Looking For A Sign

I have a piece up on Huffington Post!!!

To see it, click here:
Looking For A Sign

(Sorry about the two-step process to get to it. I hope you don't mind taking the trouble to go there.)

xoxo

College Schmollege

There’s a lot of talk about college here these days.

I went to a state school.  Not a big state university, but a mid-size college in my own state that had a reputation as a great teacher’s college and was driving distance from my parents’ home.  I chose it largely because I liked the way the buildings looked in the brochure.

Last night, after working long and hard on his essay supplements for his Early Decision application, The Teenager asked me whether I’d had a good experience at MSU.  We happen to live in the same town as my Alma-mater and its reputation here is very different than when I was growing up.  It's used as a generic diss that kids hurl at one another at the high school.  “If you don’t take any AP classes, you’re going to end up at MSU.”  The way I threaten my kids' about their laziness by promising them a life of working at Burger King.

I never considered MSU a bottom of the barrel school – not when I went there, and not afterwards – that is, until I moved back here as an adult.  The kids I went to high school with were not well off and many were downright poor.  Several of my friends never went to college at all and those who did went mostly to big state schools where the tuition was much more affordable.  Even when I worked in Manhattan with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met – all graduates of prestigious private colleges, many of them Ivies – I was not embarrassed and never felt the need to make excuses for my education. 

But here, where I live now, I am truly in the minority.  Most every one of my peers has at least one degree, many several, from schools that currently boast an acceptance rate of under 20 percent.  When it becomes apparent that I need to share where I went to college with a new acquaintance, I often preface it by saying that my dad died when I was a high school senior and I needed to stay close to home, but the truth is, even if he’d survived his cancer, I doubt I would have gone anywhere else.

When I was in high school, I didn’t want to go to college and my grades and behavior reflected that.  I wanted to leave home, get an apartment, get a job and be independent.  I didn’t care what the job was, only that I wouldn’t need to wear cowl neck sweaters or pumps. 

When The Teenager asked about MSU, I began by getting all philosophical.  “I believe that the education is up to the kid,” I said.  “You can be a go-getter in a mediocre school and if you take advantage of all the opportunities there for you, you’ll get a really good education.  Conversely, [I actually use words like that with The Teenager in informal conversation, even after SATs are behind us] you can go to a great school and if you just plod through it and don’t grab what’s available to you, you’ll get an ‘ok’ education, but probably not a great one.”

He was expecting me to tell him what a go-getter I was; I knew that by how surprised he seemed by what I said next.  “I didn’t take advantage of much of anything when I was in college.  I got an ok education at MSU, but it could have been much, much better.  I wasn’t that interested in being a student.  I was too concerned with learning how to be a grown up.”

And then, in a voice that was kinder than any he’s used with me since this whole, God-awful college process has started, he said, “Well, you’re a good grown up.”

Although I’m not entirely sure he meant it as a compliment.

Letting Go

I’m wondering why, on my morning walk, I even started thinking about a certain exclusive pre-school that sat atop a certain bluff in a certain riverfront town.  A preschool that, 14 years ago, decided that my then-three-year-old wasn’t advanced enough to join all of his friends that September in their hand-picked, crunchy granola classroom and benefit from the finest progressive pre-k education a co-op could offer.  I hadn’t thought about that school, or that incident, in over a decade – I had certainly stopped ruminating about it long before that.  But this morning, as I leaned down to pick up some discarded frozen yogurt cups on the corner – cups that I’d noticed on my walk the day before and now realized were not going to get into a trash container any other way – I felt very sorry for myself because it was so hard for me to bend forward to retrieve them. 

My stiff midsection made me think about calling my friend Suzanne, who happens to live in that certain riverfront town, and tell her about my body woes, because she is a massage therapist and acupuncturist and also because she understands my particular lot in life, which is that I hold my emotions so tightly in check that they wreck havoc on my musculoskeletal system.  If I called Suzanne, I would have told her about the woman I’ve been seeing who does “energy work” and how, after two sessions with her, having embarked on a process of (in her words) unfurling all the tension and stress within, I can now barely bend forward and do not feel in the least bit unfurled, but rather achy and stiff, as if I’ve aged 15 years in the last four weeks. 

But as I continued to walk, my mind quickly jumped from that Suzanne to a different Suzanne, one who also lives in that certain riverfront town, and whom I happened to run into a few weeks ago on a train ride into Manhattan.  I hadn’t seen This Other Suzanne for almost as long as the preschool incident, because her daughter was one of my son’s friends who did get accepted to that certain exclusive pre-school and not long after that, we moved.  This Other Suzanne’s daughter just finished her senior year in high school and was off to college somewhere, I forget where, but I’m sure it’s someplace fabulous, because This Other Suzanne’s daughter was fluent in two languages by age three and has a rather unusual name (after the wife of a famous painter), but most importantly, she attended a certain very exclusive preschool. 

I didn’t spend a minute of my walk trying to remember the name of the daughter’s college or the name of the painter for whose wife she was named, but instead turned my attention quickly to a certain exclusive college that The Teenager wants to apply to Early Decision, in the hopes that it might better the chance of his acceptance from under 10% to perhaps 12 or 13 percent.  This is exactly the type of college I have not wanted The Teenager to apply to at all because I have developed, over the years, a reverse prejudice about Schools Like That, and have deemed them, in my mind, haughty and elitist and basically just institutions that manufacture assholes.  I hold this opinion strongly and deeply, even though many, many of my close friends went to Schools Like That and not a one of them is an asshole. 

Yet, on my walk, I began to have a fantasy of The Teenager receiving an acceptance letter from a certain exclusive college and rather than worrying about whether or not he would turn into an asshole, I immediately imagined taking a picture of that acceptance letter and mailing it to a certain exclusive preschool along with a simple handwritten note containing only a certain vulgar two-word phrase that is meant to convey both disdain and superiority. 

And the prospect of that made me smile.

As I was replaying my fantasy over and over, imagining my note being read by the self-same woman who, 14 years ago, thought it was reasonable to judge three-year-old children on their “potential,” I found myself becoming really excited by the prospect of The Teenager getting into that certain exclusive college, largely so I could thumb my nose at a woman whose name I will never remember and whose face I wouldn’t recognize in a million years. 

And then I wondered whether, maybe, just maybe, the Energy Healer’s work isn’t working because I have a tendency to hold on so tightly to old resentments and wrongdoings.  Whether I can’t bend forward because there are too many things my muscles won’t let go of; that perhaps they’re forever tethered by my every longstanding rebuff. 

I had to wonder whether the frozen yogurt cups were left on my corner for A Reason.  Whether some cosmic force knew I would lean down to pick them up and they would remind me how easy it is to get rid of garbage that’s not your own, and how it really shouldn’t be any harder to get rid of your own garbage, but, damn, it sure is.

And how letting go of something that’s been a part of you for a long time, even something that you know doesn’t belong there anymore, feels a little like being broken.

Meta Physics

Yesterday I learned that The Teenager has a seemingly irreparable conflict in his schedule for senior year.  Two classes that he really wants to take meet only during the same period.  One of the classes is AP Physics C Part 2.  I’d certainly like him to get the classes he wants, but if I never have to know about another physics project for the rest of my life, I may possibly die a happy woman.

Physics projects have aged me.  Is that a Law of Physics?

The Teenager is driving home from the beach right now with a full sized catapult in the back of the car.  The catapult that was due last Friday and built, for the most part, Thursday night.  The catapult that needed to be designed and constructed to hurl an egg an unknown distance to hit the instructor.  A distance that could be anywhere from 20 to 50 feet.

The catapult was the final exam for AP Physics C Part 1.  The students had already spent the year designing and  building other irksome projects. A balsa wood tower that had to adhere to height, weight and girth requirements and also be able to sustain 30 lbs.  A mechanical helicopter that needed to fly and remain airborne for at least 60 seconds.

Both feats were miraculously accomplished by boys who, I’m fairly certain, have no idea how to make a bed.

I try not to get involved in these projects, but when the assemblage takes place in my home, the stress permeates the premises.  I am a sponge, and I absorb any and all angst within my purview. 

Unlike the tower, where I was called upon to fetch more balsa wood, replenish glue-gun glue and procure Venti Lattes, or, in the case of the helicopter, order a sanctioned building kit (replete with 23-page instruction manual) to be delivered overnight and secure three different types of modeling glue, I was not asked for any assistance at all with the catapult – a shame, really, because the project reeked of Monty Python to me, and, as a result, warmed my heart.  In fact, when The Teenager’s lab partner jokingly intimated that they were just going to buy a catapult and call it a day, I didn’t even try and dissuade them.  “I don’t want to spend countless hours building this thing . What a colossal waste of time,” he said.  And I was like, Yeah, I could think of better things to do.

So, wasn’t I surprised when, two weeks ago, they came lumbering in with two-by-fours (sorry, bad pun) and rope, and headed to the basement workbench?  They spent a chunk of time building the base that night and, once complete, left it, in typical teenager fashion, untouched for nine days until the eve of its due date. 

“It’s almost halfway built,” said The Teenager.  “We’ll be able to bang out the rest of it really fast.”

I won’t bore you with their hapless setbacks, I will just say this:  The whole point (it seems) of a physics project, is to give yourself time to make the types of modifications necessary when you can’t get your egg to sail more than 18 feet.  Time that simply does not exist when you begin the project in earnest at 7 o’clock the night before it’s due.

“Is it the torque or the trajectory?” I asked, pacing the basement and trying to sound helpful but, in truth, barely knowing what either of those things mean.  By this time it was almost 11 o’clock and I wanted to go to sleep.

Unfortunately, one of my many shortcomings is that I can’t sleep when a catapult is being built in my midst.

Every time they needed to test the catapult, they had to haul it up the narrow basement stairway and around the island in the kitchen, and out the back door to the yard.  They'd set it up on the driveway and let it rip.  The egg would barely make 20 feet.  They’d then haul it back down to the basement again to make adjustments.

The Teenager and his lab partner argue a lot. They’ve been friends for years and they’re like two old men on a park bench with nothing in the world better to do than contradict each other. Much of the building session was spent this way, with both of them taking seats on the patio, trying to reason and cajole each other to modify this way instead of that.

“We need a longer throwing arm.  We need to get to a lumber yard,” one of them finally declared.

“There are no lumber yards open at this time of night,” I told them.  “You’ll have to use what you can find around the house.”

They texted other classmates to check on their progress.  They replaced their wooden arm with a lacrosse stick.  They barreled through my ($5.99/dozen organic!) eggs.

Splat, splat, splat.  My driveway was full of yolk.  None of it landing further than 22 feet.

“Forget it,” said The Teenager. “Twenty-two feet will have to be good enough.  I’m going to bed.”

But his lab partner talked him into further adjustments and modifications while I lay tossing and turning on what may as well have been a bed of nails.  Is there anything in the medicine cabinet for a Catapult-Induced Sleep Disorder?

Eventually, they too called it quits.

Bleary the next morning, I asked him how it went.  My past experience with The Teenager is that things always seem to work out. I somehow let sleep overtake me and when I wake up, the thousand page paper has been written or the minutia-laden architecture model has been constructed.  I don’t ever believe these elfin surprises will materialize, but they always do.

“The egg never landed beyond 22 feet,” he said in his gloomy voice, a situation we both knew would not bode well for his grade.

Yet, six hours, eight two-by-fours, two bungee cords, one lacrosse stick and two fresh eggs later, catapult magic happened.  An egg was launched and landed inches before the teacher, a distance of over 49 feet. 

There is no scientific explanation as to how this was possible.  How someone can repeat a process dozens of times and get the same lousy outcome every time, and then, finally, that one time that it counts, everything falls into place.  Is that a Law of Physics, too?  Or is it something bigger, like a blessing, or just good old-fashioned grace?

I know it’s too much to hope that the schedule conflict magically resolves itself in a similar way.  I mean, it’s just not possible.  Everyone has already told me so.