school days

Every one knows I love school.
It took me a few years.
It took me losing a few heart-warming things.
It took me time for literature to sink in.

For a few years, I felt like every other student was smarter than me, and that they all knew something I didn't. Or worse, that they had taken a class that taught them all about Lacan's mirror theory, or about how to ace MLA for writing papers. Or maybe I needed to smoke weed to get the deeper meaning of everything. But it turned out I was just young and was only taking 2 or 3 classes a semester, so I really wasn't reading as much as the other English students who were wearing weird clothes and didn't have real jobs.

Now, I love school. And it's not like I feel part of this elite academia like "Skinny Harvard Girl" (see "Harvard" label) or Pilar*, and it's not always just about the learning and the knowledge. It's just about being there. It's just about taking the bus or the train to this place.

The university...it feels secluded. It feels far away from my house (it is) and it feels like there are no children there. (Sometimes I see a child, and it is like, where the heck did you come from?) It feels like a place I travel to.
The iPod is involved in getting there. Moody music and This American Life.
Snacks are involved. Packing your bag for the long hours.
Reading books you never would have read. Forcing yourself to learn and think in a second language, just because it is required for your Bachelor's in Art.

But besides being a road trip, College is full of surprising people. You put them under a certain amount of pressure, and watch them start to boil. OR, you just take away their parents, and find out that they are actually primates.
You see girls who are wearing sunglasses to class because they are hungover. You see a boy in the Library commons trying to get you to vote for a ficus tree instead of the students who are running for office. You see a kid walk down the hall in a shark costume.

And one day, maybe you are just washing your hands in the girls' bathroom after spending an entire class period searching for the deeper gender politics in the British Horror movie The Descent and standing there, staring at you, is an old man. A very old man. And you are embarrassed to try to think how to tell him he is in the women's restroom. He is giving you an awkward smile because he is trying to think how to tell you that you are in the men's restroom. You know there is another girl in the stall, but you think, This old guy is pretty harmless, so you don't say anything, and as you walk away, you see him looking for urinals and not being able to spot any. And you hope the other girl doesn't see him, and you hope no other girls see him.
And perhaps they don't.
And you reassure yourself that it was definitely an old man, because he had a real beard.

"And all the wine is all for me."
-The National

*Character bio: Pilar
Pilar sits next to me in Spanish, and makes me feel old because she is 18. She has no job, but takes like a buttload of credits and plays Lacrosse. She is the most fluent in our Spanish class, besides our professor. She also takes Greek, because she is Greek. I have a deep and undying need for her to approve of me, because she is a way cooler 18-year-old than I ever was.