September (October, actually) 2003

Some People Seemed the Same
Memories of 1993

This month, I've submitted both the September and October "Memories" because I was lazy last month.

So there I am, a college freshman at a college far from home. In one respect, it was an opportunity for me to realize a new SELF, a new IDENTITY, and impress it on my new world. In the weeks and months before arriving at school, I'd idealized my wealth of opportunities - new people, new life…no parents. Everything, as best as I could imagine, was going to be different. But, with the myriad readings and coursework for new students, I did not have enough time to force that new me (whoever that was) on the campus. When I think back on it, I suppose that my freshman year at college may have been the most confused of my life.

Big surprise, huh? Hard to imagine that a young, suburban commando such as myself was nothing short of an 18 year-old dynamo? I do my best to repress the worst of the memories, but to no avail. My biggest failures seem to come back to me all the time.

Surely, you are not reading this to hear about my lamentably average adventures in college. What's more, I don't wanna write too much about me as an 18 year-old moron. There is plenty of room for that in my memoirs (to be published in either 2030 or 2034.) My life did have some interesting subtlety to it here and there.

Example: In the first few weeks of school, I kept having the same feeling about nearly every person I met - I believed that I had met them all before - in my high school.

This was not a de ja vu thing, nor was it a past-life thing. (I don't believe in any of that.) It's just that I come from the suburbs, and most of the students at school came from the suburbs, so my college was kind of a cross-section of suburban life (with sprinkles of foreign and city kids.) The cross-section was so complete, I swore at times my high school had come to college with me.

I think this belief grew largely out of my tendency to short-change people. I quickly categorize people when I meet them (simplify!) As a rule, I don't like people, so I like to place them where I think they belong, in my mind, until I get a chance to know them, at which point I may or may not change my mind. (It's a very easy way to get along in life - arrogantly and with maximum discrimination. Sure, it's no way to life a very good life, but it helps if you are not interested in meeting very many new people.)

They were there, at every table, in every class, on every stairwell: the soccer guys, indy kids, party girls, burn outs, faux-punks, stoners, prissy girls, the god-squad, drunks, wastes, and even a handful of bland normals. For a while, I could stop starring at people, waiting for them to do something to surprise me. They never did.

It was at that time when I came to the conclusion that God, if he did exist, had run out of ideas - or he just stopped trying to create new personalities. That was stupid! Neither God nor Allah, nor any other invisible superhero in the sky was responsible for what I thought I saw. Not at all. In time, I came to believe that it is suburbia itself that creates a limited number of characters for the world. We all watch the same tee-vee, see the same movies, and hear the same music. It's either a curse or a blessing for the middle-class. We sacrifice diversity for comfort.

All that aside, the sight of all those similar people changed me - in my mind. It changed me more than the books, sex, drugs and booze of the first month because it was unexpected. I had hoped to meet tons of new people, but I didn't.

Don't get me wrong, I did meet and befriend a number of beautiful and wonderful people there. Hell, I even married a gal I met at college. In those people I found nuance and dignity I wouldn't have expected (or, possibly, ascribed) in them. Besides, I am certain that by shying away from the familiar faces, I would have been rejecting my destiny as a white suburban American male, and who would ever want to do that?