College Withdrawal begins

As I left for college and when I was in college, people would often tell me that college was the greatest time of their lives. Some would recollect fondly on the learning or the emotional growth. Others would grin as they described it with vagaries, though I could almost envision the keggers they were remembering silently. There was, of course, the occasional advice about "hooking up with a lot of girls" because college is the time for that. The people who suggested the latter hadn't actually been to college, now that I think about it.

Pessimist that I am, when I was in college I would often ask recent graduates if they missed college, trying to prepare for the inevitable fallout after college. “Yes...but I don’t miss the tests and papers,” was the common rejoinder. I would chuckle and nod. Yes, that must be nice.

But now I'm done with college....and I miss the papers and tests.

There was something inherently satisfying of trying very hard to achieve a goal and being evaluated based upon my labors. In high school, I would study very hard for the college board tests in order to get into good schools. In college, I would work hard for papers and tests...not because I necessarily wanted a good grade or wanted to get into a great graduate school, but because I wanted to learn the material. This is still true of my learning. But I also wanted the immediate satisfaction—or disappointment—of seeing my work evaluated. Of seeing the fruits of my labor.


I suppose this is why some people go to graduate school and never leave...

There is no longer someone standing over me with a carrot dangling from a stick, encouraging me to learn. Or perhaps there is. I want to maintain my dignity in front of my students, to know the material well enough to answer their questions. This is not so much of carrot in front of a stick as a man with a hickory stick threatening to beat me if I don’t learn and learn fast enough to present to the class I have in thirty minutes. I learn out of fear now.

In my role as a teacher, I expect to see a few small progressions in students. Perhaps a student will learn to craft a thesis. If I’m lucky, a student may see the value in history. Yet I will never see most of the results of my current labors. In fifteen years, a former student might think of me vaguely when he remembers to put a comma before a coordinating conjunction. But the immediate satisfaction—what often keeps me going—is gone. I want to be rewarded, and I wanted to know that there is an end to my labors and an end to my trying to read and write obsessively during my free time (emphasize “trying”). I want to take all the knowledge that my curiosity has led me to accrue and synthesize it into a greater work. I have hopes of writing a novel and publishing poetry and essays...but there is no guarantee. Though they pale in comparison, school tests and essays provided a guaranteed reader and conversation partner—even if only one. I have listeners now....but they don't really listen. They stare mindlessly at the screen and take notes or talk in the background, surreptitiously texting on their cell phones.

How I lost my iTunes Store Virginity

Since it’s inception, I have resisted purchasing songs from the iTunes music store. This is in part because I like owning CDs. The main advantage of CDs is the ability to read the liner notes in their original form. I’m not interested in having the conversation of whether reading from a computer screen is comparable or preferable from reading from a book. It is not. Despite this product. For a more detailed investigation of reading on computers, you can read parts of this. But I’m getting off topic....CDs also provide a sort of insurance policy. I can load it onto my hard drive and still have the original disc in case my hard drive crashes—or if I want to bring it into someone’s car. Yes, yes, you can burn CDs from computers, I know. And truth be told, I have tended to rip CDs from friends, so I suppose I can’t claim that I prefer CDs over MP3s. I don’t want to risk being compared to one of those atavistic hipster bastards that still listens to vinyl despite the fact that vinyl was mostly fazed out before his birth. But I was determined that I was not going to pay for an MP3.

This changed two weeks ago when Radiohead released their brilliant new album, In Rainbows. If you don’t already know, the band decided to circumvent iTunes and sell the album from its website. However, not only was the band selling the album itself, it let the customer set the price. I like Radiohead’s music and wanted to support the band’s new venture, so I put aside my qualms, told myself I was being hip, and purchased the mp3-cd. (Since you’ll want to know: I paid around seven dollars. You can blame my cheapness on a poor paying job or the combination of my Midwestern-Småland-Jewish background. The ultimate in miserly genes.) The downloading was easy, and because I’m a guilt-ridden person, I found I enjoyed obtaining the MP3s legitimately. This was the first step to what happened last night.

The second step was downloading Wes Anderson’s short film, Hotel Chevalier from the iTunes Store, where it was being offered for free. To download the film, I had to create a username, which included surrendering my credit card information to the Itunes store for future purchases.

Yesterday morning, before my first parent-teacher conferences, I found myself reading RSS feeds in an effort to put off getting ready for the coming day. I came across an article about an English guy making his own fan-commercial for Apple, which then saw the video on You Tube and decided to purchase it: Apple Fan's Homemade Ad Goes from YouTube to Boob Tube. I watched his video. Then I watched it again. And again. And again. I wasn’t watching for the slick footage of the iPod Touch, though. What had me glued to my computer with only twenty minutes to shower, get dressed, and get to parent teacher conferences was the song, “Music is my hot, hot sex,” by a Brazilian Group, CSS.

The song was in my head all day as I talked to twenty sets of parents. The phrases which I no doubt repeated dozens of times—“The big problem is an attention to detail,” and “vocabulary quizzes are killing the grade,”—were layered over the commercial’s opening guitar riff. After conferences were over, I was determined to hear the song again.

Now normally I would turn to my Swedish friends at the Pirates Bay, but the crazy filter here at the school would most certainly block the site. I don’t even want to try. After being blocked from Twitter, Facebook, The Best of Craig’s list, Vanity Fair, MySpace (I linked CSS on good faith), and seemingly every art site that I would like to visit, a piracy block would almost certainly lead to a direct confrontation with the IT guy.

So I caved in and went to the iTunes store. It was only 99 cents, I reasoned (I didn’t want to by the whole album, which I have a hunch is terrible). I experienced a momentary lapse of determination when I forgot my password, but Apple quickly sent a link to reset it. So I took a sip of the cheap port I was drinking, the after-conference celebration, and purchased the song.

Now here I am the morning after. Though I’ve listened to the song many, many times, I’m not proud of purchasing it. It’s not a great song. Rather, a tawdry version of Le Tigre, a band I find more annoying than anything. The song’s playcount sits at 11. It will probably climb no higher than 20 before never being played again. In the meantime, I’m going downstairs to make some coffee and listen to Bob Dylan, a prayer of repentance.