One week and a few hours from tomorrow, I'll be sitting in a classroom as a full-time student for the first time in a decade. I'll be a graduate student in a journalism program that I failed out of in undergrad. When I began it those many years ago, I wasn't sure of anything except that I needed to get a social life, because I had spent high school watching Friday Night Videos, lusting after John Taylor, and writing horrible poetry. Therefore drinking grain punch out of a trashcan was a much more appealing option than, say, going to geology class.
I failed geology twice, the same number of times I failed economics. I didn't give a shit about economics, and really still don't, although I find the composition of the Earth much more interesting now. I switched to hearing and speech science, a shockingly difficult open admission major, after I failed out of the selective J-school, and after I declared elementary education, English, and secondary English education as majors for a day or two at a time. Once uncomfortably declared hearing and speech, I moved on to Ds in Introduction to Audiology and Speech Pathology III, and a bunch of low-rent Cs in my other major classes. I got an A in media law and all of my French classes, and a B in writing for mass media. I also got an A, because my life is steeped in irony and tragicomedy, in a three-credit health class called "Weight Control." The only thing I remember from that class is that the professor - who was actually a badass nutrition genius named Britt - was married to a man who spoke Spanish, and she alternated between regular and diet Coke when they went to the movies, because she though Aspartame was just as bad as sugar.
Thankfully my classes now will be just about the writing stuff, and there will be no science requirements. As Tallulah Bankhead is quoted (via my friend Erin...thanks, sugar), "I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education."
Nowadays, I drink my grain punch out of a wine glass, and it's called Cabernet. I no longer watch Friday Night Videos. And I also know myself to be a writer much more resolutely. This means I don't really need the degree, I guess, but in some ways I really do. And whether I need it or not, I want the focus, and the community, and the experience. Years ago, I traced my chronic sense of discontent with my life back as far as my third eye could see, and I landed on that day when I knew I'd finally pushed the school situation past its limit, effectively squashing the only plan I'd ever considered, which was to carve out a living with the only skill I had any faith in. I scraped my way out of college with a degree that fit me as well as a size 2 dress. (That is to say, not well - and not even in my dreams. I'd like to be an 8, actually.) Screwing up in school was the one thing I really regretted that I considered totally within my control. Still, as my twenties fell away and my thirties wended on, I talked myself out of rectifying it many times, for a series of reasons that seemed solid. Something happened this past winter, though. The reasons fell away, and for some reason it seemed like the one thing in my life that needed to be done right now. Right now, as in immediately right now, not the right now thrice removed that I've been known to talk myself into.
I applied to two programs, knowing I wouldn't get in, that I couldn't afford it, that it was a stupid idea so why was I even thinking about it? I got letters of recommendation that said things about me that I never dared imagine anyone would put on paper. I called in favors. I sent in application fees.
I got into both. One would have required moving to New York, something I really wanted to do, all of a sudden, although I knew that put the decision, literally, into a higher rent district. Another, closer to home, would keep some doors open and allow for an almost do-over that seemed apropos. I visited campuses. I started to believe that the acceptance letters had actually been addressed to me.
Scholarships appeared, first one, and then, after a little bit of legwork, the other.I kept making phone calls, and writing e-mails. Apparently I cared about this. My intuition and common sense went on several hot dates and finally got married. In the end, after a level of hysterical decision-making stress that I hadn't experienced in a while, I decided on the program that I'd been asked to leave almost 20 years ago. I started to think it could actually happen. I kept my safety nets, and then I started cutting cords, and leaving others comfortably intact.
It's the end of the summer, and I began this trip in the dead of winter, at the start of a new year. I have most of a book list. I have a parking permit. I have a room in a house. I got my roots done today so I don't look the 36 I don't feel either. I'm wondering how a woman who looks over her glasses at nineteen year olds and complains of chronic back pain will go over in a room of bright-eyed writers. I have a course schedule printed out that I keep looking at, because I get a kick out of the titles of my classes. I am going to ruin the curve.
I find that I'm occasionally smiling to myself, for no reason, and for the first time ever it has nothing to do with a man or the prospect of chocolate cake. I have a sense that this is the rightest thing I've done in a long time. I'm a little more than cautiously optimistic, and I don't know why. I'm just going to do this. It's quite that simple. And I'm honestly not waiting for the other shoe, because I have learned a few things in the past couple of decades, and one of them is that the damned thing drops whether you think about it ahead of time or not, so I'm just not going to.
The other day, a person who I must necessarily see on a regular basis for reasons beyond my control, whose sole purpose in life seems to be to randomly deflate other people, said, "Wow, better you than me. I just can't imagine putting myself back in that situation now. I have other things to focus on, like my SPIRITUALITY, and kids."
I didn't even care that she was applying her own experience to mine, as though the two intersected at all. I know she's unhappy and insecure, and she doesn't really know me, so like most shitty reactions to things that aren't the reactor's business, it isn't about me at all. Instead, I obnoxiously said, "I am so happy...so excited. I can't wait." She honestly didn't know what to do with that, and I kept on walking. Stun people with positivity, people. Go all Harry Potter on their asses. Wave your wand and yell, "HAPPYASSMUS!!!!" I recommend this especially much if you're like me and you suffer from the occasional Freak Outs of Negativity and Impending Doom, and that might be what people have come to expect. They won't know what to do with you.
I'm writing about all of this tonight because I just got a scholarship refund check in the mail. It is sizeable. It is a gift that I got just for being myself - for filling out an application and showing up for an interview. It's the thing I tell students to do, come true - "Put yourself out there. You never know. Someone might give you money. You should never have to pay to go to school." I've said this so many times over the past six years, never dreaming it would apply to me, as I career counseled others endlessly, not realizing the whole time that I was talking to myself more than any of them.
I've never gotten money like this for education before, money that wasn't owed back, or crushingly earned through a less-than-minimum-wage assistantship. Take THAT Dawn from Dayton, office manager from hell, circa 1994! I cried tonight, a few minutes after I opened the envelope with the check in it, when I sat down in front of this keyboard, seriously. One the one hand because I'm a big baby with spontaneous tear production disorder, but mostly because I'm happy.
This isn't money that I can go out and blow on a big steak dinner, although I might go for carne asada and a margarita given the right company. But it is going to allow me to breathe a little - to pay some lingering, looming bills, and buy some things that I need to get off to the right start in this program, equipmenty sort of things, things I thought were beyond my reach a week ago, that I wouldn't let myself look at because they just couldn't happen. I should probably pay the Federal government back for my dog, who I bought with student loan money twelve years ago, but I don't know where to send that itemized invoice. I just can't even say how random and wonderful this whole thing is seeming to me now, especially when it goes along with a big as in little "zero" balance on a tuition bill.
I guess when it takes you twenty years to figure something out - two decades of thinking about the missteps and the questions and the geology grades and the times you slept because you just couldn't deal with the questions - the universe figures it'll throw you some mad money. I'm going to really like spending it. It so hasn't been a free ride.
We saw it all on the news, but the people who lived there saw it in person. They still see it in person, if they've managed to come back or never left in the first place. It's a place where the two elements have always lived uneasily close together, but not in a bad way until the earth lost its grip. All of the rebuilding efforts are really an effort to shore it up so it doesn't collapse again.
It's strange to read about instability in a place that's so solid in so many ways that can't always be seen. The hands that went up in the air at JazzFest were powerful. It's a culture and a place that's always existed in obvious acknowledgement of the relationship between earth and water. This will never change. 
Today I remember images I'll never forget, of people clinging to earth while the water tried to carry them away. Helicopters. Roofs of shanty houses. Black marks on buildings. Old, dark faces, left to rot outside a physical symbol of our nation's obsession with sport and millions of dollars that go in the wrong direction.
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