Phthursday Musings: Redoing College

Last week’s installment of Musings was read and commented upon by many more people than any previous week’s. This is largely from sharing on a Facebook group with a lot of fellow alumni; many of whom strongly connected with the content; which led to the post getting boosted by the algorithms; which caused more alumni to see it; which caused more people to strongly connect… It’s fascinating to see a personal application of the algorithms.

Some of the responses, and in turn some conversations with closer friends, got me to thinking about the college experience itself, with thoughts wandering off to how I might have done things differently. But I don’t want to think narrowly about the past. I also want to think about applications for the present, and potentially to my son’s future.

The guidelines I’m trying to follow for this thought exercise:

• Nothing prior to the first day of college is different

• Nothing which would be totally antithetical to my current life

• To the extent possible, not focusing on things specific to where I went, but rather to college broadly

A brief background on what college was for me: In 1994, at age 17, I showed up at Illinois Wesleyan University. I graduated in four years with a double major in History and Political Science, with my very unofficial “third major” having been my time on the staff at our college radio station, WESN. I lived on campus all four years.

What might I have done differently?

First, I absolutely would have done some kind of study abroad. Maybe for a whole semester, maybe for May Term (IWU has a 3-week “term” in May where you take one class, three hours a day; many people have used this for some kind of condensed study abroad.)

I was afraid of spending a semester away. I thought I’d be “left behind”, would come back to peers which had moved on without me. So I never seriously considered it, not even for May. This was a big mistake.

I want to say I would have taken many different classes, but the list is too long. Sociology? A minor in a foreign language? But there were a finite number of slots, and I was double majoring.

What I would have done is I would have sought out more varied non-class academic things going on around me. Lectures, presentations, whatever. It’s not like there wasn’t a lot of down time, especially early on. I would have tried to get a lot more up front exposure to help me figure out what other classes to squeeze in. I didn’t do hardly any of this.

I probably wouldn’t have taken an Art or Music class, but I would have gone to showings or performances. I would have been much more experiential than I was. I think I was so enamored by the idea of living on my own that I spent way too much time in my room or in the dorm back lounge. There were a lot of other things going on around me, all the time, and I could have taken a lot more in.

I would have gone to school sporting events. Not a lot, but, some.

My thinking back then went like this: In my small high school, we all knew everyone. You go to a football or volleyball or basketball game, the people on the team are your friends - maybe not all your best friends, but still, they’re friends.

In college? I didn’t know these people. Even at a relatively small school, the athletes were almost total unknowns to us. I reasoned that they were mostly in fraternities and sororities and not my scene. And since I didn’t know them, and since I also thought our Division III school just wasn’t interesting in that respect, I didn’t see any reason to attend. If I wanted to watch college basketball, I’d just turn on ESPN.

I think this was all short-sighted. Much in the same way that art was not my thing, but I look back and wish I would have gone to showings, IWU soccer or baseball were not my thing, but I wish I would have gone to games.

In 2020 before the pandemic took hold, my sister and I took our boys to a couple of men’s basketball games at UIC. The year before we went to a Northwestern game. The reality is, I love the competition, and getting a taste of the personality of a team makes it all the better. We’ll go back next year, I expect. And we’ll go to professional soccer - both men and women. And we’ll go to baseball. And maybe I’ll even take the boy to the local high school’s soccer games.

I would have been well served by taking games in when I was in college, and not having a small chip on my shoulder about it all.

I would have had more business cards printed.

I would have eaten better.

I mean this in two respects. I was, relatively speaking, tall and thin, and my metabolism allowed me to get away with eating like crap. This was dumb. I would have eaten healthier.

The other thing though is that I would have gotten outside of my damn comfort zone. Yes, the college cafeteria was no great shakes. But there were still things to try, not just there but at other times as well. It wasn’t until grad school that I went to a real Mexican place. It wasn’t until grad school that I ate Chinese food. And I’m not talking about complicated things here. I was a ridiculous eater when I was young, but there was so little reason to maintain like that when I was in college.

It is perhaps here as much as anywhere where I can really look back and say how sheltered I continued to allow myself to be. And while there may be something to be said for safety or whatnot, by the time I graduated, I was definitely breaking out of that mentality, and yet I still would eat a hamburger for dinner most nights.

Admittedly I’m not a whole lot better today. But at least today it’s more about being a creature of habit, and not about refusing to try things. It’s true, I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch roughly five days a week, just like when I was 7. But I’d absolutely go for aloo matar or a bánh mì or falafel first. And I would have benefited so much had I wisened up to this when I was 19.

One the one hand, thinking through the above, a lot of it is in that no shit realm. I may as well add that I would have been a better person, I would have brushed my teeth more often, blah blah blah.

But a lot of what I’m musing upon here are the things I would have differently but which bore a distinct resemblance in form to some of the things I might have done the same.

I was a college radio Music Director, with all of the silly baggage that comes with that, but that also meant that I was listening to damn near everything back then. Yeah, I was indie rock guy, but I was listening at least some to rap and country and electronica and deth metal too. I was a sponge for music, and I really do think that the key word there isn’t music, it’s sponge. I was unnecessarily limiting myself.

What I’ve tried to avoid here is dwelling upon certain poor decisions, or, perhaps, certain poor defaults. If I had it to do all over again, I would not have gone to grad school when and how I did. But it’s hard for me to think back and know how I might necessarily have put myself on a different path. I just assumed I was going to grad school, and kind of bumbled my way to applying to places based largely on who was going to be writing my letters of recommendation. I didn’t have the answers, and I didn’t even understand the questions. I literally did not know that it was okay to take a year off before grad school, so I never remotely considered what I might do with, say, a travel year.

I think about this sort of stuff today for a couple of reasons. I was a first generation college student. My parents didn’t know all of this shit. Oh, my dad understood the importance of being future focused, but he hadn’t had the opportunity I had. He tried to help me get on a proper track as best as he could. Today, I’m more able to help my own son get on a proper track. I owe that to both of them.

There is also this: I am not going to stop learning.

In the comments to last week’s post, I mentioned going a couple of years ago to the Art Institute to see the László Moholy-Nagy exhibit. Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian artist and photographer and a key member of the Bauhaus school and movement in Weimar Germany, and when he left Germany for America, he wound up in Chicago where he founded the School of Design. He’s a fascinating man. Bauhaus is fascinating to me. It would have been tremendous to have seen this exhibit and then the next day been in a classroom to discuss it. I wish I could walk into a classroom tomorrow and discuss it.

This week I finished the book Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-75, which bills itself as “the first survey of the classic twentieth-century houses that defined American Midwestern modernism”, which would have meant absolutely nothing to me in college. And yet what occurs to me is that as a young child I spent hours in what was absolutely a temple to mid-century American modernist architecture: my grandparents’ Kishwaukee Coin Laundry, a building surrounded on two sides by huge pane glass windows, and painted on the inside like every day was Easter. My god, to find someone else who might readily understand such a realization, and be able to discuss such a thing in an academic environment.

The thing is that, pandemic aside, there’s almost never occasion to sit down and talk through anything like this. I’m a novice at understanding something like modern design, but I’m a willing student. And this is just one realm that fascinates me. Highway engineering. Preserving languages on the brink of extinction. Advanced statistical analysis in baseball. Secondary education. I traditionally get so little of this. But so much of this, and so much else, was readily availabe in college, and I was hungry then too, and I had much more capacity than I would acknowledge. Not studying abroad was a manifestation of fear. Were not some of these other things merely lesser manifestations of fear? College was the time that fear could be shoved aside, and when I did so, it benefited me tremendously. Oh, if I only could have done more of it.

But, see, I still can.

I don’t know exactly what form it might take, but if we let the discussion that ensued from last week’s post wither away into nothing, it will be a real tragedy. Either through opening new connections or rediscovering old ones, I am hopeful that at least a germ of an idea came out of that, and will further come out of this.

I’m prone to big sweeping ideas that others might be able to embrace but where no actual plan reaches fruition. I may as well be writing about how everyone should have a good job!

But I do want something more, even something small, to emerge from this. A book circle. A weird showing from people who weren’t Art majors but who found 20 years later that they just had to create and don’t know what to do with the impulse. A meetup after a 5K of alumni who never would have dreamed of running a 5K back in college. Partners in that elusive business concept that I keep being told I should come up with. I mean, shit, let’s just get dinner when we finally can. (No hamburgers, please.)

My mom informs my thinking on this, in two ways. She is never satisfied with what she knows, and she gives voice to that kind of thinking. I am never satisfied either, but without the right framework for thinking about it, I’m not sure I’d be as driven by the meta-idea of constant growth. The other way is indirect, almost backwards. She makes the argument that as we grow older, we become more of who we are. I don’t think she’s wrong, exactly, but there’s also a part of me which refuses to accept the notion. I don’t see myself as a trigonometric function tending toward a limit of some fixed point. I won’t be so ridiculous as to suggest that my limit is infinity. Rather, I’ll be just ridiculous enough to suggest that I think my function keeps changing, at least a little. (This paragraph may be as meta as META-SPIEL gets.)

Anyway, it’s nearing the end of Phthursday, I’m a day after Pfizer #1, and I spent an hour this evening throwing pop-ups to 7 year olds. I may be reaching a state of delirium writing. Next week, perhaps, we’ll return to fare like bird poop.