So when we left off yesterday, you had just been given a pitiful description of my first year of college. Let’s leave that mess behind, and jump to my senior year. To set the scene, I was kicking ass. By that spring I had finished all but 2 of my difficult classes. I was taking Yoga and Improvisational Acting, and spending a grand total of 45 extra minutes a week on my school work. I fell into a comfortable routine of South Park and Venture Bros. with the same guys I’d been friends with since freshman year, and the New Orleans Saints had won their first Super Bowl in franchise history. My best friend and I had finally scored a 2 person apartment and a margarita maker. Life was great. It seemed that Louisiana had finally accepted me back as its native daughter, and I was looking at a future of crawfish boils and 90% humidity.
In retrospect, I should’ve seen my epic failure coming. Who wants to think about graduation when you and your friends spend every weekend having Nerf sword fights, playing Super Smash Bros., and playing music until 2 in the morning? I had absolutely no plans for post-grad, except that I had no desire to return to the tundra. I wanted to stay in BR and be 21 forever. Then my mom reminded me that the whole point of college was gainful employment, and sent me to the black hole that is internet job postings. I realized that majoring in English and Archaeology may make for a cool introduction (“I’m like Indiana Jones with better grammar”), but they make for a crap job search. Finally, feeling desperate and watching The Mummy on AMC, I decided that I could probably be a library technician. Yes, dear readers, I was taking job advice from a Brendan Frasier movie. Not my best idea, but I figured it was a start.
That was about the same time that the world as I knew it exploded.
In a matter of days I realized that by the time I could apply for library work, 97% of the apartments is BR would be filled with kids who had planned for their future, and the remaining 3% would require me to buy a bullet proof vest for walking to my car. I had no marketable skills, student loans looming in the distance, and parents who were just now realizing that they had raised an idiot. The only sensible solution was for me to move back to the tundra until I figured out what I wanted to do/could afford to escape. I felt like I was morphing into an awful, chick flick caricature of myself – the spoiled only child who suddenly had to fend for herself in the scary “real world”, or the small town escapee who finds herself making a not-so-triumphant return to her hometown. It was a nightmare.
There were two bright spots in the entire incident. The first was my friends, who assured me that I would die without them, made dirty jokes, and fully embraced my new life as a straight-to-DVD sequel of a bad Reese Witherspoon movie. They even spent an evening deciding which celebrity they wanted to play them when my life was (inevitably) made into a movie. The second was literally my last moment as a college student. I was turning in my last final (Shakespeare: Our Contemporary [and a royal pain in the ass]) when a cell phone went off in class. Inexplicably, if not appropriately, it was playing the Star Wars theme song. And somehow, in the haze of my disappointment and imminent extradition to my least favorite place in the world, I remembered that I was capable of laughter. I was actually giggling when I handed the paper over to my teacher, a balding lit snob who had never forgiven me for comparing the Bard to Seasame Street.
“Well,” he said, “you’re graduating right? What do plan to do now?”
“No clue” I answered. “But with a send-off like that, it has to be something pretty epic.”
He was not amused, but to me it was the only way I could’ve ended 16 years of academia. They could take away my friends, but they couldn’t take my snarky attitude.
Despite that last act of defiance, the rest of my time there sucked. My college graduation was an awful experience. My parents were aggravated at me for being an idiot and for wearing hot pink Chuck Taylors to graduation, I was aggravated at them for being realists, and everyone was aggravated by the 3 hour ceremony I had to sit through for my mostly useless diploma. As far as I was concerned, I might as well jump into the Mississippi. I was going into social carbonite, while my BR friends continued to have super cool adventures together. I watched miserably as my last days in Louisiana ticked away, and finally – in one of the cruelest twists in the story – had to pack up my car and drive myself across state lines and back to the tundra. I played "Highway to Hell" on loop for most of the drive, and prepared myself to sink into unfathomable depths of boredom.
Damn, was I wrong.
And on the off chance that you liked yesterday's entry better
Tah-dah!
No comments:
Post a Comment