They Called It Education

By Jessica Ann May

It had come to an end: five years of college, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. Or at least that was the feeling I got nearing the finals week of my last term. Yes, my entire college career could be summed up by that university t-shirt bought the first day and its tattered, abused reflection. My enthusiasm had been so great I didn’t mind paying an extra 32 dollars for a university-logo t-shirt after spending the 429 dollars and eighty-three cents for my first load of textbooks. See, I had bantam aspirations. I was going to be the first college graduate in the history of my family, my family’s family. At that time, the whole world made sense to me. It wasn’t until further along in my journey that things made no sense at all.

Universities called it education; Buddha called it enlightenment; Whitman called it Song of Myself; and even Darwin figured it as “the strongest and the fittest survive,” though he knew to keep this insight to himself until death. I am referring to the moment in life you realize everything is bigger and greater than you ever thought, the epiphany smacking you in the face, proving you really are just a single molecule on a piece of dust. It’s cold, humbling. Mites eat you for breakfast. Well, maybe not you, but Whitman and I anyway. I went from one day saving the world, to needing sleep before my back-to-back finals, to asking myself is this the best verb to reflect my accomplishments while writing a resume for a future career. Frankly, the world grew in the last five years.

Of course, this overwhelming meager feeling didn’t strike like a lightning bolt carrying a message from Zeus in heaven above; no, we are not talking about a sort of mythology told to your favorite niece at Thanksgiving. Occasionally, small bits would hit in spurts. Over time, noticing them became easier, clearer, like a bad day. Once one thing goes wrong, you begin to see every negative detail. It builds and surmounts, until you come home to your boyfriend in tears, sobbing the ultimatum “either people are against me or destiny is.” All great men loath this moment, just like all great men find inspiration from the idea of being small. They work past it; I guess.

When I entered college, people asked me: “What are you going to be?” It seemed like an important question, and so, I answered them with the weekly aspiration I had. When I told them a psychologist, they were amazed. When I told them a teacher, they were excited. “What grade?” They liked lawyer and biochemist. It all sounded fun, but I was adamant about finishing all the basic classes first. I just wanted the degree, and then I could move on to saving the world. I seemed to write well, so most of my classes ended up in English and writing. It felt good; it seemed to be my strength, and then it began.

The feeling of insignificance came out of nowhere. Winter term my second year, it happened right after American Lit. The professor wanted to talk to me about my ideas for a paper on Melville’s Billy Budd. The term before I had had exceptional grades in his class, but in the current term I exerted how I enjoyed writing and thought that I was good at it. Ha, maybe I should be a writer. Big mistake. He looked at me, wrinkles sagging under his eyes: “Janie, I hope you do realize you are not that great of a writer.” My enthusiasm popped like a balloon reaching too high in the atmosphere. What should a person say? I said nothing; I believed him. Because of my comment, I ended up writing a comparison paper on how Billy Budd was like Christ, and how Melville used Paul’s teachings in the Bible. I couldn’t speak up against it nor make the correlation. I never had paid attention to Paul.

Irritated, I sought the advice of my mentoring professor. She listened to my long winded soap-opera box complaint, then forced onto me two vital virtues to expand much further in life than simply my education: compliance and tenacity.

“Sandra, I don’t get were he is coming up with these ideas, or why I am having to go through the Bible to come up with a paper for his class. What are his motives anyway?”

“Janie, just vomit back to him what he wants, and get done with the class already. Sometimes, you just have to vomit out things that people want, just to make them happy.”

As disgusting as it were, she was completely right. It was going to be the most acidic vomiting of my life, but I gave it to him good just for spite. I even printed out a colored picture of Christ hanging dead on the cross with blood dripping down his head. It was a filthy masterpiece of vile puke. Oddly, my puke earned an ‘A.’ I later heard that the professor went to priest school, but dropped out. It must have been his encouraging personality.
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Jesus called it “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” He, like Darwin, saved this too for death.

Somewhere two and half years ago, I finally lost hope of saving the world. By then, my t-shirt was faded and stretched from the weight I gained eating university food. Studying and eating began to go together like… like skittles while talking a shower. I tasted the rainbow, and it washed me clean. It was those little things that paired so well and kept me grinding through midterms and finals. My boyfriend, Lucas, wasn’t worried about my eighteen-pound gain; he was an abstract artist and seemed to find beauty in unusual places. The world was different to him, and he believed his unique perspective would open people’s eyes: the world would change. This inspired me.

I decided to take archeology as an elective. Perhaps it dealt with Indiana Jones and finding treasure. Not really, but it was interesting. I declared anthropology as a minor. I had taken so many Literature classes, English had become my non-chosen major. Some advisor told me I was well on my way to a pre-law degree, though I had intention for law school.

When it came to deciding what classes to enroll in, I always registered for the most fascinating classes on the schedule. Band and Tribal Societies; Visual Anthropology; Mythology. And there it was: Semantics. The word itself became fascinating; I had never seen it before. I registered for the class figuring it to be of some importance to my educational career. Later, I learned it was more than I ever imagined. Semantics was about linguistics and the brain having the capacity to store and retrieve words. We looked at different aspects: psychological, cultural, political, even the good old literary sense. Of course, I didn’t understand all of it. No, it was based on complicated theories.

We had one major assignment in the class, which was to produce a paper and present it. “Fuzzy words” seemed to be the easiest theme; I mean: what could be so difficult about fuzzy meanings, anyway? After doing extensive primary and secondary research, pulling out my hair, and bawling to Lucas that I had no idea what the research indicated, I proved that even within the same language, people do not share the same meaning of words. Ultimately, each word represents a sort of mental image that is different to everyone, even within the same culture.

How do we ever understand each other? I was interested in looking at fuzzy meanings from a cross-cultural perspective, but the world was now three times greater, and I longed to be Whitman’s ever so important blade of grass. I longed to be understood.
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Einstein called it “spooky actions at a distance.” This ended the great mathematical physicist’s aspirations, as he claimed no desire to mess with it. The world had grown too large, and it scared him enough; he backed off. I guess we all have our curiosity and our limits.

And so, I was careful not to dwell too far into fuzzy meanings, but now they just seemed to pop up, such as friends, family, and um, racism. Yes, the idea of racism intrigued me, mostly because everyone separated people into different races, though technically, we are all Homo sapiens. This is a fuzzy meaning. Only anthropologists and taxonomist knew we were one race. Every other department in the university and in society believed race to be a form either of ethnicity, skin color, or nationality. I stuttered on this for another year before registering a major in anthropology. I then had renewed my aspiration of saving the world. I would inform people they could stop hating each other; we are all the same; xenophobia can’t really exist. I had proof: if we interbreed we will create genetically viable offspring. It was too obvious, and society was passing this fuzziness onto their children.

I made a plan. I would make bumper stickers that read: Racism is not the problem; your ethnocentric parents are. Lucas backed me all the way, saying “I’ll make the art; your ideas; my art; on the back off everyone’s car; changing the world.” A business plan would be a great idea. The next term I took Entrepreneurship. The bumper sticker idea was short lived. Call it trying to make the world small, perhaps smaller than myself. It wasn’t feasible in the way of profit margins, and ultimately, racism did exist because people experienced it.

I had a year left, and was now wearing my stretched-out t-shirt for helping Lucas to paint a nature mural on our wall; he called it “bringing the beauty within.” We had both become humanitarians. I had lost those extra pounds. My grueling final exams had turned into final papers. Since it was my senior year, I was able to use all previous work from the last four years, and transform the ideas into beautiful, well-contrived papers without even researching. It was during this year that a different sort of feeling took over. It could be summed up as a lack of motivation.

Optimistically, I would have liked to see it as a lack of challenge, but in reality, I felt the whole world was screwed, yes, and in the way I couldn’t change it. Being that I was to be the first college graduate in my family, I could no longer hold intelligent conversations with them. I only saw how ignorant they came in not understanding how they were merely racist when they declared all illegal immigrants as being of Mexican decent, or the fact they thought the English language was in jeopardy of being taken over by Spanish speakers. If I explained otherwise, I became the naive one. The world had become so large I could not recognized where I came from or who I was when starting this journey.
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The university called it education; they called it a well-rounded person. I was earning a degree to make the world a better place. They would take pride in my success giving me status of magna cum laude and later alumni. And the people asked me, “What are you going to be?”

“An anthropologist.” I always answered them wishing it were something else; something people knew about, like policewoman, doctor, or even dog walker would have worked.

Baffled faces patronized, “What will you do with that, dig in the dirt?”

I wanted to reply, “Do proctologists go to school only to dig in butts,” but it wasn’t a good analogy because unlike proctology, I was going to be doing any digging. I specialized in language and culture.

Looking back to the beginning, all the way back to deconstructive analysis, I remember a professor saying, “I don’t see the point of it; don’t use it, or I’ll mark you down.” Bright eyed and bushy tailed, I absorbed his comment only to later use it in daily prayer. I found myself beginning to understand Pink Floyd’s “we don’t need no education” a little different than I thought of it while skipping in high school. I had stopped eating skittles in the shower and was now ‘screaming at the top of my lungs what’s going on’ by 4 Non Blondes.

In the year 2005, the world’s population was 6 billion and growing. Somewhere in the world, a baby is born every 3 seconds. Ideas, theories, and societies continue to grow to exponential proportions though the world is smaller in comparison to available space. Where there was once a dream to save the world, now lay the burden of Einstein’s ever so expanding universe.

And here I rested: days from graduation, filling out applications for a future career with the perfect resume containing all my accomplished verbs. As if that wasn’t enough, I was linked to an online application quiz.

“Lucas, it is asking me if I would be happy working in the circus. What is it really asking me?”

“You should answer that one as a definite no.”

“But is the circus some kinda fuzzy metaphor for capability to work in a busy environment, or could it mean a person who doesn’t take things seriously and wants to have fun?”

“Hmm, maybe you’re right. Maybe they want a trapeze artist,” smirking.

“Well, I’m putting no. If I wanted to work at the circus, that’s where I’d apply.”

While multitasking thoughts of the nonsense question on the screen, ranting silently about its tricky absurdness, and reaching for my coffee, I knocked the mug into a laundry basket of freshly folded clothes: my university t-shirt on top staring back, its stretched and frying threads, it’s paint spots and stains, an accumulation of nonsense. I grined leaving it to suffer, just a bit more.

Copyright © 2007 Jessica Ann May [aka Jae Anne]

No part may be used, copied, or reproduced without consent. If quoting, please cite author as Jessica Ann May. Thanks.