A Dropout’s Guide to Passing As a College Graduate

 

 

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A Dropout’s Guide to Passing As a College Graduate

via The Faster Times by Frankie Thomas on 2/1/10

The other night I dreamed I had a threesome with Princess Kitty Shtcherbatsky and Varenka. Yes, I was reading Anna Karenina before bed. I'm reading Anna Karenina in bed and on the subway and while I eat; I am up to my ears in Kareniniana. My New Years resolution, you see, is to read and read and read — the classics, the greats, the hard stuff in every sense — until I can convincingly pass as a college graduate.

"Are you doing this for a boy?" was the reaction of one of my shrewder friends.

I stalled. "Well—"

And this friend, whose Bulgarian origins lend a delightfully cynical Old World wisdom to her girl talk, was frank: "Don't worry about it. I know his type, and he doesn't care how smart you are; he just loves to hear himself talk."

But then she added, "Read Anna Karenina first."

And so I am. But I'm not doing it for a boy — not, at least, for any particular boy. I'm doing it because, as a newly single college dropout, I'm dating my way up through the academic world I abandoned two years ago. Talk about killing two birds with one stone! I go out with teaching fellows, doctoral candidates, professors adjunct and assistant alike (none tenured yet, though that would be the Holy Grail), and I study their respective subjects until I can hold my own in conversation with them. Erotically and educationally, I'm making up for lost time — I'm à la recherche de temps perdu, I might say to a scholar of French literature, hoping he'll be too impressed with the allusion to notice how strained it really is.

Some might accuse me of overcompensating. Objection noted. But they surely can't deny that remedial self-education through dating is vastly cheaper than actually going to college — and a lot more fun, too.

I've never felt much shame about being a dropout, and yet something was always missing, or at least amiss. My ex was (shall we say) not much of a reader; after four years with him, it was a shock to be picked up by my first academic, who had been enrolled in various institutions of higher education since the Clinton administration.

"I'm a perpetual student," he told me.

"But then, in a larger sense, aren't we all?" I blurted out — afraid he'd think I was dumb for dropping out, and recalling my dad's advice that "But then, in a larger sense, aren't we all?" is a foolproof smart-sounding answer to just about anything.

"How deep," this fellow deadpanned, and I made a mental note to thank my dad. "Had we but world enough, and time—"

What followed was unprintable, and yet it was the printable part that shocked me into reevaluating my entire life. The good news: I got the reference. The bad news: I got the reference only because my English class had studied "To His Coy Mistress" in the eighth grade. It was sheer luck that I remembered it now — but what would I do about the next reference, and the one after that? Was I really relying on my middle school education to sustain my flirtatious banter with the academic élite?

Frankie, I told myself sternly, you've been coasting.

Hence Anna Karenina. Hence the Merriam-Webster website newly bookmarked on my browser toolbar; hence the sprinkling of delicious new words like apricity, sui generis, frangible, uxorious, brinksmanship, omertà, and viz. into my correspondence. Drop one of those suckers into a first-date conversation with an educator, and even if you're the kind of girl who combs her hair with her fingers and blows her nose into her cocktail napkin, I guarantee you won't go home alone. Take it from me, girls! (Seriously, though, always carry a handkerchief in the winter.) At my best, I can be as charming and glamorous and breezily brainy as the situation requires — "Surely Slavoj Zizek is more relevant here as an interpreter of Lacan than as a philosopher in his own right," I'll say, or "Ah, but the work of Wittgenstein can just as easily be used to argue in favor of language across the species barrier!" — and I go to bed brilliant.

By the light of day, however, I'm not so bright. Every morning, like Cinderella transformed back into a maid, I find myself once again a 22-year-old film school dropout — one who's terrified to call her landlord on the phone, who got goat cheese smeared all over her best shirt while making scrambled eggs at three in the morning, whose boyfriend left her after she used the bathroom sponge on the kitchen counter and who always chokes up at that freakishly earnest holiday ad for Coke and Wal-Mart. I live on the highest hilltop in Brooklyn, and I tell people that on a clear day I can see forever; but the truth is that even on the clearest of days I can't see past New Jersey.

No spoilers, please: I secretly don't know quite how Anna Karenina will end. I secretly don't know quite what I'm doing at all. As much fun as I'm having, I'm secretly playing a part, wildly out of my depth, struggling to pass as an adult.

But then, in a larger sense, aren't we all?

 

 

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Decades come and go

It is as much human nature to mark epochs as to make lists, often combining the two, hence the proliferation of best of year, decade, etc lists. I don't recall millennial lists, but there must have been some, even if only compiled by historian.

I can't pass on marking Mountainair in the decade that was: the oughties/ noughties mark my own tenure here. I arrived from Davis CA at the very end 1999 to take care of my mother, who died a year later at the end of 2000. That marks either way of measuring the decade. I stayed. So the decade just past (or starting it's last year depending on how you reckon) is my decade in Mountainair.

 

1. Mountainair Mural
2. Deer Canyon - exemplifying the exurb - and its denizens come to Mountainair
3. Green energy ~ hope, future prosperity or empty promises? cui bono?
4. Mountainair gets Wired: web pages and social media supplement traditional flyers and broadsides, challenge traditional print media
   
5. Shaffer Revenant
6. The White Elephant on US 60 (aka Assembly of God Campgrounds, Mountainair Campgrounds, presently Mountainair Activity Complex

Still standing, sometimes in spite of itself and against all odds

• Firecracker Jubilee (Mountainair's oldest continuing event, wobbled for a while but going strong again and picking up steam)
• Poets & Writers Picnic (much more recent but still 2nd oldest)
  
• Sunflower Festival (enduring a series of name and sponsor changes, but surviving, now thriving)
  
• Chamber of Commerce: declined, almost pronounced, presumed reborn (the midwife has not left the building)
• Local institutions: Meds & More, Ancient Cities, Just in Tyme Shoppe, Gustin's Hardware, Cibola Arts, Mike Padilla's gas station (under any name), the local grocery store on Broadway across from the Post Office - no matter who owns it or what we call it, Bank of Belen/ MyBank, Burn's Auto Supply, Hair Enchantment, The Laundrymat
  

 Bienvenidos (for better or for worse)

• Deer Canyon: Preserve, Homeowners Association, Folk, Gated Community, SoCal Exurb (as per Mike Davis' definition)
• B St Market,. Scott Remmich, but still featuring familiar faces from the Mountainair Grocery
• Alpine Alley
  

Adios:  Ranchers Day, Arts Tour, Mountainair New & Views (print journalism bit the dirt sooner here than nationally), Kowboy Kafe, The Firehouse, Chuckwagon (drive thru eatery changing hands many times throughout the decade), Granny's Sweets & its giant ice cream sundae drive through, Art Alley, Roy Kirby and Jude Mowris of StoneTree Gallery and Straw Mountain Studio, Mountainair Grocery (see Bienvenidos, above), uncounted Shaffer hotel and restaurant manager. Wells Fargo

Public Looks Back at Worst Decade in 50 Years

Originally I intended this post this post for Mountainair Arts and have already reposted there. For now and maybe longer, I will also export flâneuse posts to "chez Vanessa" at OS. Comparing reactions from different readerships / demographics should be interesting.

From a report from the PEW Research Center:

"As the current decade draws to a close, relatively few Americans have positive things to say about it. By roughly two-to-one, more say they have a generally negative (50%) rather than a generally positive (27%) impression of the past 10 years. This stands in stark contrast to the public's recollection of other decades in the past half-century. When asked to look back on the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, positive feelings outweigh negative in all cases."

Public Looks Back at Worst Decade in 50 Years

What do you think? Do you agree or disagree? Have the "aughties" been a transformative decade, a black hole or both? Personally, I find separating the personal from the "larger picture" exceedingly difficult... if not downright impossible

resolutions of an irresolute flâneuse

flâneuse résolue ~ c'est moi, néamoins plusiers doutes. surveying the list of posts, sad ~  17 in three years counting this one. granted, if I am to continue here, fewer or at least different but more interesting rants and more resolutions - of the practical and realistic variety. last year's blog resolutions worked ~ KISS (keep it short and simple) ~ Blogging English excepted.

resolutions do not have to be the same for each blog. the flâneuse hereby resolves:

1. customize resolutions (except this one?)
2. (and this one) blog regularly: set a schedule (i.e. 1-3 week) and stick to it 
3. don't let regularity lead to mental constipation or banality
4. the contrary flâneuse is not a community blog ~ shun psa's and lectures
5. blog à clé: use pseudonyms for any references that could be construed as personal
   
6. blog not clog ~ short posts (channel TW)
7. the niche thing ~ post to a theme even if I don't yet know what that would be

too many for now ~ back in another to trim

flâneuse revenante

dang flâneuse won't fade away like faerie no one believes in, won't lie down and die. could this be a message to my unconscious that she has more to say? that she needs to speak free, run amok. who knows, resuscitating her might breathe life in the sad flagship ~ blog ship? ship of blog? or be the instrument seppuku. arts needs an id. is flâneuse arts' id? say that fast 20 times...

send out the runners... change the settings. what status then? to publish but not list on profile? to flaunt or not to flaunt, that is the question.

a recent problogger post might be relevant here: "How to Manage Expectations with Your Blog Readers?"