The radio people love to ask provocative questions.
This time, they asked if people could go back to college, would they? And what would they do differently?
The answers generally fell into 2 categories:
1) Party more.
2) Party less.
So, what about me? Would I go back?
My immediate thought was “Hell no!”
Not because college wasn’t awesome. My god, it was! I never missed a class. Nor a party. I made friends with the greatest people EVER. Had a radio show (this impressed my daugther; I left out that it was from 2am to 6am!), wrote poetry for the campus lit magazine, challenged myself with Math, Programming (yikes!), Black History, and Death Penalty classes, luxuriated in Hemingway, Faulkner, and Shakespeare, Got a C is Human Sexuality (double yikes!), learned to write, learned to think, hung out with professors in their offices and living rooms, got drunk, got laid (take that, sex class!), fell in love a couple times, flew a bike off a ramp into a lake, did art, Saw the Violent Femmes, saw Digable Planets, did the midnight waffles, lived in the dorms, got an apartment, laughed my ass off, stayed up late wondering about the world…
(Sheesh, I haven’t reflected on that in a while…)
It was all good. Like ALLLLLLL good.
But I wouldn’t want to go back.
I suppose “back” is the keyword there. Going back would be more like finding a place to hide.
I’m still in discovery mode.
I’m still in figure shit out mode.
Besides, I’ve seen the trails behind me; I’ve read the lines in the trees.
Put another way, “Been there, done that, bruh.”
It makes me happy to not want to go back.
Not regretting my past is kind of a celebration of who I am now.
And even though I’m not always good, and life pretty much isn’t good these days, I don’t want to go back.
Feels nice to say that; like I did things right. Right for me.
I don’t need a do-over. I’m proud of my path.
I’m the guy who drove a bike into a lake. I’m the guy who drank a fifth of Jack on a fire escape with the girl he loved. I’m the guy who made his writing teacher beam with pride. I’m the guy who tried Math and then switched to English. I’m the guy who argued with professors over the details of Shakespearean sex scenes. I’m the guy who graduated scared shitless of what was next.
And I’m the guy who kept walking into those big blank spaces, one foot in front of the other, making his own dotted line from Boston to LA to San Francisco to Oakland, into love, deep into love, into fatherhood, into entrpreneurship, into a home with a 50-foot inflatable waterslide and a karaoke lounge in the basement.
I’m that guy. And he’s a pretty cool dude.
College — just like kickball, little yellow school buses, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches — got me to where I am now.
Thank you, college. You did me right. But I’m good.
I’m me.