I’m finishing college this week.
I’m finishing college this week. That sounds so odd that I feel the need to say it a couple of times. It’s weird for a few reasons, the first being that I’m graduating in the middle of the summer with absolutely no fanfare, and the second being that I still feel like I’m eleven, excited about shaving my legs, and worried about the cool kids not liking me. To be an adult with a degree is completely foreign; I thought by this point in my life I’d be all grown up and sophisticated, when in reality, I’m a bigger disaster than ever before. But to commemorate this landmark and perhaps bring some sense of personal closure to this period in my life, I’m going to recap the past few years.
In August of 2002, I moved to Charleston, South Carolina to attend the College of Charleston. I had chosen that school off the top of my head at the beginning of my senior year, visited that October, applied in December, and was accepted with an academic scholarship. I never even considered applying to other schools. To this day, I can’t recall how I selected the College of Charleston – but I was damn certain it was the perfect school for me and I belonged nowhere else.
Within a month of my first day of classes, I was applying for transfers to other schools. It wasn’t that Charleston lacked charm and appeal; I was just strongly averse to the thriving roach population. I was sitting in the living room of my dorm one night when a large roach DROPPED FROM THE CEILING and landed a mere foot from my chair, THE CHAIR IN WHICH I WAS SEATED. Although that was terrible in and of itself, the realization that the roach could have actually landed on some part of my body sealed the deal: I was moving out of the city, out of the state, and out of the same solar system as those terrible bugs.
I applied and was accepted to George Washington University. However, my parents needed me to take a semester off during which they would harvest their organs in an attempt to pay the astronomical tuition. I spent the spring and summer of 2003 working at Starbucks, where I discovered just how badly certain people need to be strangled or forced to serve fancy coffee drinks to the clinically insane. By the time tuition was due, my father was short one lung, one large intestine, one kidney, and $25,000, so I applied to George Mason University and was accepted to begin classes immediately.
Despite a growing hatred for the coffeeshop industry, I stayed at Starbucks until December of 2003, when I realized that it was either quitting or stabbing the next customer who complained that their triple tall skim dry cappuccino tasted like shit. This decision coincided with a few major personal financial crises, which left me jobless and living on the edge of poverty. I took a part-time job doing “marketing” for a one-man company, a position that covered everything from creating brochures to cleaning his espresso machine to painting his townhouse yellow. While highly amusing, the job paid poorly and left me bartering with my live-in boyfriend to pay me for washing his car so I could take my mother to the movies for Mother’s Day. It was a “creative” time in my life – I gave homemade gifts, ate aged food, and wore the same three shirts on a disturbingly regular basis.
I was finally able to land a full time job as a clerk at a courthouse in July of 2004, although it never occurred to me to wonder why they were willing to hire me, a young, inexperienced student. By the time I quit in December of 2004, I had learned: nobody, not even syphilitic lepers, wanted to do that job. It was repetitive, degrading, and monotonous, and the lead supervisor was borderline psychotic. She vacillated wildly between loving me (plying me with non-virgin margaritas at lunch on my twentieth birthday) and hating me (threatening to beat me up after I quit and convinced her pet employee to come with me). The ultimate reason for my leaving, however, was that the court would not grant me the vacation time I requested to travel to Guatemala with Caitlin. It was a very difficult decision – stay at a low-paying job located an hour from my house where I was abused like a circus monkey or take a fabulous trip with my best friend who had purchased my plane ticket – but I made the leap.
In a rare stroke of luck, I was able to find a substantially more appealing job at another courthouse located close to my home. For the first eight months, the job was wonderful – I liked the people and the work, and the money wasn’t bad either. However, my charming demeanor combined with my increasing boredom soon led me to burn many bridges in a short period of time (burn? hell, I incinerated those bridges). Within four months of the onset of my dissent, I was kindly asked to resign. For some reason, the court didn’t like the docket cart races I staged in the hallway, the wearing of the Abominable Snowman slippers, or my repertoire of snide responses to the many stupid questions my coworkers asked. I learned the definition of professionalism the day I was canned, but also the meaning of the phrase, “You backstabbing bitch!” My only souvenir from those days is an enduring friendship with my former boss, who will forever be the coolest supervisor to look the other way.
After that, I plummeted into debt, despair, and designer purses. I found a temp job at a law firm, which sounded appealing until I realized that the job consisted of me being a slave to a mentally unhinged attorney in an otherwise empty office located on the fourth floor of a Tysons Corner building. A month after starting, I began taking daily medication to remedy my urge to throw myself headfirst through the plate glass window, finished organizing an entire room of files, and was told not to come back because my school schedule was inconvenient. It was a dark time. I spent a lot of time in the same pair of ripped, faded jeans, and endured cracks about early retirement from my father and chemical dependency from my friends.
Caitlin saved the day with a temporary data-entry job at her company that evolved into my being hired for my current position. I’m not yet rich and I’m far from famous, but I’ve had an absolutely wonderful time redefining workplace etiquette with Caitlin. It’s also amazing to realize that my best friend has known me since the time I suffered an emotional breakdown over a B+ during the second quarter of Geometry in the eighth grade, and we’re STILL close, as evidenced by her firsthand knowledge of all of my biological functions AND her continual willingness to do all of my drycleaning.
In the past few years, I’ve also acquired two quirky dogs, one sweet husband, a lot of crazy memories, a fair share of painful bruises, and a handful of lifelong friends. There’s Christina, my roommate from Charleston, who taught me that I really just need to stop the endless drama party and “get a grip”. There’s my bubbly Liz, who, even when engulfed in flames, would put down the fire extinguisher to attend a sale at Express. There’s Mary, my former boss from the court who has more wisdom, cooking skills, and dates than I could ever aspire to possess. And finally, I have an entire collection of wonderful people who are always good for a drink, a lunch, or a laugh. Oh, and I have a blog where complete strangers know that I cannot digest popcorn and that I share gum with my dog.
In conclusion, it has been quite a trip. I can’t yet grasp that I’m technically all grown up, and based on how little I know about so much, even that’s highly debatable. On the bright side, I’ve bought myself another three years before I’m forced to face the real world. And after that, there’s always the PhD.