On going off to uni.
When I was seven, I realized that all the books that Iāve read had happy endings. What was up with that? I wondered. Maybe when I grow up I will write the first story with a sad ending, and it would blow everyoneās minds.
Twenty minutes later, Iāve decided that the world is too large and too strange for there to be no sad books in existence. Itās more likely that they just donāt give that kind of story to seven-year-olds.
When I first discovered the wordĀ ātragedyā, I felt a pulse of satisfaction.
When I was thirteen and at the tail end of my listless emo phase, I wondered why no one else seemed to mind the meaninglessness of their existence here on this tiny ball of mud in an infinitely large universe. School, work, children, retirement; is there all there is?
A week later I woke up at 4 in the morning with a revelation: people who donāt follow this american-dream path probably wonāt live in the suburbs either. The world is too large and too strange for everyone to choose the exact same path through life, I just happened to live in a place that valued traditional dreams a lot.
Even later on I discovered Nietzsche, was immediately bored by Beyond Good and Evil, and went back to playing Neopets.
All in all, I think Iām pretty good at figuring out how the world works.
When I was seventeen I had exactly one moment of being afraid of university, before I shut down that line of thought. Donāt be silly, I thought, in the millions of people have gone to university, thereās bound to be some dumber than you who also went and succeeded. Thereās bound to be some lazier than you, whoalso went and succeeded. Thereās also bound to be many who fail, too, either to pass high school or to get accepted or to continue on into their second or third or fourth year, but if they all ended up on the streets our homeless problem would be much, much larger, which means that thereās other ways to make a living. You just havenāt found them yet. If you need to, you will.
Or, thatās how itās supposed to work. Iām still a little panicky, to be honest. Would I be part of the 33% who donāt go on into second year? That would suck. My family would be so disappointed. Itās a distant fear, but I guess what makes us human is that some parts of our brains canāt be soothed with logic.
Still, I am very very excited about uni. My mom has the best stories of all the things she did there, all the road trips with friends who were not that close at the start, all the passionate arguments about literature and philosophy (have a feeling those might be in short supply at Waterloo tho), a fucking ballroom club where she had the same boy as a partner for four years and they never spoke outside the club, never even exchanged names.
If I have even half the adventures she did Iām in for a fantastic time, but letās be real, Imma blow her experiences out of the water. Iām off tomorrow!
In the meantime, though, I gotta finish up my packing.