College

Nelson Hernandez

College

There’s plenty of ideas about college floating around, particularly those within a college student’s head. They range from the mundane to the sane, usually stuck on the latter when a deadline looms. Everything whirs, if you close your eyes and clench them hArd enough they float by: bubbles bursting over and over with each new passerby. What’s my GMAT score? Bro, mad party tonite. I should be dead. Can I return this book? SHIT SHIT SHIT I AM LATE AGAIN. The pills aren’t working. The novel’s process… All thoughts valid, really.

But one thought is universal, what the hell am I really doing here?
It’s normal, when thrust into an expectation, and that is what the university system has become, an expectation. A formalized pat on the shoulder signifying you have merely lived a continuation of your high school years, only with the stress compounded, fees boosted and new faces thrown in to keep it interesting.
Is it a cynical look? Perhaps. I try not to get caught up in cynicism as a life outlook, only as a buoy to keep my thoughts afloat why they sink amongst the sea of mediocrity we’ve put on stage for the world to see, gussied it up and taken it out to a salmon dinner at Red Lobster (although our date hates seafood). One reason is certain for my outlook, I am currently attending a so called “global studies campus” while only a few blocks away from my high school. It feels as if though I’m stuck in arrested development.

But enough about that, that was merely full disclosure on my part.

To use a Mitch Hedberg quote, “maybe it’s good enough and we’re just wasting our time.” Mitch meant refried beans, I mean life. Maybe life is good enough and college is just a refried waste of time. But imagine this waste of time costing you thousands and being played out upon the inner screen of every last person who walk’s by you. It’s frightening. The college student, if nothing else, is frightening.
People scare me, for what we are capable of (I have to include myself in this pot, again full disclosure). People see potential for action and great things, which many times comes through, but this is something different. This is federal, state and socially sanctioned mental suicide.

Granted maybe this is just an overreaction, but the further and further people progress in this institution (and others) there is this sinking feeling, this anchor that drags them down, you can see the bags under their eyes, discarded pill bottle after pill bottle for headaches, nausea, uppers downers and the whole lot strewn about their rooms. It’s a travesty. My problem in all this is that I expected too much. While there’s still hope (I have a semester to go), I find myself binging on these emotions, dwelling on them, and I begin to convince myself that it’s just me. College is a bit of a selfish thing in this day and age, we come not to do anything other than progress ourselves. Any group activities or charity work in between is just icing on the cake. We come for a paper. That is the end result. To say any more or less is to be a lazy bastard or an idealist, neither of which function in the so-called real world. This was supposed to be the real world! Instead, again speaking in generalities, we have a continuation of the same high school years we fought so hard to leave behind.

Perhaps it’s institutional. I do agree with that on some levels, but what exactly is the institution we rage against? Is it the university as a whole? Is it the earlier schooling systems? Is it the nation? One can’t say, but I can. It’s life that’s the issue. Life gets in the way of a college degree. Being a student doesn’t pay so great. Trying to find your place in the world, getting a job, meeting the woman of your dreams, children, shot engines, nights out, these mean nothing (aside from this particular class).

That might be it. This class (along with the other honors programs) care too much. I feel desensitized throughout the semester as a result of my other classes. They begin to function like a condom, taking away the chance to impregnate the system with thought. Instead, a massive rubber is slapped around my thoughts and held to the light, then discarded with a simple letter and a GPA boost or bust. And that’s counting the times one can shoot their academic load. For plenty of classes, the mind numbing effect produces mental blue balls. We can only masturbate out these thoughts while reading a book or writing for pleasure, usually for an audience of one.

I began to wonder what it meant to really be heard in the world. As a former Catholic, God was always there to hear you. This massive force that spread itself across the universe, on multiple planes and dimensions, always ready to take in your day to day. Priests were the shamans and we all sang loud, waiting for a parish member to get better or for some sense of closure in the conversation, before we began another with the almighty. Everyone never thinking, merely sitting in a confessional waiting for their turn to speak.

What I used to love about confession was waiting. While waiting, unlike most, my friends and I would compare sins. As you get older, it seems like it got more fun (if only I still went to church, I could dazzle old women with tales of nights out and we could all have a laugh about it). Discharging issues onto a priest seems a lost cause, until I realized the small threshold of evil every person kept within themselves. Priests were just as fucked as I was, in the end. That’s when I stopped going, that’s when I stopped waiting my turn, that’s when something in me snapped and I realized the hedonistic pursuit of life didn’t just have to be tits and ass and drugs and sex and rock n’ roll. It meant reading banned books. It meant making love like you were about to die. It meant driving too fast on too little sleep. It meant going out and tearing up the town like you owned it. It meant taking control. It meant god no longer applied to me.

Perhaps there is a force, I won’t pretend to know or believe. I just expect to live life honestly and see what comes. Half the fun is never knowing, why should religion spoil all that? Why should the university be any different? I came to learn, not to regurgitate, but on all levels, no matter how much independent thought is asked of a student it becomes harder and harder to believe that that’s entirely true. John Lennon had a song called “Woman is the Nigger of the World.” After a few nights of lost sleep with that on rotation, I’ve come to believe that students are the nigger of the academic world. We mean nothing. The only way to overcome that is to establish a personal relationship with the few who do care. I’m not sure how much longer I can take until I’m left with about a handful of people I can really say I know, that I deeply care about as instructors. Perhaps that’s more than most, but like anything else in life, it’s never enough.

Having no satisfaction is American, but it’s also addictive. As a nation, I can’t think of any greater place for an addict. For any fix, there is a trade, for any downfall, there is always a group clamoring to pull you out. Twelve steps, baby steps, red fish blue fish all same in the end. We die each and every day to rebuild and make new that we have broken. The cycle is neverending, the love for each activity dims and dims until it is barely perceptible. I saw myself as a Prometheus, seeking to share at any cost and spread the fire. All I ended up with was burnt hands and a heavy heart. I have time, to save myself, but perhaps I was wrong in thinking that people needed saving. People want to fail, they say it’s the best way to learn, but this doesn’t apply in the hallowed halls. Excellence exceeds, the rest sift through and hope for a better tomorrow. I’m stuck in an academic tomorrow, never living in the day, along with most of my classmates. They say ADHD is my generation’s ailment. It is, but we’ve forced it upon ourselves.

I don’t blame things like reality TV and the internet for speeding up these things. We won’t ever go back to the simplicity of Shoeless Joe, we are a generation free of heroes, but prone to hero worship. Maybe I could spend my day building baseball fields, but he will not come. Nobody will.

Our heroes are of a bygone era. The 60s wanted to stay in the 50s, the 70s harked to the love of the 60s, the 80s sought to forget the free nature of the 70s by dressing it in a power suit and the 90s fucked it all up by harking back to the 70s. the 00s are an amalgam of this life. We’ve scattered as a society, as humans. We know too much. We have each become our own teenage Prometheus, thinking we’ve got it all figured out, while being wracked with this throbbing pain in our hearts that we realize we don’t. We are beautiful, we are imaginative, we are broke, we are doomed to a life of this push and pull, this red bull and vodka effect with our minds hanging in the balance.