Four quiet years
My sister's graduating from college a couple weekends from now, which is crazy. She's 22 and she's been working in insurance sales since the beginning of the year. I don't have a clue what to get her for a graduation present. Suggestions? If she were getting an apartment instead of moving back home, I could have some fun buying kitchen stuff for her. I know she'd like to get cash or a Target gift card, but those tend to be the default things she gets for every gift-giving occasion, and I'd like to do something a little different for her graduation. She's a very thrifty girl (I think she'd be pleased that I wrote that about her) and doesn't like to receive books that she'd get at the library, or DVDs or music that she wouldn't buy on her own. Last year, I made her a mix CD as part of her bridesmaid basket for my wedding, but I was so embarrassed of how much effort I put into her (and everyone else's) CD that I couldn't bear to ask her if she liked it.
Her graduation day will be my first time back in Athens in over a year. I love the town, but every time I'm there I have to fight off feeling spiteful about my own years there. When I read about other people's Athens experiences I wonder how it is that they've managed to find classes free of fratboys, and places to live that don't involve their neighbors puking in front of their doors and punching holes in the drywall in the public stairwell. I built so many romantic notions of college, and it pains me a little bit to realize that the lifestyle I wanted was there (I knew it had to be!), yet all my little twenty-year-old aches and desires couldn't bring it to me. Sometimes I went to shows by myself and sat at the bar putting mixed drinks on a tab, hoping that my loopyness and my love of the music could help me infiltrate one of the groups of people dancing in front of the stage. I remember being ecstatic at once getting an "excuse me" from someone. I know that I carried around a deadly combination of personality traits during those four years -- I was judgmental and hypersensitive to a good portion of the student body, always telling myself that I was at once too good yet not good enough for, say, the marketing majors in their pristine North Face gear who hung out in front of the business school between classes. I was quiet in a way that made people nervous. I was depressed. If I were given another four years to be an undergraduate there, could I make them any better? Would I find a way to meet people and genuinely enjoy their company, or just go on silently envying them like I did before? I've got it pretty solidly in my head that my Japan year is my repayment to myself for everything that I did and was in high school and college. In Japan, I did what I wanted and had the social life I envisioned, and it all came about pretty organically. I never once sat around plotting how to reinvent myself. What made it even better is that I was able to do all that in a place that was inherently more difficult to get along in than a northeast Georgia town where pretty much everyone's around your age and speaks your language. So now, when I get excited about finding Ito En brand teas at Whole Foods and getting Hayao Miyazaki movies from Netflix, it's not so much about me being a Japanophile, but rather about getting a reminder that, yes, there was a strange place across an ocean where I was able to put on display my most real, shiny, strange, and crazy karaoke-singing self.
My sister's college experiences are closer to what I remember: nearly falling over on the campus buses because the handles are too high for a short girl to reach, overhearing some girl in your 500-person lecture class telling her friend that her brand new Coach bag got stolen, envying all the kids who have time to laze around on the North Campus lawn on sunny afternoons. I wish I could convince my sister to go to overseas for a year. I hope she's not as bitter at 22 as I was. I hope no one is.
Anyway.
Adam and I were at Super Target today picking up various greeting cards and a couple food items. I swooped into the "birthday humor" rack and picked out a card for him while he wasn't looking, and then he was able to go and do the same for my birthday card while I was trying to pick out a Mother's Day card for my mom that didn't have anything to do with God, drinking, or shopping. When we met up in front of the graduation cards, I saw that the card on top of his stack had an orange envelope. It was turned over and had a picture of a smiling cow on the back. Same as the card on the bottom of my stack. "Is that, um, my birthday card?" I said.
He said, "Noooo!", which of course meant that it was.
I flipped over the card I'd gotten for him. "Is it this one?"
It was.
We laughed and went to put the cards back. Oh, what a sitcom moment.
Her graduation day will be my first time back in Athens in over a year. I love the town, but every time I'm there I have to fight off feeling spiteful about my own years there. When I read about other people's Athens experiences I wonder how it is that they've managed to find classes free of fratboys, and places to live that don't involve their neighbors puking in front of their doors and punching holes in the drywall in the public stairwell. I built so many romantic notions of college, and it pains me a little bit to realize that the lifestyle I wanted was there (I knew it had to be!), yet all my little twenty-year-old aches and desires couldn't bring it to me. Sometimes I went to shows by myself and sat at the bar putting mixed drinks on a tab, hoping that my loopyness and my love of the music could help me infiltrate one of the groups of people dancing in front of the stage. I remember being ecstatic at once getting an "excuse me" from someone. I know that I carried around a deadly combination of personality traits during those four years -- I was judgmental and hypersensitive to a good portion of the student body, always telling myself that I was at once too good yet not good enough for, say, the marketing majors in their pristine North Face gear who hung out in front of the business school between classes. I was quiet in a way that made people nervous. I was depressed. If I were given another four years to be an undergraduate there, could I make them any better? Would I find a way to meet people and genuinely enjoy their company, or just go on silently envying them like I did before? I've got it pretty solidly in my head that my Japan year is my repayment to myself for everything that I did and was in high school and college. In Japan, I did what I wanted and had the social life I envisioned, and it all came about pretty organically. I never once sat around plotting how to reinvent myself. What made it even better is that I was able to do all that in a place that was inherently more difficult to get along in than a northeast Georgia town where pretty much everyone's around your age and speaks your language. So now, when I get excited about finding Ito En brand teas at Whole Foods and getting Hayao Miyazaki movies from Netflix, it's not so much about me being a Japanophile, but rather about getting a reminder that, yes, there was a strange place across an ocean where I was able to put on display my most real, shiny, strange, and crazy karaoke-singing self.
My sister's college experiences are closer to what I remember: nearly falling over on the campus buses because the handles are too high for a short girl to reach, overhearing some girl in your 500-person lecture class telling her friend that her brand new Coach bag got stolen, envying all the kids who have time to laze around on the North Campus lawn on sunny afternoons. I wish I could convince my sister to go to overseas for a year. I hope she's not as bitter at 22 as I was. I hope no one is.
Anyway.
Adam and I were at Super Target today picking up various greeting cards and a couple food items. I swooped into the "birthday humor" rack and picked out a card for him while he wasn't looking, and then he was able to go and do the same for my birthday card while I was trying to pick out a Mother's Day card for my mom that didn't have anything to do with God, drinking, or shopping. When we met up in front of the graduation cards, I saw that the card on top of his stack had an orange envelope. It was turned over and had a picture of a smiling cow on the back. Same as the card on the bottom of my stack. "Is that, um, my birthday card?" I said.
He said, "Noooo!", which of course meant that it was.
I flipped over the card I'd gotten for him. "Is it this one?"
It was.
We laughed and went to put the cards back. Oh, what a sitcom moment.