What They Don't Tell You About College

What they don't tell you about college is that it smells awful in the dorms. None of the pamphlets prepared me for the stench of genitals wafting through the hallways every morning, or the way your pillow always manages to smell like feet no matter how often you wash it. It might have been nice to be prepared for the fact that people apparently don't find it in their hearts to remove their own wads of public hair from the shower drains, or that sometimes the janitors just ignore it for weeks on end. But maybe that's just me.

What they don't tell you about college is that no matter how much you hated wherever you lived before, you're going to miss it at some point. For me, the word "hate" is too mild. Public school was not kind to me; I was bullied consistently from the time I was 8 on through my high school graduation, and being smart didn't get very far socially, even with the smart kids. My town was four hours away from any substantial city, and was encased in a valley in the Rocky Mountains, so feeling like you were caught in an empty fish bowl wasn't far off from the truth. It rarely rained, the foliage was sparse and usually parasitic, and the summers were so dry your hands looked like they were covered in flesh-colored scales. But it was familiar, and familiarity is few and far between 1000 miles from where you grew up.

What they don't tell you about college is that it's nothing like what you'd expected, but you can't imagine a better way to spend the first four years of your adulthood. About halfway through my first semester, as a freshman, I seriously considered dropping out and getting a service industry job to pay the bills while I penned the next great American novel. That first semester I was taking all core classes, and I had a grand total of one friend who was only really my friend because neither of us had met anyone else yet, and I couldn't remember ever feeling more completely alone. But for all the genital stench, all the unexpected homesickness, and all the grandiose expectations of my fabulous college life, I can honestly say that college has made me a better person. I am no longer that angry, deeply wounded kid who left Colorado with a chip on her shoulder and an empty glass. I am now an angry, on-the-mend young adult who stays out until 4am to go for a walk with someone she barely knows, washes dishes for two hours to film a silly cooking video with her roommates, and writes slam poetry about peeing standing up and being an angry, on-the-mend young adult. And honestly, who could ask for anything more out of their college experience?

Blog #3: My First Kiss and the subsequent cliches therein

He wasn't going to do it. My dad was picking me up any minutes, the darkened windows of Barnes and Nobles leered from behind us, we'd been out here alone for two hours, and he wasn't going to do it. From beyond the windows I imagined the protagonists from all my favorite books rolling their black-and-white eyes. Right. Before my brain got in the way, I spoke up.

"Mike. Look up." I commanded, in a tone I hoped wasn't as aggressive as it probably was. His head was bent, looking down at the sliver of concrete between us, the bookstore looking on impassively.

He did look up, but turned his face away from me, curiously gazing across the street, away from the impatient audience beyond the glass panes.

"No, Mike." I breathed, trying not to let my exasperation- hardly a romantic emotion- show. "Look at me."

Slowly, as if he knew what was coming, my fifteen-year-old boyfriend rotated his whole body back in my direction. As soon as the path to his face was clear, I initiated what I've since named the "kiss attack" strategy. I scrunched my eyes closed comically, mentally calculated the direction I needed to move, and shoved my face forward, hoping to God he didn't move his mug.

I don't remember how long it was, just that the panic slowly ebbed away to relief. The first kiss. It was over.

What I do remember was that it was soft, unlike the spines of the books lined up neatly past where our faces were mashed together awkwardly. I had braces and he looked like Sid the Sloth, and his mouth was soft. The taste, if there was one, didn't make an impression, and all I could smell was cold cement and Mike's own dissipating fear, but the one thing that I know without a shadow of a doubt was that it
was
soft.
And that Alanna the Lioness, cackling from the pages of her many volumes inside the store, would have been so damn proud.


...I'm not sure I succeeded; there weren't a lot of concrete options to choose from for this particular scene.

Blog #2: Little (Big) Lie

I don't remember ever lying to my parents before high school. I mean, I'm sure I did, but it was never about big stuff, or about stuff that was statistically significant to my memory, apparently. But I lied to my teachers a lot in middle school, because I was used to being given free reign over my education from elementary school (they were really good about challenging "gifted" students, a category I fell into for a good portion of my childhood) and middle school was throwing off my groove.

And that's why I found myself, still flinchy about swear words at 13, handing Mr. Baker a forged note to get me out of SNT. He glanced at it, glanced up at me, and I literally felt my hands shaking and my upper lip beginning to perspire. As he studied the curves of the fake signature my forearm twitched, as if it wanted to snatch the note back and apologize and never do anything so stupid again. I wasn't used to rebellion. This was too much. I had to-

"Ok. Go on." He nodded at me but kept the note and went back to grading papers.

I-I got away with it? AWESOME! As I walked away from the classroom, I mentally gave a passionate middle finger to the SNT class growing smaller and smaller behind me.

SNT was "Student Needs Time", or basically study hall in which you were graded on your apparent effort. Doing homework (or, really, writing anything for 45 minutes, even if it was just the word "fuck" over and over again because no teacher ever actually checked) got you an A for the day, reading a book got you a B, and on and on down the line. I never had stuff to do during SNT because I often finished homework during class, and I always had a book to read because I was such a fast worker and needed something to do with the approx. two hours of waiting around I did per day for the rest of the class to finish up. SNT was not my friend, and I was not giving up my 4.0 for a glorified study hall class.

Next bit of context: At the time, I was in a class called "Production Tech." I honestly have no idea what the actual purpose of that class was, since I spent most of it in the computer lab, blogging on my new website. I think we were supposed to be filming and editing the morning video announcements, which weren't as daily as they were meant to be, as I remember. A kid named Keenan, who was friends with some new friends of mine, was in charge of editing said not-so-daily daily videos, in a cramped little black room with archaic analog editing machines. Sometimes, when editing didn't get finished during production tech, which it often didn't because of how long it took with the editing machines from the 1700s, Keenan and whoever else was involved in that day's episode could get a note excusing them from SNT to finish up.

Further (and final) context: Production tech was "taught" by a rather detatched teacher named Ms. Greb, who never monitored the editing room, during class, SNT, or otherwise. In fact, I don't remember a single occasion when she set foot in the room at all. She wasn't detached enough to sign any note we wanted her to, though, but luckily her signature, which we had several copies of, was easy to forge.

So for the rest of the year, unless I actually had homework to do, I'd forge myself a note and hang out in the editing room, reading.

There wasn't much sensory detail in that, but it's the earliest lie I can remember. Looking back, that was the nerdiest bit of rebellion ever. I forged notes from my teacher not to smoke, or get high, or whatever else kids forge notes for, but to read in peace without my SNT grade suffering. Pathetic. I don't think I have to analyze that any further because this anecdote pretty much speaks for itself. I AM A NERD.

Blog #1: A Study in Swing Sets

It's hard to chronologically sort memories from before you were old enough to know what "chronologically" meant. It's even harder when you aren't in school and don't have those handy grades to keep the dates straight in your mind. But if I were to venture a guess, I'd say my earliest memory was when I was two or three years old, in a Seattle preschool. I don't remember the preschool itself, really. I remember there being rows of tiny desks and a basket of oranges, but both of those details could have been completely reconstructed from reading about kids going to preschool later on. What I actually remember is this: a tire swing in front of a small wooden building surrounded by giant trees, connected to society by only a long, isolated road. I also remember swinging on that tire swing set, waiting for my mom to pick me up. But mostly it's just that image of a tire swing, gently rocking in the wind of the Pacific Northwest, in the middle of a dense copse of trees, in front of a little preschool.

As for the rest of the questions, there isn't really much of this memory to call creative non-fiction, but I don't think I'd have a problem with that label. I asked my mom, and she admits that there was a tire swing in front of my first preschool, so that much was true, although she's not sure where the "stranded in the forest" part came from. Either way, the important part of the memory, the swing set, was true, and that's good enough for me.

To a point, I agree with Joan Didion that "if you remember it, it's true." If the detail in question isn't an important factor in the point of a memory, and it just serves to better remark upon you as the rememberer (apparently that's not a word.... whatever), then sure, it's true. Obviously, making up a car accident or the death of a relative is pretty important in the shaping of a story, and at that point I wouldn't consider it non-fiction, creative or not. But in class some people didn't like that one author grouped three friends into one person for the purposes of her story and to lessen the "real-world" impact on the people mentioned, and I disagree with them. I don't think that was such a big deal, for two reasons.
1. The story isn't about her friends, it's about her. It doesn't matter who else is going through this as long as it doesn't change the circumstances of the story for the person the story is meant to be about.
2. I can empathize with the author not wanting to implicate or hurt her friends more than she has to. As a blogger, I've had to change names or sometimes even leave chunks of stories out in order to protect the people who make appearances in said stories. Telling the truth is important, but if it's at the expense of all your friends and family, then is absolute, total truth worth it? We don't all have the freedom of Frank McCourt had, waiting for his mother to die before publishing his story.

ICJ: Early memory of the death of an animal

Hello! Although this is not technically a prompt meant to be put on the blog, I thought I'd use this platform to collect all the writings I do throughout the semester in one place online. Unless things become a bit too personal with the in-class-journal (ICJ), which I can't really imagine, I'll be posting all the writing I do for creative nonfiction here on this blog. You're welcome. (har. har.)

I don't exactly remember why we got chickens in the first place. Whenever we'd stop by the feed store to pick up goat good in the springtime, we would always play with the baby chicks in their warm, well lit cardboard boxes, but our yard wasn't really a farm yard.

One year, on Easter, however, we bought two. One, a tiny half-dead rooster I called Easter (fitting, I know) and one strong, healthy hen my brother named Twister, for his favorite movie.

We'd only had them for a year or two when I woke up one cold December morning and found a somber dad and brother at the kitchen table. Apparently, that morning, they'd found pieces of the two animals strewn around the backyard. Twister's carcass they eventually found- all we had left of Easter were large clumps of feathers. He'd put up more of a fight, it seemed. I cried for a good hour, assuming correctly that the murderer was one of those bastard stray cats, tearing down from my walls anything even remotely feline. Granted, there wasn't much, aside from a fake award for "Most Motivated" with a grinning clip art kitty at the top, but I tore it down anyways. Then I took to my journal and drew a graphic illustration of myself murdering said murderer cat.

(That's when Prof. Johnson told us to stop writing. If I'd had more time, maybe I would have talked about how even though Easter looked half-dead as a chick, he grew up to be an adorable little man, with pale yellow and jet black feathers puffing him up like the proud rooster he was. I could have also talked about how his feet, instead of being stick-like and scaly, were covered with those same feathers, making it look like he was constantly wearing a pair of flamboyant flared pants. Maybe I might have mentioned how I could pick him up with one hand and carry him about the yard with me as I did my chores, or how Twister would drink wads of spit off the sidewalk and crickets we threw in her direction, or how Easter used to pick fights with the goats and refused to back down until human intervention, or how even after they died I spread chicken seed around their old house in mourning. Or maybe I wouldn't have mentioned any of that. Who knows.)