Sunday

After a day spent in Lawrence, KS I may have some things I would like to discuss. First of all, I miss living in a college town. The majority of my adult life thus far, despite my most recent stay in the KC Metro, was spent in E. Lansing and Kalamazoo. I actually lived in Kalamazoo longer than any other place in my whole life. But I miss it, the atmosphere. I miss being around people whose sole purpose in life is learning. I am by no means an idealist and do not think that every frat boy and sorority girl is in college to actually become educated. But even at the basest level where college is really nothing more than a trade school (see business, engineering, and pre-med majors, e.g.), the kids are still learning how to be adults. Allie and I had the discussion today about the benefits of living on campus, and my input is that it is while on a college campus that you are exposed to real life for the first time (for those of us that go to college). That being said, it's not actually the Real World, only a shadow of it. It's the best part of the Real World. It's the Real World as the World should be. And in that regard, I do not miss living in a college town. A college town is an illusion. It's a utopia for the middle class. It's a time when you can afford to do things that you will never be able to afford to do again- if you want to be able to actually participate in the RW. I think many of us have tried to carry over our college life into the RW and have believed that it will work. The problem is that no two college experiences are the same (unless yours was a Greek experience). Thus, no one is able to adequately adapt their existential hiatus to anyone else's. I mean seriously, I was a Religious Studies major at a Big 10 university and spent a lot of time smoking weed and having sex when I should have been going to classes. Don't get me wrong, I studied a lot. I read a lot of books that most people will never read. I learned ancient Greek. But my college experience was vastly different from a lot of people that went to the same university as I. I never took more than 12 credit hours in a semester and only took Summer classes once. I grew my hair long and hung out with a bunch of hippies, even though I still claim to have absolutely no hippie tendencies. I had a job, in a library, and did most of my studying while I was working. In fact I even had sex while I was working in the library- more than once. How many people can say that they actually have had sex while they working? I don't know, but in college, or at least my college, I did. My point is: this is not the RW. After being out in the RW for a couple of years, I can honestly say that employers do not schedule work only M-Th. They also do not offer night shifts one day a week that are equivalent to three days worth of work. They take attendence. If your work is not done, you can rarely take an "I" and make it up the following quarter. You can't really skip an hour of work and go down by river and get stoned and read Virginia Woolfe and you certainly can't expect to have sex with one of your co-workers and write it off to a bad acid trip and expect that there will be no repercussions. However, I also know that it's highly unlikely to ever engage your co-workers in a conversation about the influence of social Darwinism on American nationalism over a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes without sounding like an a-hole and probably getting fired for being a racist (and possibly sued for sexual harrassment when you ask said co-worker if they want to go back to your place and continue the conversation over a fatty preferrably naked). So, do I miss the college lifestyle? Yes. And no. But college towns are fun to visit, and so I'll probably return to Lawrence sooner or later, or maybe some other town that will take me back to the illusion of the middle-class Utopian dream. And I didn't even get to grad school in this post...