things.  Growing up when I did, all my high school days and now my college ones are digitally preserved. With every money-grubbing update, I lose a bit of those records.  I guess I could go around taking screenshots of them all, but who thinks about doing that?

In my medieval literature class, we talk about how little is preserved of that time because all the flimsy or poorly kept records have disintegrated with time.  Maybe our digital age is a new version of that, and peoples of the future will have to study us on flickering, dusty screens what remains from the latest updates on our twitter accounts.

Yik Yaking

Yik Yak invaded my life.  Well, Yik Yak wants me to believe that it invaded my life. You see, I don't really think it has.  It just wants me to believe its integral to my existence.

But I guess it worked since I downloaded it this morning, after the one-two punch of a Daily Tar Heel story and a class discussion tipped me just far enough to curious to overwhelm my instinct not to be unduly annoyed.

It happened anyway.  I truly do not understand the appeal of this thing.  I admit, I found the signs advertising it around campus amusing (one outside of the dining hall: "What if soy milk is just regular milk introducing itself? ha ha ha).  But that is a carefully choreographed advertising campaign with content far better than is provided with the actual product.

You see, people are not actually that funny.  Growing up inundated with social media has taught me one thing (besides how to shorten my attention span to .3 seconds and to be an insufferable selfie-taking narcissist who types with numbers in place of letters): regular people don't have that  much to offer in the way of quality entertainment. 

 That brings me to Yik Yak.  It takes the worst element of all social media and glorifies it.  It only contains the drivel.  There is no utility.  The way people talked, I expected (foolishly) to find witty comments about the zeitgeist or brilliant quips at the heart of what is it to be in Chapel Hill at this very moment.

What I got were hundreds of complaints about the heat, eight a.m. classes, and freshmen.  These are the same complaints I read all on all three previously mentioned social media websites. Why do we need so many outlets to complain about things?  These are things people have been complaining about since the dawn of time.  But somehow, we never get tired of the same jokes.

I have adopted a smug attitude toward social media in this here post on my blog, with Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr opened up in different tabs. I'm not saying all social media is drivel because it's primarily filled with average joe's musings.  It's just that Yik Yak takes the worst parts of all social media sites and focuses entirely on that.

Facebook is full of crap I don't want to read. I think it's fair to say most everyone feels that way.  Nobody keeps their Facebook account active because they want to see how much Ashley <3's Josh or somebody else's Grandma's badly typed prayer request or six thousand pictures of people arranged in sorority girl squats.  They keep Facebook because the world assumes you have one: you are a social non-entity if you can't get Facebook event invites or group messages planning events. Facebook messages are a prime line of communication.  This is part of our lives now. There is utility and social capital in participating on Facebook.  I'll buy it.

Twitter lacks a conversational utility, but it has its purposes. Real journalists and organizations tweet, and it's helpful to have all that information all in one place.  It's a legitimate way to pass information on to others, especially when covering live events. There is something intriguing about watching the world erupt when Bryan Cranston kissed Julia Louis-Dryfus on the Emmys (and stole McConaghey or Jon Hamm's Emmy). I can see the utility of this.

Tumblr is perhaps hardest to justify, based on my standards of utility and no-drivel policies.  But Tumblr attracts a nerdier, more focused set.  You can follow blogs with very specific topics, so you only get content from people who don't annoy you.  It's not like Facebook, where every time you talk to a person for more than three minutes, you qualify to be Facebook friends.  There's a degree of anonymity. Plus, I once got a job at a literary magazine off Tumblr, so it does have a purpose.

I don't think I need Yik Yak in my life.  I know it's hot. I go outside. I know 8 a.m. is early. I have class then.  I know freshmen don't know what's up.  I was one once.  Thanks for being informative, Yik Yak.  Thanks., this whole myth that it's such a big trend and everyone is doing it seems wrong.  Not a single person in my close circle of friends and acquaintances--no roommates, no co-workers, no casual lunch companions--have appeared given Yik Yak hardly a thought.  If so many people on campus have it, where are they?  Am I just friends with the wrong people?
Or maybe I'm friends with the right people. People who have something more to say than "it's hot."

Academic Advising

I'm tired of trying to predict what the world wants of me, what it will be like a year (or two or three, if I hide in grad school) from now when I'm forced to join it.  How am I supposed to know?  Everybody has an opinion on how best to prepare for it.

There are doom and gloom advisers.  It's easy to want to trust them, with their diplomas declaring "I passed" neatly command hooked to the walls of their offices, supposed testaments to their successes.  All the textbooks that now gather dust on their office shelves because they no longer read them.  Maybe the diplomas really say "I failed."  Nobody starts out with ambitions to be an adviser anyway.  That means they failed first at something else. Maybe they failed at pursuing the goal you're asking them about; maybe they have a reason to tell you an English major will make you miserable because an English major made them miserable.  But you're not them and they can't know you from a collection of scores scribbled in pencil on an academic worksheet, a conglomeration of classes that adds up to practically nothing but a lot of money and time. 

Or maybe they failed because the conditions really are terrible, they've been through things you're too young and idealistic to know about, and you should listen to them because they're right.  Maybe they really do want to help you; maybe you really do need their rough love, their reality check.

There's the other students.  The hakuna matatars, the it-will-all-work-out-so-let's-take-a-shot-ers.  They convince you for a moment that maybe you can't really plan for the unknowable future, and things will just fall into place if you keep trucking along.  Maybe you are a little too high strung. You'll have a diploma. It'll be okay.  Spend a semester in Buenos Aires or the Carribean. Live life. But what if these college hippies are just lifetime loafers waiting to become the homeless people on Franklin Street, begging for change and cigarettes.  When their looks and vodka runs out, what will they have?

There's the friends and family, brimming with over-confidence in you.  You are brilliant and driven and gorgeous and nothing can stop you.  They believe in your pixelated skype smile more than you do.  Every rejection letter is their loss, every bad test grade comes from a bad professor, you weren't tugging on any of the doors that slam shut.  They mistake giving up dreams for being lazy or insecure.  They live forty years behind you, not really understanding the ticking in your brain or the circumstances of your desperation.

So who is right?  Who should you believe? Amid all of it, you must figure out where your voice is, what your heart wants, what the world wants.  How do you put food on the table without sacrificing everything you love?  This might be the key question to the universe. It is not about where we came from or if there's a god.  It's more about "how do I still get to read Dickens without becoming one of his starving characters?"

I love too many things and not enough things.  I'm decent at a few things but not good enough at any of them.  I can't accept that I'm useless to the world, but I can't find a good use for myself.  Is the peak of my productivity checking out DVDs to undergrads?  Surely not.

I resist believing in fate or god or anything that would make these decisions for me.  I relish in free will and the power of humanity to shape itself.  But right now, I just want somebody to tell me what to do.  But I've only got me.

Frank Levering

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro developed a handy map of all the famous authors living in North Carolina.  This provides me yet another reason to feel inferior about my homeland: an unenviable little place called Surry County.

I've written entire memoirs devoted to trashing the place, and I apologize every time I tell somebody where I'm from, as if I've affronted them by being from a place they've never heard of.  I spent my youth hating it in an intensely stereotypical fashion.  But, mostly, I feel like it totally prevents me from ever being successful, especially as a writer.  (I know this is silly, but growing up in a small town will do that to you.)

Surry County has 18 famous authors currently residing there.  (Though they are generous with their estimations: it's a stretch to consider Andy Griffith both an "author" and "alive.") I was heartened by this number.  That's not so bad!  I've even heard of two of them.  Andy Griffith, because how could I not?  The county's economy depends on his old home's bed and breakfast profits.

And also Ralph Levering, who I assume is the Frank Levering that my high school English teacher introduced us to during creative writing class, though he appears as Ralph on the website.  Apparently, he's famous enough to appear on this database with its mysterious criterion, though I cannot name any of his major works.

So I clicked on him.  He studied at my very own beloved UNC, and went on to teach at Davidson. He popped up on Amazon! He has a goodreads page! People like him!

I didn't know when I met him years ago that he may serve as inspiration: miracles really do happen. You can succeed despite hailing from a map dot, with no resources and hardly any encouragement.

Besides, I looked up my boyfriend's county, and they only have ten famous authors. So ha!

Too Crotchety for College

I think I'm getting too old for college.  This phenonomia seemed impossible just three years ago, when I skipped bright-eyed and bushy-tailed onto campus, in constant awe, just pleased to be allowed to grace the hallowed bricks. Now, I only curse when I trip on them.

The first sign was when my new suitemates moved in.  My former suitemates--who'd I lived with for the last three years--all decided to abandon me for the greener pastures of illegally living in the basement of a ramshackle duplex and paying for their own toilet paper.  So my roommate and I were forced to co-habitat with a cohort of plucky sophomores.  

One by one, they moved in.  Each carried more suitcases than I'd owned in my life, all matching and monogrammed. The bathroom filled with the stock of a Bath and Body Works, and the hallway seems permanently scented by a mixture of "sexy seafoam" and "seductive orchid" body sprays.  The rooms filled with such glittered radiance I wear sunglasses to go the bathroom. Every surface shines, or else it's adorned with huge scripted initials, in case somebody tries to steal all the linens, I suppose. The hot pink of the room reminds of the Claire's I worshipped in late elementary school, including the One Direction poster with its place on honor in the center of the back wall.  I feel sixty-five every time I sneak a peak inside.

In just three years, my decor has lost whatever matchy matching charm it may have once possessed and has wheedled down to pure functionality.  My bedspread is not cute, but it provides the optimal temperature in conjunction with the ancient window air conditioning unit.  My dishes do not match like my grandmother's fine china, but they are microwave safe. My purses are not hung in adorable formations on the wall with $10 command hooks, but I know where they are all located.  With such old age, interior design seems hardly worth it.

The schoolgirl shrieks and giggles that are now the soundtrack to my evenings are not the only reason I feel too old for college.  Various collegiate spectacles, that used to make me feel happy to be alive, now just make me want to go back to bed.  While people run over each other for a Dixie Cup of free ice cream, I walk to Walgreens and buy a whole pint to myself.  Free doesn't really taste better anymore.  Even Senior Bar night could not unglue me from binge-watching the Sopranos. Too many crowds.  Too much sweat.  Too many drunk people; their behavior is no longer cute.

I circumvent the crowds advertising their various passionate causes. I used to admire these people, appreciate their dedication.   I imagined them as experts in their fields, working hard to work their way up to gain the respect of their peers. Recruiting passionately. Being that all-important world all the brochures tell you makes college worth doing: involved.  Hell, I even became one of these people, though temporarily.  Now I see them all as annoying resume-padders who stand between me and dinner. 

My friends call me crotchety.  Maybe I am.  I'd like to think this is just nature's way of preparing from the propulsion of the insular life of college into the real world.  And I think maybe, just maybe, as I stand up in my cap and gown at the end of this year, I'll feel a little flutter of the awestruck youth I once was. Until then, I'm going to bed at nine.