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.