College is a funny thing. Not haha funny like when your friend makes out with your ex-girlfriend, and later you agree with him that it was all a joke and he laughs about it and slaps you on the back as you wilt a little inside. Not like that. I mean funny like when you wave at someone, then quickly remember that they don’t know you and that, barring a freak coincidence, they haven’t been looking at your Facebook profile for the past week, and won’t understand that you know them, and find their favorite quotes spunky and not sappy at all, and that they are supposed to wave back. Curious, I mean to say.
They say college is where one finds oneself. And so for three years, I’ve been waiting to stumble upon the ideal me. The particular self I’m waiting to find has won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism and a Nobel Prize for literature, lives on the third leaf of Dubai’s Palm Island, and is married to the reincarnation of Susan Sontag. I’ve run into a few problems.
Because when they say find yourself, it turns out, they don’t mean find like when you walk into your room and find a note from your ex-girlfriend slipped under your door asking for a certain friend’s phone number because its been a month since we broke up anyway, and we said we would always be friends.
No. By find they actually mean search for. And work for. Which can be hard.
Did you know, for example, that they only give out one Nobel Prize for literature a year? There are 2,700 students on this campus alone, not to mention like 6 billion people on this planet. We can’t all win Nobel Prizes. My collected works (read: half a column so far) don’t stack up against Orhan Pamuk’s, or even Ed Klein’s.
It’s tough realizing that everybody has the same dreams. You start thinking you’ll never get a dream of your own. And it’s easy to get despondent. Despondent like when your friend is e-mailing sex pictures of himself and your ex-girlfriend to your ex-girlfriend but accidentally CCs you the e-mail and happens to write “I bet you never did this” in the subject line.
But dreams don’t go away just because you want them to. There is a reason a dream can mean both a conscious desire and an unconscious thought. They stay with you, and then you get used to dreams never materializing.
What I’m getting at with all this is that dreams are beautiful and far away, and it’s easy to spend days and days staring at their Facebook pictures, and not thinking about how hard it is to actually go out there and flirt with them, and be witty, smart, and alluring, and then maybe touch a dream on the back of the hand, and then get a little bolder and so on. This takes initiative and resolve, and I’ve never heard anyone claim that college is where you find any of those things. Initiative and resolve are self-created, or at least self-sustained, I’ve decided.
So I’ve started taking action. I’ve already written three letters to the Sontag estate asking them to send me one of Ms. Sontag’s coffee mugs. Once I have it, I’ll have every girl I meet re-enact the scene from “Little Buddha” where Jesse Conrad correctly picks out the dead priest’s bowl and they prove he’s the old man reincarnated.
Because the real funny thing is that in college no idea is too far flung. As long as you back it up, you can say and do whatever you want. I don’t mean whatever you want like when you forward a certain e-mail to your ex-girlfriend’s 84-year old Quaker grandmother. I mean like when you decide to write that novel about mutant lesbian cyborgs attempting to start a hippie commune in the late 1880s American west, Pulitzer be damned. And maybe that’s really what they mean when they say find yourself.
Leave a Reply