College has seeped into my brain a lot lately, and not really in a way that's connected to my own experience with it. For example, I had a dream the other night that I was dating violinist Lindsey Stirling, and doing her lighting design while in college. We just finished up watching all three seasons thus far of The Sex Lives Of College Girls on Max, and every B-roll shot of the campus, they apparently used Vassar, had me thinking about campus life.
I've written more than once about the dreams, and it's worth noting that they don't involve actual Ashland University, the school I graduated from. My actual college experience was kind of a mixed bag. It was often a lonely experience, and I spent most of my sophomore year being depressed. I had an emotionally abusive instructor, which is weird to say in retrospect, but he was some of the reason that I disengaged a lot from my major activities. A close friend turned out to be a total sociopath, which wasn't great for my already tenuous social life. My senior year, I lived off-campus, totally over working in residence life as an RA, ready to just be graduated to start my career, and dating Stephanie, who would become my first wife. I wouldn't say that college was a bad experience, it just isn't what I would have liked it to be.
But what stands out is the feeling of starting a new year. For a little while, at least, every year I felt confident and hopeful, and I was kind of a super version of myself. I even talked to girls, though these encounters always went poorly, for reasons I better understand now (ASD, among other things). I don't recall rain at all in the fall, just the sun and leaves changing colors. I mean, it had to of rained, but that's not the memory. I even looked forward to those first weeks of classes. Then stopping by the mail box to see what might be there, like Columbia House CD's. Maybe more importantly though, is the things that I don't remember because they weren't things. There was no full-time job, no parenting, no real obligations beyond graduating. It's a weird time, because you are technically an adult, but you are in many ways protected from the world. Making mistakes carries far less risk.
I'm pretty sure that it's some combination of those feelings that cause this obsession. I've had similar feelings since. When I would visit John Carroll University when Stephanie was doing a masters there, I was content to sit and read or something else while she was doing science. There was no wifi, let alone smartphones then. Working at Microsoft in Redmond was very strangely college-like, only instead of forking over six figures over four years, they paid you six figures. (Fact check: Room and board I think peaked at $17k per year at Ashland, though with grants and stuff, only the rich actually paid that much.)
I don't have a graduate degree, so I couldn't even coach at a college if I wanted to. There's nothing really that I could do professionally in an academic setting. And really, talking to friends who do work in academia, it's not a great spot to be in these days, what with the cost of school and the dumbing down of America. If I really distill down the feels that I am nostalgic for, it's what I call the "summer camp" experience, where people come together to do stuff for some limited time. I imagine that making a movie or a play is like this, too.
Maybe what I really long for is the simplicity of that stage of life. I'm trying to figure out how to get back to that simplicity, while enjoying all of the things that the complexity of life has allowed me to do. Weird obsession, indeed.
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