old haunts

Graduate school has been very busy. I have been going to and planning barbeques, attending baseball games and getting sun burnt, catching up on nonacademic reading and relearning old skills like those used in Canasta. I would like to inform you that I have been busily engaged in scholarly pursuits but that is absolutely not the case. I am not ashamed that I have been spending my time playing cards with my mother and living off a liquid diet of snow cones, diet soda and the occasional Sam Adams Summer Ale. I have been doing a great deal of work, I really have but I have also had an inordinate amount of free time that has not been spent doing my real work: writing here.

One of the more fortunate aspects of graduate school, for me, is that I have turned to one of my old haunts – the college where I was an undergraduate – and with returning to my old haunt there are also old ghosts. Concordant to that is, this is also the most unfortunate parts of being in graduate school here – the old ghosts.

Certainly being granted an audience with Dr. Ashby was fantastic. Last weekend with my friend Amber was more excitement than I can normally bear and I am giddy to the point of being sick at the prospect of seeing my college debate partner this weekend. There are many old friends here that I am happy to see in person after relying exclusively on impersonal, electronic means of maintaining a friendship. I am not very good at keeping in contact with people, I feel as if I have nothing to say – which always ends up being a lie – but if I care I make the effort to at least accost you with a phone call, text message or email on occasion.

Many of these old ghosts remember me and I am in the unfortunate situation of not remembering who they are not having the class to solicit their name, I just say “hi” back and keep going. If they were important to me in the first place I would have remembered the person’s name and kept up with them. One such person encountered me in Wal Mart yesterday and I knew their name but could not be relied up to recount why I knew them or how, essentially I value attending the same college as another person as an icebreaker rather than the basis for a relationship, and I had no idea why I should know this person and kept trying to cut off the conversation and when all else failed I discarded all my breeding, training and maternal admonishment by simply walking away from the person who was speaking to me. Sarah Betrothed reminded me later, that I did indeed know the person talking to me and it was more by reputation than experience. After Sarah had jogged my memory that little bit I remember that I indeed remember that person and liked them not at all.

The other group of people that parallel this phenomena are people who I definitely do remember but where too cool to be seen with me as undergraduates, and now that they are also in graduate school and lonely I should somehow be thrilled to see them and waste time pretending as if we were friends now. Most of the time I act is if I simply do not know them because I figure that is much ruder than entertaining a conversation with them. When I am on campus I am too busy to take strolls down memory lane with people that were not worth mixing metaphors with before.

My college is populated by a very peculiar set of religious people who thrive on being judgmental and acting as if being in a relationship with them is some sort of privilege. I do not deny being judgmental, in fact I revel in the crapulence of my own hypocrisy but I do not camouflage myself with an aura of piety either. Oddly enough I do feel very privileged to have the friends that I do, but at the same time I do not waste my time with people who treat me as if they are giving me the charitable benefit of their society.

Comments

[Alex Vance]

That's cool that you still have friends from college. I don't think I even remember anybody's name from back then.

[Suburban Island]

I am glad you are having fun at BBQs and card games. That's what grad school should really be all about anyway. What flavor snow cones by the way?