{"id":2269,"date":"2016-01-11T13:52:31","date_gmt":"2016-01-11T21:52:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2269"},"modified":"2016-01-11T13:52:31","modified_gmt":"2016-01-11T21:52:31","slug":"flashback-part-73-of-n","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2269","title":{"rendered":"flashback, part 73 of n"},"content":{"rendered":"

Start here<\/a> to see how the summer before went down. \u00a0Then click here<\/a> to see what happened the first week.<\/p>\n

The school itself is colloquially known as \u201cthe Hilltop\u201d, or in some circles \u201cHilltop High.\u201d The colors are black and gold and the alma mater is a word-for-word crib of Vanderbilt\u2019s except for the school name. \u00a0If you look at a campus map now, you\u2019ll see a lot of things that simply didn\u2019t exist then. The fraternity row was where the Lakeview dorms are now (there were no Lakeview dorms or even a lake, just a swampy patch of woods by the intramural fields). There was no bell tower in the academic quad. There was no swanky “fitness and recreation center,\u201d just the old gynmasium. No softball park, no athletics complex, no football field – no football team at all since 1939. In fact, go to that map on the website, draw a line across it about a quarter of the way down, and everything above it didn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

As far as I can tell, actually, the ensuing two decades have seen the construction of maybe one new academic building. A whole new fraternity row, multiple athletic facilities (oh irony), a couple of new dorms, sure\u2026but that\u2019s about it. Much has been made elsewhere of the country-clubbing of higher education; you\u2019ve got to have plush dorms and a lazy river in the rec center and the right sort of frozen yogurt in the food court – and a food court, for that matter, no cafeteria. And it certainly looks like they\u2019re doing their best to stay on trend.<\/p>\n

But in the fall of 1990, it was the cafeteria three meals a day (paid for by individual punch rather than any sort of debit) the Campus Store atop the dorm quad for cheap pizza that might have been better with the cardboard left under the crust, and whatever additional exercise you didn\u2019t get from hills and stairs had to come from whatever was in that old gym – some weights, maybe a machine or a treadmill, and a lot of stuff that hadn\u2019t budged since the building opened in the 1940s. There weren\u2019t even phones in every room – you had to contract with South Central Bell to get a phone in your room, and a central PBX and four- or five-digit dialing for dorms was a few years away. No internet access. No networking to speak of. DOS-based computers in labs in two or three different buildings. And an on-campus population of maybe a thousand or twelve hundred at most.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s the setting: a fairly sparse array of campus amusements, a town whose entertainment potential I\u2019d mined out in high school, and a fairly unambiguous statement of\u00a0you don\u2019t belong here.<\/em>\u00a0And my solution was\u2026to latch on like an imprinting duckling to the first girl who showed interest. Which I did. And it was a\u00a0huge<\/em>\u00a0mistake, because I had tendrils to other people who were slowly building their own thing, but the girl to whom I\u2019d tethered myself basically wanted every moment of my free time and every particle of my attention, and – hold the shock, please – I was afraid to risk the devil I knew in the face of the devil I didn\u2019t. And so I let these other people go by the boards over the course of that first semester because I was betting everything on this one girl who had kind of sort of provided me with a nugget of validation.<\/p>\n

Big mistake.\u00a0Huge<\/em>\u00a0mistake. Life-altering mistake.<\/p>\n

Because what I didn\u2019t realize is that there was a group for everything<\/em>. If you weren\u2019t in one of the frats, if you weren\u2019t in a sorority, if you weren\u2019t a theater major or a baseball player or a foreign student or living off campus, there was a loose-knit amorphous sort of clique for you and the rest of the losers. You had to really really<\/em> like Star Trek and Blackadder and be willing to speak in extensive strings of Monty Python quotes\u2026and to my immense chagrin, I realized that I wasn\u2019t really this guy<\/a> either. Here I was, whole entire personality defined by needing somewhere and something to belong to, and the music had stopped and not only were there no chairs left, there weren\u2019t any<\/em> chairs at all<\/em> and all the players were gone.<\/p>\n

Only three years and eight months to go until graduation.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

to be continued…<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Start here to see how the summer before went down. \u00a0Then click here to see what happened the first week. The school itself is colloquially known as \u201cthe Hilltop\u201d, or in some circles \u201cHilltop High.\u201d The colors are black and gold and the alma mater is a word-for-word crib of Vanderbilt\u2019s except for the school … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “flashback, part 73 of n”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2269"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}