Sunday, June 26, 2011

College the First Time

It lasted all of a year, and then I dropped out.  At the time I told myself I was just taking a little time off - and, in fact, five years later when I finally went back and loved school, this was actualized. But for a long while in between college round one and college round two, "dropout" would have been the more appropriate term.

I hardly ever think about college round one, but it comes up often enough, mostly when people I meet in an academic context get super confused about how I am in my 30s but only earned my BA five years ago. Earlier this week I was really put through the ringer about the whole ordeal, and so it's been on my mind. I'm trying to piece together what I was up to then, and how to account for how different things were for me when I was 17 than they are now.

College the First Time was a small (I mean really, really small) liberal arts school in New England. My assigned roommate and I were the very best of friends until suddenly we were worst enemies; looking back, I should have known from the start that she was kind of nuts and just kept my distance. She played the guitar, which I had no interest in doing (although took up in my 20s), and was an artist, which I suddenly had every interest in becoming. I arrived with an arsenal of bad poetry and short stories and was determined to churn out many more, not realizing until much later the the medium in which I would eventually find the most creative expression would be non-fiction. During College the First Time I added to my repertoire of creative endeavours drawing, set design, pottery, and photography. I was truly convinced that I had something to say, but I had absolutely no idea what that thing was, and only through photography did I come even remotely close to figuring that thing out. But even there I failed.

Under the guidance of my new roommate and in a gesture of feminist solidarity I hacked off most of my hair the first week of school. There was much pomp and ceremony involved, and needless to say it really confused many of the people I'd just met. I went through this awkward total butchy moment that I look back on as pretty sincere and endearing but also as kind of the worst choice ever. I was up to my ears in mid-1990s nonsense like overalls and combat boots and thrift store t-shirts that said things like "I love everybody and you're next." When my hair grew back I dyed it fire engine red. The cassette player was always blasting this or this or this or this or this, and it was never not blasting. I spent a lot of time in diners, writing more bad poems.

I'm almost certain I went to class sometimes. In the more traditionally academic courses, I remember a lot of things seeming like they could be super interesting, but paradoxically I wasn't that interested in them (or anything else). I found many poets taxing, was intrigued by Emma Goldman, adored Chaucer, and adored Charles Dickens even more. But that was really about it. Art history - which became my love and my career much later - was not taught because the faculty didn't want the past to taint our creative processes. The one professor who wouldn't stand for this was the man who taught photography, and so as a photo student I was required to take a zero-credit three-hour lecture on the history of photography once a week. The history of photography has become my field, and I would love to say that these lectures way back when informed this decision in some way. But I can't. I hardly remember them. I wish I did, because it would make me feel loads better about still paying off my College the First Time student loans.

By the middle of my second semester I knew I wasn't going to return the following year. And by the time I went back to school - this time, armed with a goal and firm ideas about what I wanted out of the experience - I knew I would transfer to another very different institution. At a rough-and-tumble large urban state school I fell in love with academics. Thank you, College the First Time, for showing me so early what I didn't want.

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