Straight No Chaser

Pee

for some reason krystle feels the need to tell the world every time she's about to urinate. she just raced by me yelling "i'm going to pee!" marcus, on the other end of my phone, sighed heavily and then laughed. "never a dull moment over there, huh?" he said. guess he's right.

but it's been a bad day. all my friends hate college, apparently. pretty much without exception. this is not the way it's supposed to be; for exactly eighteen and a half years all i ever heard was how wonderful college would be and how adult i would feel, what joy extended knowledge would bring and how easy it would be to enamor/secure/fall in love with whatever upwardly mobile male i chose. and that was just from my mom. the rest of the world took more of a "this is an absolute necessity" stance: if i didn't go to college i'd spend the rest of my life struggling to make ends meet; i'd forget everything i'd ever learned about indefinite integrals and comma placement; i'd be wasting an entire county's eighteen-year-investment in my intellectual edification. so of course it would be a blast, because i'd be doing the right thing, and what fun that always is!

i'm pretty sure everyone else heard some variant of those exact same things. and you know, maybe that's part of the problem, that we came in with these unrealistic expectations of finally self-actualizing through academic and social euphoria, because none of us are, and it's killing me to see it. tina feels underappreciated in a job that should be building her confidence right along with her journalistic skills. sean can't figure out how to access the resources that would make him feel like more than a political zombie who has to pretend he's not still in mourning over his mother. krystle cries for hours every sunday because she'd rather be baking cookies with her family than lazing around in the absolute ugliest dorm on campus.

and me: i cry myself to sleep pretty much every night. i thought i'd be excited about or at least relatively good at this peer tutoring thing, and have instead turned out to be too impatient to do anything but completely rewrite every paper that's set before me. i talk so much in some classes that i've been commentially blacklisted by two professors, and so little in others that on the last day i get an incredulous "what's your name again? are you in this class?" when i got to pick up my final exam. i always think i have just a little more literary insight than i actually do, and routinely make myself look like an ass in front of people whose opinions i care about. i get bitchslapped with all the literary magazine gruntwork, and don't complain because i still believe this might actually be my one chance to prove high school was a fluke and that i actually can successfully ed-in-chief without catastrophe. i'm cofounder of a slapdash publication that i hate only slightly more than i hate the other founders. i attend on-campus lectures and events with no rhyme or reason, choosing them because they fall in line with my schedule rather than because i actually care about the subject matter, and so end up leaving an naacp meeting twenty minutes early to catch the beginning of the apprentice. i register for classes at the last possible second and am known in the student accounts office as the "skinny, one-day-late girl." i host workshops that are supposed to teach students about documentation but secretly know absolutely nothing about mla format, except that it's indecipherable. i use too many semicolons and way too many adverbs, and am unapologetic until i encounter the one professor who actually might not encourage my bullshitting. i get consistently good grades for the first time in at least seven years and still feel stupid every time i walk into a classroom.

and also: i am secretly jealous of all my friends for some reason or another. i never want to be in my room unless krystle's there too, and i resent her for going out when i have to stay in. i look at sean and treesje with disgust but sometimes think i'd actually give up every good decision i ever made for the feeling of being wanted. i refuse to be warm to guys because i can't stop believing they'll only like me for as long as they don't really know me. i hide everything. i go on dangerous solo adventures, because i yearn to be chased after. i hate pretty girls, couples and happy people in general, even as they're smiling in my face and reassuring me that i could be like them too. i worry about things that will happen anyway, and put all my chips into the one person who can make me feel how truly worthless my chips are.

in short, this is bullshit. i want to go home. i won't, of course. but i want to.