Remember all your grand notions from
high school…Your hopes, your dreams, your fantasies about going out and
changing the world. Gather them up…toss
them out the window. Watch their colors fly as they fall…fall…fall…
SPLAT! On the pavement below.
Attend lectures. Take notes until your hand hurts. Focus so hard that you forget you are not a
robot sent there to take over the world if you could just understand what the
socially awkward man in the white coat and nerd glasses is saying.
Struggle.
Fight.
Fail.
Ask for help.
Get reminded that “this isn’t high
school anymore.” Smile. Thank him for his time.
In your
mind, dump the rotten-egg concoction that your lab partner made last week on
his head.
Remember that you’re not a robot.
Join a club to make friends. Pay the new member fee and attend a few
meetings. Realize these people aren’t your kind of people. Abandon club.
Go home to
stay sane. Smile as you tell your family how wonderful college is. Keep smiling as your mom pressures you about
being a spinster and remind her that you are only eighteen. Go back to college.
Get a
boyfriend. Learn to juggle school, work, and the new boyfriend with what you
like to pretend is your social life. Break up three months later.
Start your
education over a year and a half in.
Remember what you used to like to do and find a major similar to
that. Break the news to your
mother…Heave a sigh as she laments how she will have to change her dreams of
having a doctor in the family. Hope that she gets over it sooner rather than
later.
Date the
same boy for the second time. Learn to juggle school, work, and the
new/ex-boyfriend with your social life. Break up three months later.
Attend
lectures. Read books. Take notes until your hand hurts. Focus so hard on the subtext that you forget
that sometimes the damn curtains are just
blue.
Write until you feel like all your creativity has been sucked out
through your fingertips. Excel. Brag to
your mother. Wish she could forget that whole doctor thing already. Remind her
that you are only twenty-one and not a spinster.
Get a
boyfriend. Learn to juggle school, work, and the new boyfriend with what
remains of your social life. Break up three months later.
Ditch your
social life for a second major, a minor, and a promotion. Weigh your blossoming
work career against the one you’ve spent four years paying for. Imagine you can
combine them into one totally awesome wedding gown sewing grammatically
challenged small town English teacher.
Fall in
love.
Prove to your mother that you are not a spinster. Explain that there is a natural order of events in life and grandchildren are at the end of it. Remind her that she wants you to graduate from college and get married first so you do not move back in with her for the third time and burden her with a blossoming premarital family.
Finally...Go back to
the street full of fallen colors. Reclaim what you had thought was lost
forever. Enjoy what you do. Let it break you down so you can learn from
it and mold yourself into the best teacher you can be. Gather all your
knowledge and experience, hopes and dreams for the future…hold them close…toss
them out before you…watch their colors fly as you let them fall…fall…fall on
the heads of those who need your guidance most.
