“Hi!” someone exclaims to my right as I catch the last glimpse of my mother’s severely silver head. “I’m Luis! Where are you from? I’m from Texas!”
Oh Jesus, I thought… Texans. I abandoned the conversation to change into the wilderness garb that had been accrued by my parents for me, based on a list sent by the school. Nylon, mid-thigh length, brown shorts, SmartWool socks, black Tivas, green windbreaker, blue bandana, Aviator sunglasses, I looked like the most expensive homeless person ever.
I felt even more out of place when I returned from the bathroom and realized I was the only person decked out like a fool at this juncture. My eyes welled as the Velcro ankle straps of my dorky shoes stripped a couple of layers of skin from my Achilles. This was going to be terrible.
I wasn’t an away-from home kid. I attended camp once, and by that I mean my mom dropped me off only to get a phone call from her wailing seven-year-old a mere three hours later begging her to come get me. Luckily the camp wasn’t but ten minutes from my house, in Granby as opposed to North Granby, Connecticut, and it wasn’t even an overnight affair. I just didn’t like being away from my familiar house with the familiar people.
With this knowledge of myself, I gritted my teeth, verbally flagellated myself, and entered the Recital Hall in the FAB to be debriefed along with my normally dressed cohorts. I took a seat near the back, and started eavesdropping.
I heard a lot of names of towns I assumed were in Michigan: Troy, Dexter, Detroit… Well the Detroit Area, Ann Arbor, Grosse Pointe, Ann Arbor, and then a throaty voice said, “I’m from Avon, Connecticut.”
Holy crap!
“Dude I’m from Granby!” I blurted. “Oh wow, how are all your cows?” asked Ryan Douglass, my fellow Connecticutian and future semi-close friend.
“I just have chickens thank you,” I replied, “How’s all your money?”
“Just wonderful.”
Well he’s kind of an ass, I thought, but at least he’s relatable. As my comfort zone expanded as slowly and painfully as my oozing Achilles wound, I found myself caring less and less that the people around me were either snarky dicks or complete douche bags.
“I’m Sam, I like Cake!” shouted the four foot, patchy faced kid in the seat in front of me at the beginning of the day long bus ride. “Do you play any sports?” Asked a deep voice to my right. Lunatics and jocks, it was just like high school.
All I could do at this point was ignore the fact that I had more in common with the Cake-loving, (he meant the band but it took a while to figure this out) Lord of the Rings fanatic with serious opinions about the structure of capitalism than the relatively sane jock in the seat next to me. Eventually I fell asleep.
I woke up to see we had stopped at a Tim Hortons filled with UPers all dressed entirely in plaid. I noticed simultaneously that my cheek was quite damp with drool, and that the muscular shoulder of my athletic seat companion was much damper.
The remaining hours of the trip were spent apologizing awkwardly to my companion. And just when I started to feel comfortable again, the old feelings of dread and discomfort flooded back when I saw, through the windows, about eighteen twenty-somethings, dressed entirely in fleece, circumnavigating the bus at top speed, shouting and jumping like coked-out second graders encircling an ice-cream truck. I quickly discovered that these asylum escapees would be leading us through the Canadian wilderness. My heart sank.
Lining up for group selection, I noticed that there was only one attractive female leader. All right, I thought, if I get into the hot leader’s group, maybe I can use that as evidence that things won’t be so bad. I’ll just use this girl as a chauvinistic omen. Slowly, names were called out, a drool stained shoulder appeared and was called to join the hot leader’s group, then a gangly kid with a stupid last name, a curly haired girl with a mean mug, a short, dark-haired girl talking at the top of her voice to stamp out nervousness, a tiny gymnast girl, and then…
“Colin King.” A sign from the god of sexism, everything would be all right. And despite the girl with the train whistle for a voice, and the Kentuckian hippie who cried whenever possible, everything was all right.
After embarrassing myself in introductions where we had to pair our first name with the name of an animal starting with the same letter, (I thought alternate names for roosters were funny, I did have pet chickens for Christ’s sake) and discussing Amelie a little too passionately, I realized that I’m not that different from these idiots. We like similar movies, we all laugh boisterously, and we all have to be disgusting together, so whatever!
And it was this realization that these losers were the exact same kind of loser as I was the formula that concocted some fantastic wilderness adventures: Scaring off a monster together after responding a shriek from the curly-haired New Yorker, pulling canoes through waist deep bogs, only to then have to carry them on our heads for three kilometers through the woods. Making a giant rope swing while the leaders were gone, and then another with them present. These were the same leaders that later convinced us that we all had Giardia, and were going to have to make use of the butt plugs we’d been carrying around, until we opened the packaging and discovered they were concealed candy.
I’ve since had a few adventures with the angry girl with the curly hair, I live with the gangly kid, and my saliva-covered muscle-man turned out to be one of my best friends of freshman year. And I didn’t even have to call my mom once because the freak found his home.
Outline: Conflict: Apprehension of College.
1. I feel isolated
2. Surrounded by lameness
3. I am lame
Resolution: Lameness accepted universally.
No doubt LandSea provides ample ammunition for this assignment. The whole program is designed like a personal essay: characters, conflict, the turn, resolution.
ReplyDeleteBut this piece isn't about LandSea. It's about people, and I think you have too many people in here. With in the first few graphs we're introduced to all kinds of people: rich-boy, cake-boy, the jock. Later, more people, drool-guy, curly-hair-girl, coked out second-graders (how many second graders ahve you seen doing line) mobbing and ice gream truck, hot-leader, etc.
In a sense, you capture what it is like to meet all kinds of people those first days of college and that sort of relates to the conflict in your outline "Apprehension of College," but that's not what this about either.
You feel isolated yet are surrounded by lameness? Do you feel isolated because you do not think you are lame? Then you break the isolation by accepting your lameness?
Meh. What this is really about is first impressions and how wrong they are. You were a little, judgmental prick when you first showed up for LandSea (you sort of admitted that in your piece), yet it appears that most of your judgments were wrong.
Allow me to tell a story. When I first met everyone in my patrol on LandSea, I had already picked this kid I was not going to like. He wore Detroit Country Day (it's a private school on the east side of Michigan) sweatpants, which means he was rich, cocky, successful and would never have to work a day in life. I knew all this, from his sweatpants. We'd never be friends because I was a public-schooler from the west side of the state that had chickens, goats, sheep and used to shovel horse shit in the mornings. In short, I was better than him, I thought, but knew he'd be more popular than me.
Long story short, we weren't friends on LandSea, probably more like secret enemies. Then we lived right next to each other in Hoben. GREAT! *sarcastic* Then he became my best friend, and I mean best friend in the BFF context. Polar opposites.
So most of the time, we're wrong about first impressions, even though they are so important, or so they say.
Did this help?