March 20, 2018:
It was the right environment in which, for me, to get woke.
It was the wrong environment in which, for me, to go to school.
Not just wrong. Disastrously wrong.
There were things I was interested in but was not allowed to access. It was like Tantalus in Tartarus: you can reach for it but it can't be yours. You literally faced a literal two years of bullshit before you could begin accessing the good stuff. I was frantic with frustration.
It was just too big. My English Literature class had six hundred people in a lecture auditorium. Can you ask questions? Of course not. Can you follow up when something interests you? Of course not. The mechanism was all about distance. The Professor Shall Not Be Made Available. I have no memory of my T.A. at all.
It was too regimented. We were all expected to proceed at an identical pace. What I confronted then without having realized it previously is that I read college-level texts extremely slowly. I have to parse them and mull them and rinse and repeat. But the class is expected to move on.
It was simply too fast. I'm not going to learn 150 French vocabulary words in one week. You can't even get into the language lab, it's too crowded.
The whole place was too fucking crowded. I didn't notice it when I worked in the little collectives. It was inescapable in the big lecture stadiums.
I felt isolated. My campus friends by this point were either grad students or had graduated and gone. People I'd known in high school were there but I'd emphatically moved on.
I was deep inside my first wave of age-related congenital depression and I was deeply confused.
There were no visible alternatives. I thought, This is what college is, meaning, all colleges. It was a nightmare.
But there were two good things. Between them they shaped the future of my life.
The art teacher gave me Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years. I've frequently discussed here how that was a life-changing event.
The lovely blonde rebel teen Kelly gave me the Johnston College catalog. I've frequently discussed here how that was a life-changing event.
God bless good things.