Fitting In

Discovering your place in university life is hard. The internet makes it harder.

Whether you move hundreds of miles from home or simply go to the local community college; life at college is change. Assuming you just go to a local community college the difference in rigor is apparent from day one. You get syllabi and you are told the grading scheme and how calculations of grades will be made. (So suddenly math is important.) There are deadlines. Usually, if you misread the assignment or fail to get your work done you fail. Accountability comes as a shock to many, many people when they leave high school. There are no safety nets.

Take it to the next level and add in the move away from your established support system relocating to a distant residential college brings and things get even more challenging. Support system is a bit of a misnomer. In reality there are two systems you are moving away from. First, you leave whatever is your extant family structure. You say goodbye to Mom, and/or Dad, siblings, cousins or whatever familial universe you have been made part of for those first 17 or 18 years of your life. Whatever hand on shoulder, eye gazing into eye, or voice tone guidance that was open to you 24/7 is now no longer a there for you to seek out.

Secondly the social hierarchy you have lived at secondary school no matter how Lord of the Flies-esque it might have been is also changed. I initially used the word gone instead of changed, but changed and fading is probably the better term. Going “away” to college means you are alone among new people who don't have the same life experiences. These are people who haven't come to a common lexicon of humor with you. They most likely have encountered occurrences and values from an environment vastly if not totally different from your own. At a point in your life when you have the greatest doubts about who you are and what capabilities you have you are sent out to a place where everyone is trying to define themselves in a manner that does not leave them one down in the pecking order.

It is hard. It is damn hard. The first night in that dorm room bed is probably the worst for most people when the thought keeps resounding, “What have I gotten myself into?” It may come a week or two later but in those initial days you mostly likely will ask yourself, is this the right choice?

Trying to peel back the haze of my move from New Jersey to Michigan, rose colored hue that it now is, fall 1974 was a cold lonely time for a skinny kid with an attitude. At that point there was no e-mail and Facebook did not exist when the blue LTD pulled away I was alone with a footlocker that contained my possessions, all the possessions I would have access to for the next three months. The only connection between Salem County New Jersey and the Michigan State Universe was a Bell telephone line. And if you were going to make that call you did it late evening or Sunday when the rates were down all day.

Michigan, (a place I had been two twice in my life in mid summer mind you) was a big state with lots of open space and cold winds that came early. So long ago was that first fall with its early snow and a blizzard on Thanksgiving weekend it predated the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald by a year. The people were different-way more laid back. To a hyper squirrel from New Jersey I just couldn't understand their sense of time, at all.. Michiganders had different words for common things, sack for bag and pop for soda. They even made vowel sounds differently then. The only culturally common touch-points were movies and music. And even those were so startlingly different. Who was Bob Seger I would ask and they would respond with who is Bruce Springsteen?

By mid-October I had sent requests out to schools all over the south east seeking applications. I so wanted to go some location that was warn and where if needed I could get a Tastykake. I was so lonely I hitchhiked back one weekend and caught rides back on two other occasions. My roommate was a great guy and he drug me out of my room to see the movies that would show on campus. My classes were okay, nothing too scary. But it was all so different and I felt all so all alone. Ah and my first real girlfriend, she lived in Philadelphia.

With winter's onslaught I found a friend, a female friend. I found contemporaries who challenged my mind. I found a professor who cared and suddenly I could live with what was in the footlocker. The snow sucked but there was oases of wonder that served hot mulled wine and clam chowder.

I probably should thank the divine that the demon's span, the internet, was not available. Personally I think the internet has totally fucked up the minds of this entire generation especially the young ones who have never lived without it. Constant connectivity is a beast that never sleeps, that has a siren song of bells and whistles and false accolades for accomplishment in meaningless games. It distorts the terms of what it means to be a good human and gives the bully pulpit or maybe a megaphone to the outliers. It takes singularities and makes them seem the norm.

What I had to fill my life was class, the dorm, bad cafeteria food, books, newspapers, on campus concerts and lectures followed by sleep. Okay maybe there was the occasionally masturbation in the shower if nobody was around.

Today's students when faced with a move to a different world have the Internet's rabbit hole to dive down into. Their old friends with their old values still kinda live on there at least for a time. A point will hopefully come with the current life mutes the past for most. Those bells and whistles which when sounded by the right strokes of the ctrl and cursor keys release some endorphin are an addiction. The step out of the room into the new world to see if you can face it is made ever harder by electronic tendrils of the past.

In the past two days I have seen two different pieces of entertainment that implied time is the measure of reality. One asserted it is the defining unit of measurement of the infinite and unknowable. I am not sure of that. What I do not is that time connected in the real world at university with the allure of the internet is something necessary to integrating into campus. Hell is it something needed for us to integrate into life.