Also wonderful is something I'd always loved but forgotten all about—our Student Union has the only ATM in the known world that actually asks you to "Input Desired Amount in Multiples of $1." Yes, one dollar. It looks like a programming error, but it's totally for real and legit. And it shows such concern for and understanding of the customer base, on the part of the financial institution responsible. Let me be the first to say that as an undergraduate, it often matters a great deal that you are able to withdraw, say, seventeen dollars instead of twenty. Sometimes twenty is too much. Sometimes ten is. I never actually tried to withdraw a dollar, but I hope that this machine would allow it.
What isn't pleasant is the fact that I no longer can get on the Rust Belt Wireless Network! I don't have an account; as far as this institution's Information Technology is concerned, I don't exist! For somebody like me, this is awful, like losing a limb. Like coming home at night and finding the locks changed. Let me be the first to make the public call for an official Alumnae Login. But anyway, this means that I won't post this till later.
Also, I was dismayed to find that the burger place in the student union that I remembered with guilty fondness was gone--replaced by some salad joint. Called "Croutons." Seriously, Croutons! Now, a lesser satirist would make some hackneyed decade-old point about health-obsessed Americans, as if I couldn't get plenty of other bad food within forty feet of Croutons. But I'll merely point out that you don't win friends with salad.
I hope I'm allowed to address the student body this evening. I have a speech ready.
Kids! Stay in school! I know you think that studying isn't "rad," or "dope." But getting mixed up with drugs and gangs isn't "cool" at all. By the time I was your age, I'd killed six guys. [Pause. Lift shirt, exposing surgical scar from 1978. Wait for gasps to die down.] ...And I'd come within inches of dying myself. But then I learned about a guy, a really Powerful guy, who doesn't care if you're "cool" or not. He's always there for you, and if you need somebody to turn to, well, he's your man.
His name...is Prince. And he is funky. Now do your homework!
Or I could just "scare them straight" about their study habits. I'm a cautionary tale!
2 comments:
"I'm supposed to sit in on a fiction-writing class as an Elder Statesman, which will be fun unless someone lets on to the kids just how little fiction I've written"
I know this feeling--if its anything similar to what I feel everyday when I stand in front of the classroom that I, as a result of egregious error on the part of the administration, have been put in charge of. Four semesters strong as a complete. fraud.
I've been having trouble trying not to be nostalgic about the place I haven't even left yet, a sentiment that has been complicated by our removal from safety in the campus Heorot and placement in the newfangled "ferrari of buildings." And yet, its nice to return. So nice, in fact, that I have been attending classes here for ten years, and I sat in on them with various siblings and parents (we never had babysitters) for fifteen.
Yeah. The night I wrote of was my first visit to the Ferrari Complex. Pretty nice, sure, tho' I couldn't figure out the room-numbering. But I too had a lot of sentimental attachment to the Heorot. I have vague 1970's memories of the place, too, tagging along with my mother and aunts. (Though, oddly or not, I remember the big pedestrian ramps in the Union much better. Those must have been quite new at the time.) And it's such a landmark in this town; it sort of meant something to have it as my unofficial headquarters, if only briefly.
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