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Anonymous Friend writes:
"I hit a car the other day. It wasn't bad, just some paint transfer. I also almost hit another car last night. I feel like the worst driver in the world, not to mention the biggest idiot that's ever walked the planet.
". . . I'm scared about college. I hope I pick the right one and the right major and get enough money so that I won't be in debt 'till I'm 50. I'm scared that the outcome of my life depends on a few choices that I have to make while I'm only 17 or 18 years old. Can I just crawl back to my childhood and run in the sprinkler and get my feet muddy again?
"I'm generally a negative person. I determine my self-worth by my academic performance and compliments other people give me. I wish I was stronger."
Instantly, my monitor-frazzled eyeballs fired an urgent signal to my fingers, already poised on home row (read: asdfjkl;) for an Olympic round of keyboard gymnastics. Here I was, suspended inside a stagnant Friday afternoon as if time were a wobbling ring of Jello, ready to melt into a red-fluid night of liquid hours dripping by at an indefinite velocity, rolling blindly into another morning, another day slowly solidifying into another mold of Jello. Pause this. Here I am, congealing in my gelatinously ephemeral relaxation, while my friend and myriad others are stuck in insecurities thick and heavy as concrete. I respond:
"While my helpfulness in regard to most of these is severely limited (ex: My driving is comparable to a 3-year old's coloring. I can't stay inside the lines.), I do want to share some thoughts about college, which seems to be approaching like a concrete wall to a careening motor vehicle. Oops, let's not talk about my last driving lesson.
"Here's the surprise: It doesn't matter. College isn't a road. It's a field of corn. No matter which direction you start in, you can always end up somewhere completely unexpected, as long as you are willing to plow through a lot of corn.
"More than ever before in your life, you'll have the opportunity to explore. Meet strange and delightful people. Join suspicious clubs. Travel the world. Be Magellan. Die in the Philippines.
"And if you're like the average student, you'll end up changing your major 2-3 times. So you might as well pick culinary arts and feminist studies now, because we all know those are your consuming interests.
"A wise and wizened mystic once told me that grades are structured violence. Meaning, to judge the value of a student by numbers alone is a tragically limited basis for education. Toward the end of my high school career, I realized that the best way to learn was to ignore our school's system of quantifying effort and progress with percentages and rankings. Instead, I worked as hard as I thought I deserved, and I worked until I felt like I learned something worth remembering.
"My advice, in short: Determine your academic performance by your self-worth, and not vice-versa.
"Have a great year."
And the truth is, I needed to write this as much as my friend needed to read it.
August 10 2008, 02:29:56 UTC 3 years ago
I'm going into my senior year of high school and find myself perpetually in a state of overwhelmed confusion that probably needs no explanation to you. Reading this was just what I needed. I need "College isn't a road. It's a field of corn." emblazoned in three-foot letters on a poster in my room for the next time I want to burn my college brochures and give up entirely.
So thank you.
August 10 2008, 04:02:02 UTC 3 years ago
Thank you. Thank you for proving that the silent screams of UPDATE JOURNAL running through my head at the weirdest, most inconvenient hours are actually directing me toward that which I've always wanted to do. That is, achieve Internet fame. No, wait. I mean, help others.
But seriously, I'm unbelievably glad to have written something that resonates with you! That's at least one step above actually being comprehensible.
Despite the overwhelming deluge of COLLEGECOLLEGECOLLEGE, I hope you can derive some sort of excitement from the exploration process. The more I think about it, the more it seems like a well-prepared tasting menu rather than a giant stress buffet (theoretically, at least). The best thing to do is to enjoy the presentations and simply meditate on the things that really define you, that can shine through the grittiest and most exhausting of application procedures. For one, I think you have a fantastic blog (just from a glance, albeit a long one).
I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I never finished Gödel, Escher, Bach after attending a stunning lecture last summer, but I'm currently and wonderfully entrenched in Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop . Have you read it, by chance? It's crushing my former opinion on free will into a fine, useless powder . . . in a good way, of course.
August 10 2008, 20:12:42 UTC 3 years ago
I have in fact read Strange Loop, but I think I'll have to read it again because I think I went at it expecting something like GEB-- which it wasn't at all. So I felt a little let down, because I adored the breadth and depth and sheer exhilarating complexity of GEB and felt Strange Loop to be rather thin and flimsy in comparison. But of course, it's a different book.
Which is a lot of superfluous words for this: I didn't like it as much as GEB, but I intend to give it another shot at pleasing me. Incidentally, I suspect it's good to have your opinions pulverized every once in a while. Else how would you build sandcastles?
August 11 2008, 05:52:51 UTC 3 years ago