(no subject)
My Back to the Future
All this year, a shadow has been looming menacingly over my shoulders. Inching closer with each passing day, I have become increasingly aware of its presence, and it is entirely unwanted. Despite my denial of it, my sheer avoidance of it, I know it is coming.
I will be graduating soon. And this means I will have to then do something productive with my life.
Starting in kindergarten, I was told my ultimate goal of my young life was to go to college. That’s it, for the next twelve years - everything you do leads up to college. I mean, I didn’t even know what college was in first grade, except that it was a place that eventually I had to go to. I imagined it much like the dentist, because at that time that was also a place to which I had to go.
Needless to say, I wasn’t that excited about it. As I got older, my classmates’ elder siblings went off to various colleges, and my friends would be inspired and tell me how they wanted to go to such-and-such university like their brother, and I never cared because I didn’t particularly care for any colleges at all. I don’t think I even knew any of their names.
Then, it came time to begin applying to colleges or end up working in a donut shop, and so I had to force myself to care enough to learn their names (but only just enough). I refused to apply out-of-state, and even then I sort of arbitrarily decided on UCLA, because Berkeley was teeming with dirty hippies -- the city and the school -- and Santa Barbara, though it offered me the Regent’s scholarship, was too laid back, and after two quarters there I would have spent my days high on the beach and my nights drunk in Isla Vista and would likely never have done any schoolwork.
So UCLA it was -- and thus far, it’s been an adequate college “experience,” whatever that means. But now, the college “experience” is almost over, and life thus far has not briefed me on what happens afterwards. And I’ve never had to specifically formulate any plans, so it was very out-of-sight, out-of-mind. I have heard rumors that it involves responsibility and work and early bedtimes and I am not pleased with any of these things.
However, several days before the next quarter’s class registration period, I logged onto the school website to check my appointment time. To my dismay, at the top of the page was a message in an officious, angry-looking font, with bold red letters reading “A hold has been placed on your records.” Apparently, I was not meeting the average minimum requirement of units a ‘regular’ student has accomplished for my status -- because they don’t count the 48 credits with which I came into the school. The whole thing was a dreadful and embarrassing mistake (for them!).
Essentially, being put on academic hold is comparable to being put on hold on the phone -- it ranges from mildly annoying to a dire impediment, depending on your situation. I had to run from work, across the hilly terrain to the edge of the earth where Murphy Hall, the administration building, is, and wait in a line down in its barrows until I could speak with one of the secretaries. Fortunately, I was able to get through the line before my next class which, at two hours from then, was a close call.
Unfortunately, the agreement I had to sign, in order to get rid of the hold on my record, was a promise to be finished at UCLA after spring quarter. Just like that, I signed away any prolonged opportunity for codependency with UCLA. It’s scary, because now college has a definitive endpoint, and I know that eventually -- sooner than I expect, no doubt -- I’ll be scraped off like a barnacle from the campus, a college graduate, and moving on to the next stage of life.
When people ask what my future plans are, the best answer I can give is “not to end up dead from a cocaine overdose in a gutter on San Vicente.” This is a good goal to have, I suppose, but it doesn’t provide much in the way of a steady income -- it’s more of an evasive measure than a future plan.
But really, my insecurity about graduation ties into a grander theme of Peter Pan Syndrome; simply put, I do not want to grow up. I associate the five-o-clock world I am soon to enter with eye wrinkles and motivational memos and personally, I’d rather just stay right where I am and, I dunno, learn yet another language I don’t intend to use often.
Technically, I was supposed to be done this quarter, but I bartered with my father and promised to participate in the graduation ceremony I had previously forsworn any involvement with if I could stay another quarter. Now that that final quarter is nigh upon me, I am sad. I am sad to leave what has only recently become my familiar niche, and enter a completely new, decidedly more complex world full of people, stupid beyond all my wildest nightmares.
But with the denial, the anger, the bartering, and the sadness, it appears I look on at the end of college like the end of life -- and in fact, it is the end of a life-style, and all that I’ve come to know thus far. But the last stage which I’m destined to undergo is that of acceptance. After all, it is the time I am to shed the cloak of youth and wrap myself in the tattered burial shroud of adulthood. I’ll trade my backpack for a briefcase and my lucky keg cup for a coffee mug with a quote on it about teamwork.
But I guess it has always been a tradition of man to step boldly into the great unknown ahead -- all I need is an upsurge of confidence, a good haircut, and a machete, and maybe even I can leave Neverland and embrace the work-a-day world.
And you know, if not, I can just go to grad school.
All this year, a shadow has been looming menacingly over my shoulders. Inching closer with each passing day, I have become increasingly aware of its presence, and it is entirely unwanted. Despite my denial of it, my sheer avoidance of it, I know it is coming.
I will be graduating soon. And this means I will have to then do something productive with my life.
Starting in kindergarten, I was told my ultimate goal of my young life was to go to college. That’s it, for the next twelve years - everything you do leads up to college. I mean, I didn’t even know what college was in first grade, except that it was a place that eventually I had to go to. I imagined it much like the dentist, because at that time that was also a place to which I had to go.
Needless to say, I wasn’t that excited about it. As I got older, my classmates’ elder siblings went off to various colleges, and my friends would be inspired and tell me how they wanted to go to such-and-such university like their brother, and I never cared because I didn’t particularly care for any colleges at all. I don’t think I even knew any of their names.
Then, it came time to begin applying to colleges or end up working in a donut shop, and so I had to force myself to care enough to learn their names (but only just enough). I refused to apply out-of-state, and even then I sort of arbitrarily decided on UCLA, because Berkeley was teeming with dirty hippies -- the city and the school -- and Santa Barbara, though it offered me the Regent’s scholarship, was too laid back, and after two quarters there I would have spent my days high on the beach and my nights drunk in Isla Vista and would likely never have done any schoolwork.
So UCLA it was -- and thus far, it’s been an adequate college “experience,” whatever that means. But now, the college “experience” is almost over, and life thus far has not briefed me on what happens afterwards. And I’ve never had to specifically formulate any plans, so it was very out-of-sight, out-of-mind. I have heard rumors that it involves responsibility and work and early bedtimes and I am not pleased with any of these things.
However, several days before the next quarter’s class registration period, I logged onto the school website to check my appointment time. To my dismay, at the top of the page was a message in an officious, angry-looking font, with bold red letters reading “A hold has been placed on your records.” Apparently, I was not meeting the average minimum requirement of units a ‘regular’ student has accomplished for my status -- because they don’t count the 48 credits with which I came into the school. The whole thing was a dreadful and embarrassing mistake (for them!).
Essentially, being put on academic hold is comparable to being put on hold on the phone -- it ranges from mildly annoying to a dire impediment, depending on your situation. I had to run from work, across the hilly terrain to the edge of the earth where Murphy Hall, the administration building, is, and wait in a line down in its barrows until I could speak with one of the secretaries. Fortunately, I was able to get through the line before my next class which, at two hours from then, was a close call.
Unfortunately, the agreement I had to sign, in order to get rid of the hold on my record, was a promise to be finished at UCLA after spring quarter. Just like that, I signed away any prolonged opportunity for codependency with UCLA. It’s scary, because now college has a definitive endpoint, and I know that eventually -- sooner than I expect, no doubt -- I’ll be scraped off like a barnacle from the campus, a college graduate, and moving on to the next stage of life.
When people ask what my future plans are, the best answer I can give is “not to end up dead from a cocaine overdose in a gutter on San Vicente.” This is a good goal to have, I suppose, but it doesn’t provide much in the way of a steady income -- it’s more of an evasive measure than a future plan.
But really, my insecurity about graduation ties into a grander theme of Peter Pan Syndrome; simply put, I do not want to grow up. I associate the five-o-clock world I am soon to enter with eye wrinkles and motivational memos and personally, I’d rather just stay right where I am and, I dunno, learn yet another language I don’t intend to use often.
Technically, I was supposed to be done this quarter, but I bartered with my father and promised to participate in the graduation ceremony I had previously forsworn any involvement with if I could stay another quarter. Now that that final quarter is nigh upon me, I am sad. I am sad to leave what has only recently become my familiar niche, and enter a completely new, decidedly more complex world full of people, stupid beyond all my wildest nightmares.
But with the denial, the anger, the bartering, and the sadness, it appears I look on at the end of college like the end of life -- and in fact, it is the end of a life-style, and all that I’ve come to know thus far. But the last stage which I’m destined to undergo is that of acceptance. After all, it is the time I am to shed the cloak of youth and wrap myself in the tattered burial shroud of adulthood. I’ll trade my backpack for a briefcase and my lucky keg cup for a coffee mug with a quote on it about teamwork.
But I guess it has always been a tradition of man to step boldly into the great unknown ahead -- all I need is an upsurge of confidence, a good haircut, and a machete, and maybe even I can leave Neverland and embrace the work-a-day world.
And you know, if not, I can just go to grad school.