Being a hermit isn't working!

[garote]

Dammit. The gods are doing it again. They're laughing at me. They must be. Of course it's all in how you see it. This is the way I choose to see it. It's the gods, and they really Don't Like My Tie(tm).

I'm trying to avoid dating and romance. It's poisoned the last three months of my academic life, and filled my head with chaos. I'm Captain Ahab and the sea is hormones, but I can't get that harpoon into the white whale of sanity. You dig?

So I wander into the lounge next to my 8:00am math class. Five minutes 'till class, what the heck. Oh look, free coffee. This is good because I'm running on three hours of sleep. Ah hah.

Napkins, for the coffee. PHNOOOOT. I blow my nose. What's this? A piano. Clang, bang, zap boogey. No one is around so I don't feel embarrassed. Okay. Math class.

The teacher completely loses me 45 minutes in, and I never recover despite copious notes. He also spends an extra 5 minutes getting himself lost, trying to explain one more thing, but the chalkboard just gets hairier, so I have to mince steps to get across campus in time. I'm halfway to CS-101 when I spot Lisa, the stocky athletic blonde with the piercing dark eyes, from Merrill. I trot up to her and ask if she remembers me. She does, though it's been a good six weeks. "How are classes going?" Et cetera. We chat as we walk up the hill towards Merrill.

Uh oh. You just TEMPTED FATE! You're supposed to be a hermit now, remember? One bit of socializing always runs into another. It always escalates. Too late I realize this. She waves to Ken, who is tromping down the hill at us in his flappy green trenchcoat, with a bag stuffed under one arm. He smiles and sticks out a fistful of gummi-worms. "Worm?" he inquires.

"Certainly!" I take one.

We chat and he announces to me that the Rocky Horror Show dress rehearsal is at 6:00pm on Saturday in the Baobob Lounge. Another guy approaches, whom I recognize from the Beth's birthday party. Looks sorta like James Belushi. Let me think... Kenny, right? Yep, that's him. We confirm that we just came from the same inane math class. He shakes his head. "That guy. He's supposed to be teaching us. It was going alright and then he just pushed the whole class into a mineshaft."

Well now, a quaint party of four! Wait, who's that? I see Eszter walking down the hill in the distance. NO. DON'T DO IT. STOP BEING SOCIABLE. Oh, come on, brain! It's Eszter! You could no more turn her away than you could turn down a chocolate sundae on a solid gold plate! I wave.

She smiles and walks up. We say hello and exchange brief updates about our academic progress. I tell her of my probation. She pats me on the shoulder reassuringly. "You'll survive. You're smart," she says.

I smile awkwardly. My brain is turning around and around like a goat stuck in a closet. I gesture to Ken's fist. "Have a worm!" I say.

"Oops," says Ken. He is already slurping the last one into his mouth.

The group parts, and I walk with Ken, since he is going back down the hill. He confides in me that he is worried for Jen, who failed her classes again this quarter. The prospects don't sound good for her. Jen is wickedly smart, tall and commanding with eyes like searchlights, and also locked into a complicated and ugly battle with depression. I have not met very many people who straight-up frighten me the way Jen does. "I wish I could help," I say to Ken. "I honestly have no idea where to start."

We chat a bit more before I make a left turn to get back on track towards CS-101. Well. What the hell was that all about, I think. I just had conversations with four people I'm supposed to be ignoring. I need to work! Further along I wave hello to Richard and Noreini. Well hell, there's two more. I am just not gonna do it, huh. I can't turn this switch off.

I get to CS-101 and there are barely enough places to sit. The teacher manages somehow to make set theory and basic linked-list implementation impossible to understand, which is no easy feat. I consider myself lucky that I'm taking this material a second time. Then Sarah walks in late.

Oh no, not Sarah. God damn she is gorgeous. It's like you look at her and you hear this sound effect: WHONK. That's your brain seizing up. You need to shut everything down and try again. Okay, now don't look over at... WHONK.

Class goes on. The instructor makes a hash of linked lists. (That's a pun for you programmer types.) I tap my fingers in compound time to keep occupied, and think sideways thoughts about computer scientists and personality types. The guy next to me, who looks like a cave-dwelling UNIX guru, taps his fingers the same way I do. Hmmm.

The teacher admits that he loves Java, and a third of the class smiles dreamily, while another third grumbles ominously and makes threatening hand gestures. Hardcore. My kind of people. Hilarious that the old guy - the teacher - is all smiley about a new-fangled language, while us young guys are scoffing and leering at it. Welcome to the CS department, man.

So that fiasco ends and I shoulder my stuff. I stand around for about, oh, six seconds, HAH! TEMPTING FATE AGAIN, and Sarah walks by.

"See ya!" she says, waving and grinning. I fall into step behind her and go "Hey, don't just disappear like that!" She giggles. Ugh I am such a nuisance. We blab on the way to the bus stop and I learn a little more about her. The bus arrives but it's packed like a sardine can, and Sarah says "Ugh, I'm just gonna walk", so we shake hands and I dive into the black squishy mass on wheels.

Slug-like, the bus inches across campus, coughing out students only to devour even more. I exit, blow air through my sinuses a few times, and tromp up to Merrill, to print out my rather explicit letter of appeal for the board of directors. I buy a print card and churn it out, and head over to the department office only to find it locked. The secretary leans out and says to come back at 1:00pm, about an hour. So I wander up towards the dining commons ... and run into Phaedra.

Shit, this campus is too small. I really want to hug her very thoroughly hello but shake her hand instead. She tells me more about Jen's predicament and we both express concern. She walks into the dining commons, and I think about how food would be good about now, so I wander aimlessly to the taqueria. And here we are: Jen is sitting at a table near the wall.

I notice the letters and papers on her table. Wanting to somehow share in the pain of probation, I give her my explicit printout to read, though I know it's a bit dangerous since she's apt to recognize half the events described in it. "Pretty hair-raising, eh?" I remark.

"Actually, reading this, most people would consider you a very lucky man." She regards me cooly over the top of her glasses and passes the printout back.

"Certainly," I reply, "until you get that big letter in the mail proclaiming what a bastard you are."

She shrugs. I shrug.

There's nothing to do for a half hour, and she doesn't want to deal with her paperwork, so we sit and watch the Paw-Paw Bears on the TV bolted over the kitchen. I can hear the dialtone in my head. Finally, a break.

Five minutes to 1:00 and the credits roll, so I get up and make my goodbyes. The department office is still locked, so I stand around a bit. I lean up on the shaded windows and look across the room to the doors on the other side. There's someone there, also waiting to get in. Wow, she's short and athletically rounded and has a short pixie haircut, and ... oh for fuck's sake. It's Eszter again.

I walk around to the other side of the building so we can wait together. We have some idle chat. She seems glad to see me, or at least, not annoyed. I'm encouraged by that. Perhaps we can really talk? I'm just about to work up to some questions that matter when the door opens and we dash for it. We part ways at my counselor's door. Finally some business.

I show him my appeal and he laughs. "Is this true?" he says.

"Every bit of it," I tell him. "I know that it's standard practice to grant an appeal for anyone who writes a letter of explanation, so since there's no pressure I figured I'd give them something really honest."

We talk a bit more and he pledges to show the paper to the committee. I feel relieved.

I'm outside the door heading down to the van when I have to suppress this very strong urge to bust out laughing as hard as I can. It's just too much, too silly. I keep a straight face -- don't want to give the counselor the wrong impression, if he's looking out the window.

How am I ever going to get my head on straight? I mean, I came here for the degree, yes, but I know I also came here to be with this subset of people, and experience life with them. "The college experience," people would say, often sarcastically, like it's a pathetic indulgence for posh middle-class shitheads. I can't really deal with that perception right now. Mainly I'm asking myself, "what am I trying to learn?"

I know it's something. There's some knowledge that feels really important, but it's buried in all this other stuff. In the minds of all these people. But if I fail my classes I can't be here.

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

Kind of sad. But it's from a remote past, right?

[garote]

Yep. 20 years ago. Safe to say that back then, I didn't realize how absurd my behavior was.

[zeugma92]

Among the many great gifts of being 41, is the fact that my entire being no longer short-circuits in the presence of a beautiful woman.

[zeugma92]

Also for what it's worth, I envied you back then for having these experiences at what seemed like the right time in life to do so. I locked myself into a monogamous relationship way, way too early to accommodate my own desires, and when the relationship finally collapsed, I ended up having a wild year or so much like your UCSC time. That was my early 30s, which seems to me the latest possible time you can be constantly social and semi-promiscuous without people looking at you sideways too much. Even then, it was borderline unseemly and occasionally I realized that good friends were discounting my bad behavior until I got it out of my system!

[garote]

Personally, I look back at this time and think, "Wow, not only was I kind of a womanizing idiot, but I was aware of it and didn't care." My view becomes less charitable with every passing year. At the same time I'm also sad that I didn't write up more of it, so that I could pull it together now into something with a real through-line, because it nicely encapsulates how weirdly naive and insular and self-important that college experience is, without outright mocking it.

There are a few entries near this one that I'll be backfilling tonight (since everyone is now way too old to care, thank goodness*) and in one of them I talk about how envious I was of your stable, intimate relationship with Torrey, and how I tried to use it as a roadmap. You both were very welcoming and helpful to me during a time where I was basically rummaging around for my identity like a raccoon in a kitchen.

(*Nevertheless I excised the portion of this writeup that was nothing but a ham-handed blow-by-blow description of some really awkward, unskilled, and unhygienic sex. That can just stay in the trash can.)

[zeugma92]

Oh yeah, there were definitely huge advantages to what I had at that time, the late 90s, and it was indeed enviable. Our relationship was amazing for years but then it took a very bad turn and we never fully recovered. Which is only clear in retrospect. For a lot of that time I just wished I had given myself a chance to play the field because I knew I would have chosen someone much more compatible (for the rest of my life) in my mid-twenties than I had done in my late teens. As indeed I eventually did. But you know -- you stick with it, until you absolutely just cannot do it any longer. I took the commitment seriously.

[garote]

That's about the size of it, yep.

[zeugma92]

On that last note of yours -- I have been considering editing my own journals in a similar way to what you've been doing here, and the detailed descriptions of sex throughout them are a thing I've been specifically pondering. For sure nobody but me wants to read those passages. I want to because they remind me of what it was like to be with that person, and the emotions I was having, including lust or the lack of it. To anyone else, such passages are just gross or upsetting. I don't want to totally delete or destroy them just yet though, so I'm not sure what to do. Perhaps collect them in an encrypted file somewhere for now.

[garote]

Yeah, it loses that whole slice-of-life aspect if you need to plant a big signpost in the middle saying "And now, dear reader, let's duly acknowledge that we are all Persons Of The World, and this graphic and weirdly mechanically obsessive account is here because young men are very sensory in their memories..."

I bet, though, that you could choose some of those interludes and make them really work, by reconstructing the experience beneath them. I think there's something to the idea that getting physically intimate with a person reveals important things about who they are emotionally, and young men can actually pursue that. If I had better writing chops I might have tried to tackle that in the part I left out above...