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It was quite windy on Wednesday. Earth-shattering information I know, but it's true. I left for the city with a hat placed *PLOP* firmly atop my head and the wind blew it off and down the street. I had to chase after my damn hat like a child going after a slippery frog. I finally caught up to it rolling down Michigan Avenue but it was muddy and soggy when I got it.
I was embarrassed and upset.
It was my first day of graduate orientation and I showed up embarrassed and upset.
My new alma matre is Roosevelt University. I was surprised to realize how prime the real estate owned by the university actually is. My main campus building overlooks Buckingham Fountain, which for my out-of-state friends, is like having a college in Boston that overlooks the Citgo sign; but even prettier and classier.
Unless you think neon advertisements are classier than bubbling water fountains...
...Then nevermind.
I walked through the doors of the famous Louis O. Sullivan Auditorium building to find nothing but lines. No matter where I stood I found myself looking at the back of someone's head. Except that I'm taller than almost everyone else, so it was more like looking past the back of everyone's head directly toward the end of the line, which was much farther away than I'd have liked it to be.
My immediate problem was that I didn't know what line to be in, I couldn't tell which line was just right for me. So I went to the far right. When I drive and I don't know where I'm going, I always tend to turn right. I don't know why this is, but I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that I throw a baseball with my right hand...
...I don't know why those things would be connected...
So there I was, in the far right line waiting patiently. Eventually, I got to the head of the line, which is the nice thing about storytelling; you didn't have to wait in line with me. You got to magically zip through the boring parts of my life and experience the meaty portions by themselves without all the fat.
Which doesn't make you very good friends at all, does it? Where the hell were you during the rough times? The boring times? You're just with me for the laughs and then you're gone. I stood in that damn line for like, eighteen minutes, staring off into space. I coulda used a friend you jerk. Thanks.
I hope you're bored all day tomorrow. Don't even think about calling me, I'll just catch up to you when things get a little more interesting in your life. How 'bout that?
Jerks.
The girl at the table whose line I had been waiting in smiled at me, which was not part of her job because she did not smile at the Middle-Eastern girl with the tunic-like apparatus atop her head, waiting before me. I worried that the line-owner denied the girl ahead of me a smile because she was a racist. I opted not to make small talk with the racist girl.
I just grabbed my orientation packet and coldly headed in the direction she pointed.
I don't deal with racists.
I also don't deal with kind-hearted girls who flirt with me.
Either way, I had my bases covered.
I headed up the massive marble staircase toward the second floor where the bulk of my orientation was being held. On my way upward, I assumed I might stroll past a descending Norma Desmond awaiting her close-up. The stairs took forever to climb. About halfway up I began looking for the Gatorade guy or one of those motorized stair-chairs for the elderly. I'm no sissy, okay? I know all about stairs. Stairs and I go way back.
Way back.
We went to the same preschool. I'm pretty sure Stairs borrowed my Mr. Potatohead doll and lost his angry eyes.
No need to school me on stairs. I've climbed the Bunker Hill Monument, The Statue of Liberty, the Tian Tan Temple stairs in Hong Kong, the steps in the Philadelphia Museum of Art where Rocky conquered his fear of heights (or something like that, I can't remember what happened in that movie); you name it, I've climbed it. The stairs at the main building of my new school were tough though.It took me nearly fourteen minutes to get to the second floor. Somewhere around the nine-minute-mark, I left my pessimism behind and decided that stairs were a good thing. Stairs were both pomp and circumstance. Queens ascended staircases such as this...
...Not that I was a queen.
Not at all.
I thought we took care of those rumors during my last blog.
Stairs meant wealth and privilege and high ceilings and higher learning. These stairs represented my ascension into the glory that is education.
Metaphorically speaking, with each step I took, the smarter I became.
Physically speaking, with each step I took, the more vomit I could taste in my own mouth.
I started thinking that this damn staircase was like one of those optical illusions, like a striped barbers pole; something I would never - could never - completely climb.
By the time I reached the fifteen-hundredth step upon my spiral heavenward, I began hearing classical music and assumed that somewhere along my trip I had died and I was no longer ascending to the conference room of my graduate school but to Heaven itself. In my fatigued stupor I began getting really pissed that even though I was dead, I still had to trudge up stairs.
Shouldn't I be floating somewhere? Why the hell am I still so winded? There should be no breathlessness in Heaven. Well maybe romantic breathlessness, like that Godard film, but...
...Unless this isn't Heaven. What if we all got the directions wrong on Heaven and Hell? That would make more sense, right? Your first punishment after you die is climbing four billion stairs to get to Hell's Gate.
How had no one thought about this before?
And if this is Hell, what does it say that the ascending music I hear seems to be a Brahms piece from his Fantasias period?
I wouldn't have guessed that.
I always assumed I'd be hearing Yoko Ono on my way to Hell.
At the age of 38, I finally reached the second floor of Roosevelt University's Auditorium building. It was there that I realized I had not dreamt up the orchestra, that they were, in fact, playing in the center of the grand hallway for the enjoyment of all incoming graduate students. I also noticed multiple tables filled with finger foods and drinks.
My own mother didn't treat me with this much warmth and kindness. I stood stone- like in the middle of the hall as if a donkey had kicked the intelligence right out of my skull. I went numb. My jaw may have fallen open, but I can't be sure. Like I said, I was numb.
I moved one foot in the front of the other. My body was screaming in joy. My body wanted to run - nay - skip in peppy glee toward all the food tables and immediately take all the cookies for myself.
The tables were park trees and I was a dog lifting his leg to pee.
But I had to play it cool. This wasn't undergraduate orientation. This was graduate orientation and I didn't want to start off on more of a wrong foot than I already had.
I was the only student wearing a baseball hat. I was a little sweaty from the stairs and I had already made the racist line-leaders upset by ignoring their smiles. In hopes of not drawing further attention to myself, I decided to swing around the orchestra first. My thinking was that no one would suspect my desire for food if I didn't make a bee-line directly toward it.
So I'm standing next to the orchestra as if I were in some grunge club. All I needed was a Coors Light and a rhythmic head-bob and there'd really be no difference. It was awkward. They finished a musical piece and I began clapping, but I was the only one clapping, so I stopped clapping fairly soon after I started.
Are we not supposed to clap for orchestras? No one tells me shit.
Enough of this, let's hit that sandwich carte.
I have a friend whom for the sake of this blog I will call "Barmin." Barmin is infamous for formulating weekend plans based on the locales of gallerias and museums supplying free food at their exhibits. I only bring Barmin up because he would have wept at the sight of Roosevelt's spread. And his weeping wouldn't have been one of those "damn I just hit my thumb with this hammer" kind of weeping fits, it would have been girly and pitiful; more like "Heidi Klum just said she wanted to have my love child" fits.
I'm sure you understand.
In honor of Barmin I ate several extra tiny croissant sandwiches. I didn't even want them, but they were there and I'd be damned if I was going to allow some snotty undergrad to get their paws on it.
I also had nearly 2/3 of all available pineapple slices, which amounted to roughly six whole pineapples.
It's a passion fruit. I was incapable of stifling myself.
The orientation itself was fairly uneventful. Again, because you are not so much my friends as you are thrill-seekers, you get to be spared the boredom of the actual orientation. We'll skip past all the getting-to-know-you activities, self-congratulatory salutations that every school feels compelled to concoct and various campus tours. You can thank me later. But before we completely leave the bulk orientation portion, I should menton that I met one psychology student working on her doctorate named Christa Jones. She was extremely kind and comforting to me during our isolated group discussions and I apprecaited meeting her. Unlike Barmin, Christa Jones is her real name and the only reason I am submitting her real name here is because if she perchance comes across this blog or if I perchance ever see her on campus, I plan to immediately propose marriage to her in the name of serendipity.
Which would also go a long way in proving that I am the John Cusack of Chicago.*
My orientation evening ended waiting in yet another line; this time for my student ID. We've come a long way in field of bulk photographs. I was only in line long enough to realize that my hair had been under a soggy and muddy baseball cap for the bulk of the last few hours and that my hair isn't usually well coiffured anyway.
Sometimes, when I'm lost and driving and really need to catch a stop light in order to peek at a map, I inevitably make a record number of lights and drive for forty minutes in the absolute wrong direction. When I have nothing to do while waiting in line, the line inevitably takes for-ev-er to move. Not at Roosevelt U, nope. At Roo-U as the hep cats are known to call it, the lines with messy haired people desperately trying cajole their follicles into cooperating zips right along at record speed.
If Donald Trump got into a fist fight with a hoard of condors it would not look worse than the nonsense happening on my noggin.
"Next!" It was too late. I was up next. I looked like a Dick Tracy character and I had no time to remedy my situation. So I sat down in the chair set in front of a blue background and the thought crossed my mind that they were going to bluescreen my head onto something cool. Maybe my student ID would have a theme. Perhaps they'd affix my face onto John Wayne's body and for the next three semesters I would get to be the "John Wayne student". And maybe the girl after me would get to be the "woodchuck student" and the person after her would be the "astronaut" until she graduated.
"Next! " The cameraman bellowed. Which was a weird thing to bellow because I was already in the chair. I sat right down the first time he called my name. I've been sitting here for several seconds now and...
Oh crap! He already took my picture! That last bellow was for the person in-line after me. Crap! He didn't warn me or anything. He didn't even adjust the camera to counter my abnormally tall and lanky frame. The camera was barely tilting upwards at all and he didn't tell me to look into the camera, and because I was not instructed to do it I failed to do it.
Dammit! Why must I be such a lemming? Johnny Rotten would have looked directly into the camera no matter who told him not to. He might have even spat into the camera, but that would be taking it too far.
That would be too much. Spitting is unnecessary.
But looking into it was not unnecessary.
A warning would have been keen. A warning might have saved me from taking a picture that renders my already large forehead to appear as if an ice-dance could be performed on it's surface. And there are no do-overs for these pictures. I got one shot and I didn't even know it was happening. That picture is my key to the school's library, the bookstore, the public transportation, it's what my future girlfriends are going to ask to see when we go out to dinner and I open my wallet to pay for dinner and they notice picture identifications sticking out of it.
Photo IDs are the most important photographs anyone can take in this world and mine looks like I was punched in the head by a kangaroo.
Welcome back to school, kid. Here's your kangaroo wallop!
=============================================================== * Yes, dammit, I am aware that John Cusack is from Chicago. And yes I am aware that he hasn't even moved out of Chicago in favor of Los Angeles or something like that. And so yes I am aware that claiming to be Chicago's John Cusack is like claiming to be New York's Woody Allen or Montana's Unabomber.
Leave me alone.
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