collegiate barking

Let me tell you about my senior year at University, which should have been entitled "University : in which I Behave as an Ass - Poo and Everything".

This story has a lot to do with a lot of things, but mostly with girls who, through a long string of bad choices happened to occupy at the time in question a rather unmerited percentage of my brain space. "Oh, no", you charitably interject, "that's just normal, Josh. Boys are like that in college". Perhaps, but why would I want to be normal?

Anyway, the gist of it could probably be described by sharing with you one key, "oh-my-monkeybottom-i-wish-i-could-forget-it" moment. Let's go, then, to the lower cafeteria, bustling with people. I was one of them, along with my freind Dave Weins and the Resident Director in Charge of Keeping the Rules Unbroken. Up came a freshman female, a cute little number I recognised from "around". Introductions were dispensed with by the RD, and before my polite upbringing had a chance of kicking in I said - get this - "would you like to go to the Back Forty with me?" That's the Ass part. You see, the Back Forty Acres were the place where, rumor had it, college boys went to practice Linguistics.

I, being mostly terrified of girls, would probably have run screaming if she'd said yes. However, this was the year in which I'd turned over a new leaf, and fear wasn't about to keep me from acting like an idiot. No longer, I had decided, would I be that forgettable little goober who looks fifteen. Instead, I would flirt and chat and do things like open my mouth in public (from the top of a really tall tree) that would get me noticed. I decided, in short, to become "cool and popular".

Why did I do this? In a word, compensation. Even short mid-pubescent folks want to feel desireable. I was impatient to grow up and unsure if people would like the real me, so I created a caricature of myself and ended up throwing a way a lot of time I could have spent painting. Or playing chess. Or eating my own scabs. My poor use of time is not really the point, though. The point is that I didn't accept who I was as valuable and I thought I could shortcut to maturity by getting other, more femaler people to tell me I mattered.

On I struggled, chasing pretty faces without the gumption or the will to maintain an image of cool. I think I was perpetually aware of the silliness of what I was doing and when the crunch time came I'd back down, still maintaining the fantasy of a female ideal who would love me for who I was, unprovoked bouts of insanity and everything.

Don't feel sorry for me, though. I got what I deserved. The girl in the lower cafeteria put me in my place. The soccer team hottie laughed about three minutes and then hung up forever when she found out it was me walking across campus wearing that ridiculous Peruvian shoulder bag she deemed a "purse". The girl I charmed in the back of the theatre as we ignored the movie "Hannibal" together discovered I didn't want to be a missionary in Djabouti. And the girl I liked the most? She who, in another world, would have suited me best? She came up behind me as my two best freinds loudly mocked me for being a girl-obsessed freak. At that moment she, being of good sense and knowing whom she was, put it together with the reputation of patheticness I had undoubtedly earned and walked away.

That's OK, though. I was who I was and I'm admitting it here. You also gotta know this - I didn't want to be. I wanted to be real, but fear of rejection (that omnipresent crippler) stapled my real mouth shut. It let me talk, but in someone else's words.

I like to think that I've grown up since then. Don't get me wrong - I still live in a fantasy world. I still pretend to be something I'm not. Still,I know myself better now and I work hard, even on this website, to let people see the real me. I married an incredible woman who loves my picadillos almost more than my perfections.

Every once in a while, though, I wish the path had not been so painful, or rocky. I wish I could traipse back through time and space, go to the lower cafeteria, and kick me an Ass.