Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

college

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Those poor Freshmen don’t even have a clue.


For the last two years i’ve been involved in move in, first as a student in the middle of hurricane floyd carting my stuff trip by trip up to the fifth floor of Kelly and then in that same building the next year trying to keep things orderly through pouring rain and hard beating sun. Here in my third year, i am finally disconnected from the class slowly seeping into the precious cracks of my campus that have been so dry and empty all summer. I would rather not caulk them in with this endless stream of fresh faces. I do not want lines in the book store. I do not want people milling around in the lobby of the theatre. I do not want to bob and weave through a crowd on their way to the cafeteria because they only know how to travel in herds.

Ironic that i work in admissions, isn’t it? Today i was in the bookstore pricing my textbooks and all around me parents were gasping at prices and tellings their students what’s what as they silently looked over their shoulders and stewed. It all seemed crude to me, pudgy pushy parents edging past me in the aisles trying to take control of a situation that they could hardly hope to dent, while their student idly followed with shopping baskets dangling behind them. Do you know that parents often fill out applications for their students here in the office? I might be a momma’s boy by some standards, but she never touched the interiour of an app, and you had better believe that i picked up all of my books myself with my own money.

I suppose i just don’t really understand it… the crash of over two thousand new students swamping my campus with questions and with too-wide eyes and with their domineering parents, secretly scoping for attractive people or where they might go to hang out tonight. Why i am i working for this perpetually in-motion machine that greedily sucks in student after student and pumps out cookie cut graduates every year? Because, i suppose, somewhere in the middle the push of getting in and the pull of getting out (or perhaps the opposite) – everything balances out perfectly and all you do is float until the gravity of the situation takes over for you again.


I am not there yet; i’m just about to be $435 closer to getting my feet off the ground.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5767392/

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Of course, becoming someone is a two way street. When someone gets famous and says “some school rejected me and it changed my life” to some random interviewer, ten different thoughts shoot out in ten different directions depending on who the reader is. The most basic reaction is probably something akin to “wow, they got rejected by school. I’m shocked!”

What follows is the part that matters… is it more important that the school is that much more prestigious for turning down your favourite actor or singer, or is the school pathetic and shallow for not seeing their potential when it had been so obvious?

The thing with me was that nothing was obvious. I somehow had the idea that i could trump everyone else’s comparable scores with a slew of activities like acting and writing and volunteering, and while schools do claim to care a lot about all of that but they honestly don’t really seem to mind either way. Unless you’re submitting a portfolio, they like to hear about competing, and winning – not showcasing and performing … unless you were winning while doing that.

I was a special challenge because i was undecided about my academic major when i was applying to colleges, which was surely one of the biggest strikes against me. At Drexel, we invite undecided students to apply. We encourage it. We can help them work it out. But, some schools have no use for the indecisive, and would only take them if they’ve proved themself to be a potential nobel prize winner no matter what they major in. So, honestly, i would have had a shot at splitting my rejections in half if i had just arbitrarily picked English or Literature as my major. But, i didn’t. Oops.

The thing with me is, i’m inconsistent. I mean, i have 10 simultaneous projects up in the air at any given time, none of which are ever really getting finished or resolved. In high school, this translated into a hodge-podge of activities and B+’s instead of A’s. In retrospect, i don’t think i did anything before the age of 13 or 14 that had any definitive effect on my academic future. What it comes down to is that i need something to light a fire under me before i can be excited about anything, and back then the only things i had really were comic books and video games and reading books and nothing serious and enjoyable. As it is now I need PuppetMaster or 25/24 or taking the minutes at a big admissions meeting to light a fire under me. to keep me motivated.

However, now i have the weak excuse of passing these fires off as my continuing exploits in DIY journalism. If i didn’t have this to refer to as my way of honing my writing skills and narrative voice, what the hell would i be doing with my free time? I’m very jealous of you science types that can quantify what they’re learning and their goals so clearly. I just need to have an enthusiasm for something, and at the beginning of this Summer i said i’d ditch my guitar if i didn’t start playing this summer – for people in places other than my apartment – and i played a few times. But, it took up no effort on my part, so the guitar is getting tossed in the backseat. I have songs and voice and image but i have no drive or fire, and i don’t have anyone else to light one for me because hardly anyone else has heard these songs because i never play them because i obviously don’t have enough attention to pay to it unless i combine it with things on the internet. 25/24 was a rousing success for me even if i find the singing hideous and unlistenable; even if i somehow still haven’t finished the Best-Of CD because i keep pulling “bad” songs off of it and putting “good” songs on. But, i have failed my guitar and i feel like suddenly our little interlude has ended, and so now it is just another tool … a weapon if i hold it right.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5119833/

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NYU is who they reject, and i was rejected by them. Somewhere in that exchange of $50 and a heavy manila piece of paper with my essay about intolerance and growing up attached we agreed to define each other. NYU already knows exactly what it is because i am just one tiny speck of rejection on the wide face of their thirty thousand plus applications every year. But, i have yet to define them. To this point i have just been “peter, who did some theatre and took some advanced placement tests and didn’t get into NYU.” And, so, now i feel like i have to be something… something that represents what NYU passed up when they passed on me.

Of course, Mr. NYU didn’t really mean “You are who you reject” with any sort of positive intent other than increase in reputation. He never gave the indication that students could use their rejection to define themselves better or that they should realize that they were only being turned away because a fine institution is as much about who they admit as they are about who they don’t. There isn’t any reason to wonder about such things, and that’s why his school can afford to be nearly the most expensive place to get a degree in the entire country. He said his catchphrase and then launched into how the school targets their mailings at specific grade levels and about how they guarantee four-year housing to all students from outside of the five boroughs because none of them could ever afford to live anywhere near the school on their own.

And i was stuck on instant replay in my head, taking the meeting’s minutes down like an automaton while i wondered. He didn’t mean it as a key to self help, but i’ll be damned if i don’t use it that way. Because, i do not want to visit drexel in 10 years and hear someone say in some faceless heartless presentation that i’m the kind of student that they gobbled up 15 years ago but that now i would barely even meet the criteria to slip in the back way through our local community college. The thought of it makes me sick.

NYU and i are stuck together for life. And, if you want to get more compulsive about this than i’m being, every job and listener and reader and girl who turned me down is now saddled with me more than if they had just gave in and paid me some effort. But, the burden is on my shoulders. I’ve got to become somebody.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5119796/

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My mother had a sort of quiet depression about her in April when the decision letters started coming. To this day I feel bad for her because she didn’t know what to expect, and i think she had been convinced that i stood a chance at all of these schools because my all important gpa/sat was above their tiny averages. Despite my possession of these all-important numbers, one by one those important four rejection letters trickled in, and every one was another blow struck against that pedestal she put me higher and higher on every time some trivial score came back to us in the mail and it was a whole shade higher than she had expected on the tiny blue ETS graph. She threw out a wait list letter from one of the schools without ever even telling me because she knew that i would find a way, and that it would just hurt my pride to be left hanging by a school i might not even make it into even if we could forget the expense for a moment.

Finally we came down to two serious offers from colleges we’d been neglecting all along, and somehow she fought as hard as i’ve ever seen her fight, and after the dust had cleared i at least wound up with some pride(money) and a seat. She knew by then that the whole process was some sort of hilarious joke aimed at me and at every teacher and family member that had ever projected glorious dreams of schools vying for me and scholarships raining down from the sky. She had put herself through school and kept me smart and safe and got me into the best public high school in the state and saw my plays and bought me a guitar and paid for my ap classes and drove me to PSATs. And, all for what, in the end?

All for Drexel, of course. But, we never really said that, and we never really do. Drexel is an amazing school that’s affording me the chance to mold my own future as i choose my co-op jobs and literally redraw the curriculum as i go. But, we never intended for me to go to Drexel. No one ever did. It’s all been blind faith and dumb luck all along.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5119735/