{"id":1621,"date":"2012-09-18T14:36:53","date_gmt":"2012-09-18T22:36:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=1621"},"modified":"2012-09-18T14:36:58","modified_gmt":"2012-09-18T22:36:58","slug":"the-search-for-time-lost-last-friday-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=1621","title":{"rendered":"The search for time lost: last Friday night"},"content":{"rendered":"

(NB: Everything posted under these four “The search for time lost” posts was composed in real time as noted.)<\/em><\/p>\n

15 years. Let’s try to put that in some kind of perspective.<\/p>\n

The amount of time since I last set foot on campus, in 2006, is twice as long as the entire time I was here as a student. Put another way: a quarter of my life ago I’d already been gone almost twice as long as I was here. I’m standing on a bridge over 21st Ave. that would’ve simplified my life if it had existed then.<\/p>\n

As best I can calculate I’ve been back on campus maybe four times since graduation. Without fail, it’s always a Christmas or some other holiday or sometime when there are no students around and the whole place is dead. When it’s like that, it’s easy to imagine this is the set of a movie that I saw once and was very emotionally involved in. But now, it’s the eve of the game. The campus is full, students are buzzing, and I’m standing out on Peabody Esplanade in front of the building that used to have the computer lab where I first started to really learn the Mac.<\/p>\n

As soon as I walk past Payne, though, I realized this is not the same place. The munchie mart has been replaced with what I can only assume is the Commons cafeteria. And my car is parked across the street from where my car would’ve been parked 15 years ago, but where my apartment used to be there currently repose half a dozen new freshman dormitories. I remember standing under this very same sky on this very same lawn, wondering what was going to become of me, wondering where my life was headed, wondering if I had any future at all. Somehow, I got pulled through some fourth dimensional hole that deposited me in a science fiction future, 15 years later. And I’m dictating what I say – what I write – into something in my hand the size of a pack of cigarettes which interprets every word and gets the text about 95% accurate.<\/p>\n

Somebody else went to school. Somebody else was a university graduate fellow. Somebody else walked these lawns, took these classes, tried to live this collegiate life. He’s been gone for 15 years now and he doesn’t exist anymore. I just pay my taxes in his name.<\/p>\n

I’ve come back to Vanderbilt as a veritable sidewalk alumnus. My connections to the school, to this institution, to this life<\/em> are more tenuous and different than anyone else’s I know here. The name, and the team, and the colors, and the general sense of what this place means are the anchor to which I attempted to tie myself when the old life collapsed beneath me.<\/p>\n

18 years ago this autumn, this felt like a place that was always home from day one. That was<\/em> true. It really was. But it was somebody else’s home. And this weekend, I’m just a guest of the people who moved in after him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(NB: Everything posted under these four “The search for time lost” posts was composed in real time as noted.) 15 years. Let’s try to put that in some kind of perspective. The amount of time since I last set foot on campus, in 2006, is twice as long as the entire time I was here … <\/p>\n

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