I’ve had so many small stories from the past few days floating around, but each time one is ready to escape out of my head and onto here it is replaced with the next one and the next one successively, which has just resulted in silence. I’ve now missed talking about my overlong Monday with my turn at being the lead singer of the female a cappella group & quirky conversations with Selina, a study-mad Tuesday morning that was (as usual) too much preparation for a simple test, and my typical Tuesday of communication from which i usually bring some new axiom or theory to test out on you. All down the drain. All i’ve got left is another dream… walking barefoot from 22nd and Passyunk back to school and winding up in some strange city other than Philadelphia but with all the same people.
Being the last week to drop classes, this also happens to be midterm week. I have one every day; three more to go. Does that explain it a little better?
college
The time was 9:45am, and it was the second Monday of class. I came up off of the still-sleeping residential street at a brisk jog, entering into the quad on an angle so that each building was like a base with me positioned as a shortstop. Each one of the buildings was distinctive and crisply colored; all were brownstones and three of them had metal fire escapes (though i think they were mostly decorative). I passed a few small messes of people who were trickling out of classes early or who were just arriving, but i didn’t recognize anyone other than the girl in my other two Monday classes. I flashed her a smile but she didn’t see me.
The main issue at had was that for the entire first week of classes i had totally forgot about my 10am Modern Mythology lecture, so i had to somehow make it there and have my absences written off as a schedule confusion. Modern Mythology was to be found in room 142, but i wasn’t sure of which of the buildings surrounding the quad it was hosted in. The one building closest to me was numbered oddly, so that its 142 would have been on the top floor, and i raced up its grey stairwells only to find that it didn’t have that classroom. For some reason i thought it would be in this building, especially because i had passed so many liberal arts classes on the way up. Coming back down the stairs i was in a hurry, and i would skip the majority of each flight… gain momentum on the top few steps and then place my hand on the railing to aid in a controlled arc over the rest until touching down on the bottom two. That is how i go down academic steps all the time… skipping all of the middle ones or shuffling past them so quickly that my entire motion was just momentum. That was how i walked down stairs at Masterman.
There were three more buildings to scout out in the ten minutes i had before class, and i got up to a jog coming out of the door of the first one. The second building was a much newer structure, and had floor-to-ceiling glass paneling that served as walls to its ground floor classrooms; everyone was taught inside their own fishbowl with their gabbing teacher serving as the little plastic castle. In this building i wasn’t interested in the numbers on the classes; i knew i would recognize the teacher if i saw him through the glass, and that he was always early. All i had to do was stare into each room as i flew past them. The ground floor was enough, so i left after circling it once.
Back in the quad now, i was beginning to get worried about making it to class on time, seeing as i definitely would have to talk to the professor for a moment. The first two buildings i had chosen were opposite each other, and coming out of the plate-glass one the two remaining structures seemed impossibly far away. I started jogging to close the ground between myself and the building to my left. A few firm steps got me up to a sustainable speed, and then i planted my right foot hard into the ground and pushed down. My momentum carried me upward, but this time i didn’t merely come back to rest on my next foot. Slowly i rose, still windmilling my legs, until i was fifteen feet above the ground. I was suspending in the air in the same way a life-jacket leaves you bobbing just above sea level, and it was up to me to maneuver up and down and to gain forward momentum.
I stopped windmilling and scissored my legs twice to gain more altitude. Then i dipped my left shoulder hard into the wind to bank around left toward the next building. Suddenly i found myself slipping ever so slowly higher when i should have only gaining an inch or two, and a worried glance at the ground indicated that i was inexorably moving up and away into the blue sky. I pulled out of my bank, pushed out my chest, and inclined my head downward as if i was diving — still i was pushed upwards at an increasing speed. It was as though i had been caught in a backwards undertow… a vicious updraft that was determined to rake my back against the clouds. Before i could do anything else the quad had become the size of a dining room table, and then a cd case, and then just a postage stamp. I could feel the air getting slightly thinner, and the strange changes in pressure made my eyes flickflick flick inside of my eyelids in a way that distracted me from the ground until, finally, i woke up.
Scattered scattered scattered.
Yesterday was all about scattering myself like a dandelion in the wind to see where i wound up. I didn’t like many of the places, and so i kept scattering again and again until i had nothing left but sleep, and so that’s where i finally wound up.
Some things amaze me. There was a girl flirting with me, and she seemed nice enough but to me she was very unattractive. She was thin, and pretty, and talkative, and everything — but she absolutely didn’t mean anything to me at all. She took a hold of my necklace and asked me if i knew how to hold the reigns of a horse and i found my body suddenly sliding out from under me and two minutes later i was locked in a bathroom hiding.
The funny thing is, other guys at the party were eager to flirt with her… in fact, nearly all of them were, considering that she was blonde and single. I just couldn’t understand it; am i broken somehow, that i’m a boy yet i don’t immediately want to even so much as kiss someone if i’m not implicitly interested in them? Am i supposed to want to kiss just for the sake of kissing, and to see where it leads?
Do you know that some boys really still tally up their sexual partners like proverbial notches on a bed-frame? I always assumed that teevee-bred frat-boys and other such miscreants did it all of the time, but it’s a strange otherworldly feeling to be in a room full of boys who are having that conversation where i keep thinking… why would i want to give some of myself to so many different people? I can’t even begin to talk about the whole ordeal because it wholly involved the private-me and not the internet-me, but what i can say is that there is someone who i used to quite like as a person to talk to who i now can’t even look at because he disgusts me on such an inherent level that my stomach is currently churning. It’s not just sex… it’s disregard for self-worth. And personal safety.
In the same way that i never thought of my own friends as those sorts of boys, i never saw the Players’ dating habits as indicative of college as a whole. We are thespians, after all. However, suddenly there are all of these new girls floating around and i am old enough that i am separate from them at the parties we attend, and they make me wonder. Are they flirting with nearly everyone because they like the sudden power they have over men? Do they have their own notches and bedposts and bragging conversations that i am blissfully unaware of? Or, are they somehow hypnotized by the plain old bunch of us just because we’re older and have apartments and wet-bars and roles in plays?
I wonder if i acted anything like they do when i first got here… i always thought i had found my real friends for the first time in my life, but maybe it was just that i had finally found a social structure that i could weave my way into. Maybe for me it wasn’t the beer and the pot and the escape from the dormitories so much as the feelings that i was braiding myself into a continuing history that had existed before me and would go on without me, and that forever-after a smattering of those rambling tales of wild weekend nights would inevitably include me.
Yesterday was a day of everything in pieces. In Literature we watched a fuzzy academic film about the art of the Mexican Revolution, and it was as if all of the bright murals on the screen traded places with my campus so that their shaded in people were all round and real while mine were strangely flat. Everything in my world was little mosaic bits of mural… like looking close enough to notice that the shading of a cheek is really just a couple of dashes of black paint. Eventually i wound up giggly and in charge at the office because we were doing territory management via email and i was the only person who knew how to make an href so we could have spiffy links (i think they just thought that it happened by magic). Then there was some inbetween time… a quick $20 shopping binge with Gina at K-Mart so we could have costumes for the party. And then the party. But, the less said about that the better.
How many other people do you know that who wake up at 7:56 on the day class registration opens online, load up the class-add page at 7:59, click submit at 8:01, idly search for a sixth class but find that they’ve taken all of the ones that are offered, and are blissfully dreaming of their perfect winter schedule by 8:30?
Just wondering.