It’s not my favorite Fleetwood Mac song (”World Turning,” if you’re curious) or my favorite Stevie Nicks song (”Whole Lotta Trouble”) or my favorite Dixie Chicks song (”Cowboy Take Me Away”), except, well. Six months from today, I will be The Landslide Age, and so will Isabel Starfish. Just for five days; then she’ll age out of Landslide, while I will have to endure for another 360.

We were thinking we’d prepare. We should spend the next six months either learning to play guitar or learning to sing less terribly, and that we should schedule a trip to Austin for me for my birthday (can we all agree, here, that Austin is the place for this and not metro DC?) and that we should sing a duet/have a big YouTube party. Or just get drunk and play it on repeat.

1.  iTunes Gift card or a gift of a given playlist.
2. Tide Stain Remover Pen, because we can’t always afford to do laundry on the day our boobs serve as tomato sauce magnets.
3. That said, quarters or cold hard cash so she can afford to do laundry.
4. Burt’s Bees Res-Q Ointment. I was introduced to this junior year by a friend who has a disability which causes her to fall down a lot. It’s really effective at helping bumps and cuts heal quickly and cleanly. Very helpful if you’re a stumbling drunk or just a klutz.
5. Also, Band-aids
6. Blister band-aids.
7. Microwave popcorn.
8. EasyMac
9. To-Go Ware bamboo utensils
10. Sunglasses (because I break or lose mine constantly)
11. Headphones/earbuds (same deal)
12. Socks and underwear (but a gift card to whatever store in her college town that sells underwear and is open latest will do; sometimes it’s easier to just go buy more, you know?)
13. Something that is just a gift, plain and simple. I like earrings.
14. Spare earring backings.
15. Our Bodies, Ourselves.

What did I miss? Besides tequila, I mean?

I had a discussion recently about evolution – again, a whole other discussion – but the short of it is, yes, science exists, there is irrefutable proof that science exists… But isn’t the fact that science exists, proof that God exists too? I’m a big fan of having your cake and eating it too, in case you couldn’t tell. I think both can, and DO, co-exist peacefully. I believe that I can believe in luck, in karma, and still be in good standing with the Higher Being out there.

Do good acts beget good acts? And vice versa? Or is it a cycle, and it’s just someone’s turn to either have good/bad luck and good/bad things happen. Or…and this just occurred to me..is it all a matter of perspective? That things happen because we’ve set them in motion, and it is up to us to interpret the results? I think I like this response, because we are not only responsible for the actions, we’re responsible for our REACTIONS as well. We are put here as vessels for a greater good AND evil, but it’s up to us as to how to use our great powers.

Cake eating to commence momentarily.

Night Moves on YouTube

What does this mean for you? For me? For anybody? It means that I procrastinate to the nth degree! Example – I took a summer course with a paper and presentation due at six pm. Paper was started at noon, and presentation at five. The emphasis on this degree is on writing as people in this field are expected to express themselves with the written word, and therefore our writing is emphasized… or so they say. The reality is even if it were truly emphasized, I STILL wouldn’t care – I don’t plan on going into this field, now or ever. But what does an almost-Master’s degree and a bag of chips get you? A sandwich away from a decent lunch. So, I finish, and if all goes as planned I finish in December. But without any actual knowledge, and as I’m sure you can tell – no actual writing skills. I’ve LONG been a fan of Sunny’s writing – that’s actually how we met! She expresses what she’s thinking and feeling in such vivid ways, that I find myself nodding along and think “wow, she said what I was thinking…only better!”. So I dragged my feet, while Little Ms. Sunfish went along her sunshine-y ways, posting, and generally being her awesome self, while I sulked in the Lone Star State about how I’m not as good a writer as she is. But those are my issues, not hers, and definitely not yours.

So I make a commitment to you, dear sweet readers, to stop overthinking and overanalyzing my thoughts and writings, and just make the leap and share them with you.

Besides – it’s my last semester. I ALWAYS need more ways to procrastinate!

Two of the writers in my critique group are working on travel memoirs, and Eat Pray Love is a common topic whenever we talk about their work. Eat Pray Love is universally despised by my critique group, and Elizabeth Gilbert is decried as narcissistic; horrid.

When I discovered that my beloved coterie of writers were not Eat Pray Love fans, I felt vindicated and pure. I felt that I had chosen well by not allowing myself to be sullied by the book.

But then! But then! I watched Elizabeth Gilbert and Susan Orlean on bloggingheads.tv and, quite simply, was enchanted. Gilbert seemed sweet, kind, deep without being drippy about it, and honest. And then I felt like an asshole.

When I blogged other places (not here), I tried to be honest about my flaws and I tried to examine my flaws with humor. The sad reality is that sometimes, somebody who doesn’t want to like you will read the things you say about yourself, and then your frank discussion of your weaknesses becomes an invitation for character assassination. I often wished that people would understand that the act of acknowledging your flaws publicly and writing about them IS a way to take responsibility for them, and that not every sentence that begins, with “I have selfish tendencies” needs to end with, “and I’m in therapy for it.”

After I saw the bloggingheads.tv clip, I thought about how hard we are on women and women’s emotional or social flaws. As women, we are expected to be emotionally intelligent, and when we recognize our emotional idiosyncrasies, we’re expected to strive to fix them; get into therapy, buy a self-help book, meditate, make our peace with god, talk. It’s all so burdensome, and sometimes quite dull; moreover, peace with oneself oftentimes seems like something women do for other people, so that we are less “needy” and less of an “inconvenience.”

Basically, I find the entire notion of inner peace to be The Man Keeping Us Down. And that’s an idiosyncrasy of mine that I’m presently unwilling to shed. But I shouldn’t have allowed that perspective to go so far as to infect what I think of the writer, Elizabeth Gilbert; by all accounts, she’s voice-y, introspective, and observant; in short, my kind of writer.

So, my self-imposed punishment for being an asshole is to purchase and read Eat Pray Love–and not the book with the iconic prayer beads and cursive font. No, no. My punishment for coming late and sullen to the party is to own the version with Julia Roberts on the cover.

I was reading Matthew Yglesias’s blog post today on class-based affirmative action, which is an issue I’m interested in generally because it has had a direct impact on my life–well, maybe. Sort of. This is a not-quite Aquarius, not-quite Pisces moment, folks. An in-betweenie, equivocating, hedge-betting, KINDA SORTA MAYBE, JUST LEAVE ME ALONE AND LET ME THINK kind of moment for me. Right, so. Done with the thinking part. Anyway, was reading Yglesias’s blog post and the flashbacks started (ever notice that Taylor Swift is OBSESSED with flashbacks?).

Let me explain. Dad, mom and step-dad are college drop-outs; stepmom is a college grad. I function as an only child. In sum, there were four adult incomes supporting me throughout my adolescence and college education. It takes a village, people.

I inhabited this weird space where I lived with my poorer parent and thought of myself as being not very well-off, but because of my dad’s economic and intellectual influence, I got to live a comfortably middle class existence. It was always, always understood that I would go to college.

Have you ever heard of Upward Bound? If not, go read the Wikipedia page, then come back. I’ll wait.

When I was a freshman in junior high, I was invited to join. I felt guilty–did I really *count* as a first generation college student? Were we poor enough?  For years, I was terrified that “somebody would find out” that my GM line-worker dad had remarried and was decidedly Not Poor and then I would have to pay back the program and probably go to jail for being selfish. Hey, my rationality may be weak, but ain’t nothing wrong with my imagination.

As it turns out, becoming a more cynical grown-up has ultimately led me to a more optimistic view of my participation in Upward Bound; I was in the program but not of the program, which meant that they benefited from being able to report my scores as evidence that the program works, while fighting the good fight with the kids whose numbers may not be as strong. I never showed up for tutoring, so the tutor-pupil ratio stayed high.

Aside from tutoring and making speeches and doing the summer-camp thing, Upward Bound also had us devote a lot of time to researching colleges. A lot of time. But here’s the one thing it doesn’t take much research to figure out: there’s college, and then there’s College. Little-c colleges, like Grand Valley or Saginaw Valley or Central Michigan or LCC; those schools have lower graduation rates than big-C College, the University of Michigan or Michigan State.

It has everything to do with status and statistics. By then, I’d noticed that *regular* classes were harder than honors classes (don’t tell anybody, or our entire educational system will collapse). In regular classes, you get ridden hard for bogus reasons; did you fill out your planner properly? Was your handwriting neat enough? Did you remember exact dates, places, names? Who cared??? In honors classes, the gist of it was good enough; creativity mattered, curiosity mattered, I mattered.

At the time, I believed (and still do, though I suppose I could be wrong) that if I went to one of the cheaper, less prestigious schools befitting my station, I’d be doing myself a disservice. I’d be lumped in with the kids who didn’t take honors classes, I’d be in a school where the graduation rates were low, I’d struggle to prove myself daily, and I would probably ultimately fail. Except all of the big-C Colleges in Michigan, the schools for honors students, with the exception of Kalamazoo and maybe Albion, were big universities, where I suspected the same thing would occur: I would be nobody. I needed a small school, and since my step-dad dropped out of K-zoo, I needed one Not in Michigan.

Keep in mind that while my youthful arrogance was abundant, it wasn’t that I was the first person to GO to college in my family, it was that I was the first person who graduated. Nearly everybody attempted college, going to community college and Eastern and Western and Kalamazoo and Michigan State, but hardly anybody had actually made it out with a degree. (It gets complicated when you consider my step-family). Did I think I was smarter than all my family? Well, truth be told, yes, I thought I was MUCH smarter than they were, but I was a teenager–that’s how I was supposed to think. But I also thought that there was something wrong with the schools, that large, state-sponsored, stepping-stone schools had always done my family wrong. So I wouldn’t even look at them; I snapped at anybody who suggested that I should.

So that’s a really, really long way of getting to the point where I can begin to get to the point. Sorry.

I applied to and was accepted at Michigan State University by October 9th of my senior year. At that point, I had to ask myself, “which schools are significantly different from MSU that I would go to them if accepted?” I had to apply to schools that were so different, so undeniably better, that I would have no choice but to attend. I applied to Barnard, Bryn Mawr, and Mount Holyoke. I was wait-listed at Barnard and Bryn Mawr. My pride insists that I inform you that I was eventually accepted off the wait-list at Bryn Mawr so that you will believe that I was very high on the wait-list, but truth be told, I won my high school’s poetry contest, e-mailed my poem to the director of admission, and had an acceptance phone call within two weeks; it had nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with knowing who and how to schmooze.

I was accepted outright at Mt. Holyoke College. The financial aid package was competitive with Michigan State, and it was my stepmom who convinced me to go. I wavered, but she said that she knew me and that I would regret it if I didn’t go to my dream college. I’m forever grateful, though I was fairly unhappy at Mt. Holyoke due to a ferocious case of depression.

Weeks after arriving at Mt. Holyoke, I found out that first generation college students had been the school’s pet admissions issue that year. I concluded my first-generation status was what resulted in my acceptance instead of being wait-listed as I had been at Bryn Mawr and Barnard.

Now here’s the absolute batshit thing about all of this, this white privilege, elite college privilege: I spent most of college in bed feeling sorry for myself, I wrote all my papers in a rush, did maybe half of the reading, and I still got into law school. I graduated in the bottom half of my class at Mt. Holyoke, no honors (my dad cried that day because he was proud; I cried because I was ashamed) and I WAS ACCEPTED TO LAW SCHOOL.

Not a good one, mind you. But still.

It turns out that you will not survive law school if you do what I did; lie in bed all day and think of reasons to hate yourself. Yes, the ferocious case of depression was still raging. Worse, I had a scholarship but was going into a lot of debt. I was about to spend three years in a terrible, awful, horrible place and I wasn’t ever going to have a great career. Tier II law schools do not Supreme Court Justices make. Partners in big firms, maybe, but I was long past the point where I expected that I would be exceptional. I accepted that, of the achievement club, I’m slightly below average; good enough to pay dues, not good enough to be on any committee. I began to believe that there was no amount of hard work that would give me real power, real wealth, that I would always be subordinate to somebody; I would never be able to tolerate the risk of starting my own firm because of that whole “Ferocious Depression and needing insurance” situation, nevermind the crushing student loans debt load.

So I quit.

I moved to DC, where I had last been sort-of happy as an unpaid intern (I saved for years to be able to work as an unpaid intern and still spent a lot of time in bed hating myself), and I took a job that didn’t have anything to do with politics (because what’s the political dream without law school?). It also doesn’t require me to write–I quit law school, telling everyone I wanted to be a journalist, and applied for a bunch of jobs in journalism, had some interviews, but got desperate because student loans were coming due. So I took the first job that was offered to me–not in journalism.  Then the economy happened, and I’m still here.

What a waste. I’m an American. I was built to want more.

Anyway, my point–do I have a point? hard to tell–is that in my experience, Yglesias’s claim about changing Ivy admissions policies and the challenges poor people face is only a little bit true. Maybe. If you don’t expect them to be human. If you don’t expect poor people to graduate from Grand Valley and realize that their options still kind of suck compared to wealthier people. But by that time, they fit into a different socio-economic bracket, and their concerns are harder to get excited about. We’re all unsatisfied and subordinate to somebody.

Final thought: Elite colleges aren’t just about education; they’re about the assumptions you make about the people who attend them: I can’t think of many down-sides to the assumption that you are either smart or related to somebody who is smart or wealthy.

/flashback