Transferring Lives

I just read in the Guardian, one of the many student newspapers on campus at UCSD, an article detailing the findings of a study concerning transfer students and their assimilation to the college culture. The claim was made that they could if they just tried harder. The other point they made was that transfer students have less interaction with faculty. Again, if they just tried harder, they would interact with faculty more.

Bullshit.

If a student transfers from a community college, there are several reasons for doing so. Just a few of which are these:

1. The student did not have the money to go straight to a four year university
2. The student did not have the grades to go straight to a four year university
3. The student did not plan to go to a four year university

For me it was #1. I did not plan on going to a four year university because of my financial situation. I understood my route to a real university was through the community college system. For the last two years of high school I did not participate in the usual frenzy that surrounded college applications and their eventual acceptance or denial. The joy and anguish of waiting by the mailbox for either the little envelope notifying you that your hopes had all been for not or that large one telling you that your life was starting anew, never passed over me.

For the most part, I was pretty blasé about the entire situation. It seemed, at the time, as if I had less pressure on my shoulders. Had I been given the opportunity, I like to think I would have worked my ass off, gone to college tours and applied frantically to as many universities as I could. Not having that chance however, I can’t be positive I would have. My one regret in life though, centers on that very situation.

In another life, in another place, perhaps I would have partaken in that high school experience. If my family had enough money to spend driving around to the different schools, setting up meetings with matriculation counselors and doing what generally people do in those situations. Comic and life changing hijinks may have ensued on every one of those trips, but I wouldn’t know. The thought of working so hard for great grades that would get you into the finest schools and have them pay your way sounds now like something I should have done. Instead I had decent, if not very respectable grades (somewhere in the mid3’s, perhaps 3.3 or 3.4), nothing spectacular. I wish I could go back and tell myself to quit sports at an earlier age, or at least focus more on academic endeavors instead. I regret that everyday. No, really.

Attending UCSD only seems to have solidified that regret. Day in and day out I see fresh faced freshmen as they wander around campus seemingly free from any real responsibility. Sure they attend classes and hopefully pass them, but other than that, they seem for the most part lacking in accountability. The experience to them is not centered around their classes. For them they live in dorms, have study groups, parties in their rooms. They are encouraged rather vehemently to attend on campus activities after hours. They wander the malls of a city new to them in search of what would look great in their dorm room. They are thrust into a situation knowing few people at hand and forced to make new friends, new lives. Some do not adapt as well as others and do not have that trying yet wonderful experience. But for the most part, the majority of students seem to live a life of ease. Their freshman year they are walked through school and given every opportunity to get by. Leniency is granted although it may sound as if those granting it do not wish to.

By their sophomore year, they have made friendships that will last throughout their time at school and perhaps father into life. They have chosen roommates for off-campus housing and have a social network in which they can operate, often times as if nothing has changed since the first year of being together. They are no more adult than they were just one year before, but carry with them an air of being so because they feel more at home, more prepared than those incoming freshmen whose upcoming experience they may quietly envy. Come junior year, just two years from graduation, they’ve got it together and have settled into their social groove. Sure they will continue to make friends, but not at the rate and often the profundity of which they did those first two developing years.

Maybe it was that I dated Gina when she first went off to UC Riverside that I feel stuck between the two camps of transfer students with not comprehension of real college life and those entering freshmen naïve of the world presenting itself. She lived in the dorms and I visited frequently. It turned out to be too frequent and because of that, I ended up taking what amounted to a year off of school. But the one thing it showed me was the world of possibilities afforded the new freshmen. Life in the dorms was similar to how it is portrayed in movies and television, but it has a distinct quality about it that makes it seem so much more real to you. I went up there so regularly that people at the dorms knew me. I stayed the night repeatedly, occasionally several, that it came to the point that I felt I was almost the one enrolled.

Being from San Diego, Riverside was a new town to me. It may have been only a hundred miles away, but it could have been twenty times that for all I knew. Visiting as frequently as I did gave me the chance to explore the city for what it was. Discovering places to eat around the campus, shopping in a grocery store different from the one I went to for ten years prior. These experiences all seemed so wonderful, so full of life, that I wanted so bad for it to be me living them. No matter what the activity, be it going to a movie theater, making out in the back seat of a car, stumbling into Denny’s at three in the morning, it was different from the same experiences in my hometown. Working was never something I heard of when it came to freshmen. They had their living quarters paid for, they ate at the dining hall and some had allowances given to them by their parents. Time not spent in class could be spent sleeping, relaxing and generally enjoying college life.

Her following year, she and three other people from her dorm decided to get an apartment just off campus. Being only 19 and never having moved (outside of when I was 3), moving Gina in felt as if I too were. It was as if I was suddenly living a life not my own, in a place I had never been before. But I knew that it was not mine to live. The parties thrown throughout the complex and the frat and sorority life she partook in were far from what I did when I left for my home.

There it was working part time and going to a community college. A college devoid of social life; of real human interaction. There, the friends you made were more often acquaintances you had from high school that perhaps you hadn’t befriended very well back then. There were no dorms so therefore you were not forced to make new friends. In addition to that, a good ten to twenty percent of your classmates were well into their twenties, if not older. What kind of social interaction can you have as an 18 year old with a 35 year old mother of three who immediately after class has to pick up her baby from daycare and swing by the soccer practice to coach? Student activities are laughable on most community college campuses. The fact that they try to have events is almost pathetic and I personally believe those putting them on felt the same.

The toughest part, I truly and honestly believe, was the fact that I worked over thirty hours a week in addition to school. Instead of being able to enjoy my limited college life, my time off was spent at work. The blessing in disguise of where I found employment was that great deals of my co-workers were in the same community college boat I was. We formed a fraternity of sorts, in fact we even referred to it as such, through which we would hang out and go to parties. It was however, nothing remotely like it was just a hundred miles north for Gina. She worked for a total of two weeks at Mervyn’s before quitting in order to spend more time enriching her college experience. It was not like she was spoiled, though one may say she was, but she did not have the added pressure of making ends meet.

Now that I have transferred to UCSD, I am presented with a new world all to myself. It is that world I vicariously lived just a few years ago, but it is so vastly different from what I had experienced in those formative first two years of school. The school did not seem to care about my experiences, they did not offer any support to me in the area of academia. I was expected, naturally since I had already been in college, to perform as if I had already been going to UCSD for two years. I was expected to know the campus, to know the process for everything and to generally have my wits about me. In a way, the transfer process seems to be a sink or swim trial by fire. Either you grab hold of everything and run with it as best you can, or you fall behind and are perennially screwed.

Due in part to my family’s financial situation, I have to work in addition to going to school. By work I mean work 40 hours in addition to the 35 to 45 a week I spend on school and the assignments given. When asked by a professor of mine this quarter what time outside of class would be good for me to attend a demonstration, I had to tell her that there as no time. If I was not in class, I was at work and if I was not at work, I was in class. She said she did not understand which makes me think it’s not a popular thing this 40 hour work week. Regardless, I must make ends meet and go to school. It is not a situation I enjoy or even admire, but it is my own. It is my college experience.

When I read in the newspaper that transfer students were less likely to be involved in student activities and be less engaged with the faculty, I thought to myself “no shit.” Was that really a surprise to the survey? Was it to the newspaper? Is it to anyone? They spend at least two years working at a school that offers them next to nothing in the form of social culture, only to be thrust into a situation teeming with it. They are expected to make friends with people who have more than likely formed the bulk of their clique by the time they transfer over when they have even less exposure to them than they would have two years prior. It’s not for lack of effort on our part; it’s for lack of time. With everything we have to do, we must pick and choose what we take part in, who we spend time with and what we do on campus. Add to that a lot of transfer students generally do not live close to the campus and commuting becomes an issue of time. Throw in the fact that most of them also work off campus, they probably spend as much time driving to and from school and work as they do attending class.

At least I do.

What else I do is regret every day what I had done. There are saving graces and silver linings to every situation. As much as I would like to change the situation so that at least I had the opportunity to live that prototypical college life, I can’t. I have resigned myself to that fact and will forever regret it. I will not regret my current situation however, because for the most part I am happy. To be clichéd, you have to learn from your mistakes. My atonement will be giving my kids the chance I didn’t have.

Just a few questions

What would happen if Bill Clinton brought false evidence and testimony to Congress to put our troops in harm’s way?

What would happen if Bill Clinton was in office when it came out that officials very high up in the administration had leaked the name of a covert CIA operative to discredit an editorial?

What would happen if Bill Clinton had sent Madeleine Albright to the U.N. with sketches of mobile chemical weapons plants that turned out to be patently false?

What would happen if Bill Clinton came out and attacked the Republican Party for “politicizing” a war?

What would happen if Bill Clinton had been in office when his administration pushed through billion dollar no-bid contracts to his former employers?

What would happen if Bill Clinton had gone to a congressional hearing and refused to be put under oath?

What would happen if Bill Clinton said he would only go to said hearing if he were to receive the questions they wanted to ask in advance?

What would happen if Bill Clinton had been President when it came out that the intelligence given to the Congress was hand picked for the items that best suited his goals and not included the several, and more importantly, correct dissenting opinions in an effort to show the intelligence was unilaterally thought of?

What would happen if Bill Clinton flew onto an air craft carrier to declare that major combat operations had ended in a war that by all accounts was just beginning?

What would happen if Bill Clinton gave speeches with lie after lie and continued to do so for years in spite of the fact that he was already proven wrong?

What would happen if Bill Clinton had snubbed his nose at the rest of our allies in a show of disdain and pompousness?

What would happen if Bill Clinton were the President when it came out that U.S. forces used chemical weapons on civilians?

What would happen if Bill Clinton’s administration authorized and threatened to veto laws banning torture of prisoners?

Now replace Bill Clinton with Al Gore and re-read.

Whiteness

The blue screen of death that is so identifying of Windows is one universally known. When you see it, you know your computer is fucked. Odds are, you’ll call more than a few people before you’re able to avoid getting that blue hammer slammed down on you long enough to fix the problem. The good part about it though, is that when encountered, it can be solved. The Mac users have their own variation called the pinwheel of death that I have experienced for over twenty hours in an editing booth. Unlike the blue screen of death, you actually think that if you let it go long enough it will finish what you started by clicking that damned “Print to video” option. It never finishes though, and you’re stuck starting up the ole beast again.

The blank screen of death is worse. It’s what I call the blank, white, empty screen that automatically pops up when you load Word. Or Sophocles. Or Movie Magic Screenwriter. Or Word Perfect. It’s a punch to the stomach of creativity. If you don’t plow through that first page, the expansive white that seems to grow in spite of every key stroke saps every ounce of inspiration you carry into the project. There it sits, below your flickering cursor. Ever present; never decreasing. No matter how much you write, it’s always there.

It exists between the letters. Inside the loops of o’s and the domes of e’s. It’s above your sentences, below them, in the margins. It surrounds your work. Choking the life out of it. It seems that despite everything you do, it is out to stop you from finishing what you started. It seems to make your fingers heavy. The lifting and pounding of the fingers starts to become a task comparable to breaking the Gordian Knot. The only way you can is to hack your way through with darting clacks of digits hitting keys.

Fighting through the white with the Automatic black of your Times New Roman twelve point font is just as difficult, and often more so, as slashing through the hanging vines in a South American jungle. Looking for the completion of the story is really just the path you take to destroy the negative space that the screen keeps throwing up at you. It’s almost as if the program is designed to block you from you mission by putting that empty space up like a poor man’s roadblock. The only way to get through is to pound your way.

Every time you get through though there are more car on fire, blocking the road. You can see the end. It draws nearer with every keystroke. You’ve already written it in your head, but you can’t bring yourself to put it to paper without the rational for it. That rational is the struggle in place between the letters and the space. The story sometimes because secondary to finishing the project. Sometimes, you just start writing anything to get to where you want to go. It may make as much sense as something really nonsensical, but it puts enough black on the page to justify the insertion of the ending.

The expansive whiteness never leaves you. It is omnipresent. It follows you as you type. It reminds you of its presence as you erase it with your serifs and punctuation. The bitch about it though, is that when you finally get to the bottom of the page and think you’re done, your last word is just long enough to require a new line. That one lonely letter pushes your paragraph into the next page and boom! An entire page of white staring you down again. Your pride takes over and the cycle starts again.

Looking at the blank screen of death is worse than anything to me. I can deal with the constant crashing of my computer. I can even deal with the freezing problem. What I can’t deal with though, is rushing home to start writing something, turning on the computer and then staring at the blank page, filled with white that awaits my words. It sits there, blank as a poker face, daring me to start. It calls me every time and frequently I fold. Sometimes I fight through the bluff and keep going, but in the end I resign my king and close the program. There are times where that white screen is just a banner at a high school football game, easily torn through with the slightest pressure. The other times however, the blank screen of death stares me down as if challenging me to conquer it. Unlike the blue screen or the pinwheel, there is no solution outside of my own mind.

So I say to you, fellow writers, let me be your muse. Let me solve your writer’s block. Let me cash your royalty checks.