I want it all or nothing.

So, why I loved school: as an INTP, I fly high as a kite on nitpicky details, and a quality education is chock full of ‘em. Sometimes I think that Anthropology, my chosen discipline, was just the area with the most nitpicking to be done. The study of (wo)man and his start. Imagine—nitpicking about nitpicking! I loved how one could start with a solid foundation, grounded in something material like an old shaman’s basket, and extract meaning down to the thread. To know exactly what was going on when that particular weave was selected, the source of the color of the dye, the exact species of the four legged creature on the outside, and, to give you an epistemological hit, the meaning that threaded the entire scheme together. I love knowing things that other people don’t know—so going to a school where the student’s main lobbying point was keeping the library open 24 hours a day for studying any sort of arcana was in many ways a great thing. (“It’s Saturday! It’s 3AM and my roommates are having a party with drugs and alcohol, but that’s OK because I can go to the library and study osteology! And it’s a tepid 40 degrees out!”)

At camp, I loved how external my life was. I would wear a hat at breakfast and by lunchtime it would have traveled the mussy and greasy pates of five or six other people. Like I said, I couldn’t eat a meal in peace (ever, we never got meals off); it wasn’t about peace, but a sort of chaos where your ego got completely erased for a large portion of the day. A beautiful thing. Now, if you will, imagine the complete opposite of that, and that was my school experience. Surely not everyone’s who went to that school, but mine. Isolated, pouring over a book (my favorites were Julia Kristeva, Dostoevsky, and Kenneth Anger), usually wearing a long coat because of the cold, and happy in a strange sense. At my best moments, I experienced ego erasure on this end as well. My inner monologue of complaints and bodily concerns obliterated by the exhilarating act of creating context for what I read—the act of learning in its purest form. Well, OK, I didn’t actually feel that way that often...most of the time, those complaints and bodily concerns were exactly what I thought about.
Picture the author if you will, 20, curled up in a stained easy chair, wearing a calf-length black pea coat and and old t-shirt and jeans. Imagine her staring at a Gregory Bateson book, say, Mind and Nature, frowning in concentration:

I’m hungry…should eat something…ate big dinner with that Alex kid…liked his beard, but why all the food in it?…I’m getting fat…but hey, not like anyone’s seeing me naked…I wonder if I would care more if I were a member of an equatorial tribe and it was too damn hot to wear clothes anyway? Then everyone sees you naked so you stop having stupid little insecure fits? Oh my god, what’s this? Trees grow systems over millions of years the way we grow neurons over a second? Woooohaha…neat! I wonder if that’s just branching trees…I should write that down, I bet I could write a paper or two about that..What about bananas? Banana…Bet that’s good for your skin…they’re pretty smooth I guess…should eat more fruit. Mmm…equator…bananas…I think I’ll go for a walk…I might be real hungry in a half hour…let’s see, when can I go home and eat something and watch The Simpsons?” etc., etc.)

And repeat, repeat, repeat. I must have read a few hundred thousand pages this way. Of course, I didn’t study all the time. I spent a somewhat significant amount of time socializing, taking midnight trains downtown, smoking weed (two or three times…just never took), screwing, and playing rugby. But it was hard for me to make connections with people. I think I may not have given them a fair chance because they weren’t the folks I knew from my camp, which had a way of testing the mettle of people immediately. This chatty, more casual friendship was something I’ve never been good at. Instant closeness, or nothing at all. I was lonely, but during summers, my camp in the mountains full of shouting kids and rock-climbing was always waiting. I didn’t even bother to reconcile these two worlds.

Tomorrow: I still haven’t.

Such goddamn word-squeezers.

Where we start is at 9:40 PM on a Tuesday. This time is important because I have to be up and hopefully out the door in about eight hours. The history is this (please excuse me if this seems laundry-list-esque): I have a prosperous upbringing behind me, really all the support that anyone could ask for, including financial so that I could concentrate on my (very expensive) education from an university with more name brand appeal than Vicks Vapo-Rub. My path was clear: study hard, create wealth, worry about the rest later.

But, obstinate girl that I am, I decided to switch the order of some of these things around. I studied hard, the better to get out of college sooner. I wanted nothing to do with a place that felt so smarmy and strange to my sensibilities, which leaned more and more towards wanting an expression of the heart, rather than the mind. Why was that, what with my straight shot into the stratosphere afforded by race and a cushy monetary base? Because I’d found something that, at the time, really resonated with me: working with kids, for almost nothing, 22 hours a day. I did this every summer for six years, and the effects of it rippled through me for the intervening nine months. I remember the satisfaction of my classmates as they completed a nine-hour binge of Marx, Hegel, and a few fiths, and feeling my own creeping disaffection. It all seemed a little pointless and strange, even when I was completely caught up in it. For what were all the works of Foucault and Vico compared to all the works of a nine year old who had never sat under a tree and acted out her own story? Or, to put more of a point on it, the feeling of being the only adult around to hear that story? The feeling of making a kid’s day complete by being sympathetic when they hurt their knee, to leave them patched up and cared for? To retrieve jackets when it was cold, to hold them up when they wanted to climb high, to play the game of convincing kids to eat (actually, I sort of hated that game…but when I won, nothing I could ever smoke or inject would top that feeling). What an amazing thing, to work and sweat and tramp through the cold to be a kid’s champion for two minutes! What could I then do when I went back to the world of reading theory for six hours a day and barely worrying about my own meals? Come the end of September, I hopped on a plane to the midwest, where it was cold, where my mountain-tan shrunk and my coat grew in length and opacity. I myself grew pale and by turns skinny and skinny-fat (the roundness of those who don't work that hard and who tend to survive on heavily creamed coffee drinks). I got back into the swing of things.




Tomorrow: why I loved school, in my own fashion.