{"id":2580,"date":"2018-03-19T09:37:20","date_gmt":"2018-03-19T17:37:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2580"},"modified":"2018-03-19T09:37:20","modified_gmt":"2018-03-19T17:37:20","slug":"flashback-part-93-of-n","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2580","title":{"rendered":"Flashback, part 93 of n"},"content":{"rendered":"
Spring of 1995 was my second term at Vanderbilt. I squeaked out of the first semester with a 3.25 GPA, not realizing that a B in grad school is like a D- anywhere else, and then promptly struggled with some poor choices. The only course I clearly remember taking was one on Pragmatism in the philosophy department with the legend John Lachs, which I finished with an incomplete. Which was a nuclear alarm red flag, except I wasn\u2019t clued in enough to realize it.\u00a0<\/div>\n
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I remember hay fever, worse than I\u2019d ever experienced, so bad that the drugs they gave me for it induced an actual blackout. I went to drop off a paper at 4 PM and woke up on my apartment floor the next morning with no idea what happened in between. I remember walking past the library in the morning and feeling like I was going to school on the back nine at Augusta. I remember wondering how exactly I was going to deal with not having internet access when I got home, given that my only connection was via a Geoport Telecom Adapter and an Apple Remote Access dialup to a campus number.\u00a0<\/div>\n
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I remember happy hour out on the front patio at a now-defunct Hillsboro Village sports bar, wearing my glasses and a button-up shirt, holding a Manhattan in a rocks glass, and one of my colleagues telling me that I looked like someone who didn\u2019t have to prove anything. Which became more or less my life\u2019s aspiration from that moment forward and shaped me ever since. Not only the look of nothing to prove, not only the fact<\/em> of nothing to prove, but the additional bonus of having a peer group \u00a0to join out on the deck at happy hour on a sunny spring afternoon.<\/div>\n
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But something else shaped me that spring. I remember hearing the Cranberries\u2019 \u201cOde To My Family\u201d driving down the back side of campus one warm spring night, and hearing Springsteen\u2019s \u201cThunder Road\u201d for the first time, and seeing that the campus cinema was going to show The Graduate<\/em> as the last film of the year, in keeping with tradition. And I distinctly recall wishing I\u2019d had that tradition the year before. And then wishing I\u2019d had any tradition at all in undergrad. And then…<\/div>\n
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If I had to pin down an exact moment when I saw the black hole open up behind me, that would be it. A realization that I might have made a huge mistake thinking that grad school would launder my college experience, and that I wasn\u2019t ever going to be able to make up for what I missed. I\u2019d had fleeting bits of that the week before I graduated from my undergrad, but they\u2019d been washed away in the euphoria of actually marching and knowing Vanderbilt was on the way. This time, though, in the spring of \u201995, I began to realize that somehow I\u2019d managed to throw away my shot, that college had already happened for me and wasn\u2019t going to happen again.<\/div>\n
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And I tried to make up the difference instead of moving on to the next thing – and it would take over twenty years for me to let it go. And that\u2019s been the biggest breakthrough of the last six months. Partly because age 46 is too old to still be tearing up at \u201cI Wish I Could Go Back To College\u201d when you\u2019re old enough to be sending a kid off that way, partly because I managed to create some of the same things out of a patchwork of Nashville and DC, and partly because I\u2019ve managed to wall myself away at work and stop letting myself be constantly reminded that I could have been on a different path that led me to a better version of where I am now.<\/div>\n
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I wasted most of the 1990s. Of which more later. But if there\u2019s a lesson I finally learned, it\u2019s don\u2019t waste now<\/em>.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spring of 1995 was my second term at Vanderbilt. I squeaked out of the first semester with a 3.25 GPA, not realizing that a B in grad school is like a D- anywhere else, and then promptly struggled with some poor choices. The only course I clearly remember taking was one on Pragmatism in the … <\/p>\n

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