With four hours sunk into the alumni association, in what may be the most substantial donation my alma mater will ever shake out of me, I’ve decided to redefine what it means to give something the old college try. Previously I had set the bar pretty low–make it through a single event, so went the edict–and now, I’m committed to obtaining my permanent name tag before I call it quits. By that point, I figure, I’ll have afforded myself a bit more data to make an intelligent call.
I’m continually floored by how readily people volunteer for stuff. Who on earth could schedule events through December, then take minutes for a conference call, and then step up to decorate the venue? Jesus. Well, not specifically, since I was invoking more out of sacrilege, though I imagine He could also swing it. But the question stands. Is it love for the school? A desire to please? A pure, unadulterated hatred of free time?
Once again, it brought me back to the classroom. What drove students to raise their hands repeatedly? Sign up for extracurriculars? Produce copious notes? Collect not one major, but two? Actually take advantage of office hours? This kind of motivation was–is–alien to me. My shining moment during senior year, besides striding into a professor’s office to terminate my honors thesis, was when I realized I had cracked the nut on writing papers.
The formula was simple: know your core assertion, add quotes, and then sprinkle on some soapboxes from other professors, where appropriate. The most substantial time savings stemmed from how you collected those quotes. Rather than read a given book, as prescribed by the syllabus, you merely had to plumb the index for pages relevant to your argument. Now, you had to make sure you weren’t citing out of context, but that’s why Amazon reviews, “About the Author” sections, and dust jacket descriptions exist, right? I can’t claim credit for the index trick. I thought I got it from Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book, but the kicker is I didn’t read that book either, so I must’ve heard about it, then proceeded to misuse it.
I’ve been tired recently, marrow to soul, and I suspect it’s caused by a few things. There’s the manufactured extroversion, for one, but more likely that goddamned motorcyclist is to blame. To save you a click, all you need to know is that weather has been dry recently, which means every morning for the last two weeks has been a chance to rev the ol’ hog, like, a dozen fucking times before launch. But with a solid week of inclement weather on the horizon, I couldn’t be happier. I see those thunder cloud icons on Weather.com, nine in a row, and I rejoice over rainfall, like the heathens of antiquity.
Even now, there are faint reminders of the calluses I cultivated from my adventures in golf, each of them a rough, fleshy testament to my particularly violent backswing. But while the battle scars may still be there, my backswing certainly isn’t, nor is my frontswing, my leftswing, or my rightswing. Indeed, any capital I established during my tenure as a terrible golfer has dissipated, leaving me the very embodiment of tabula rasa, with apologies to John Locke. Unless, of course, you enjoyed golf as much as you did philosophizing, Locke, in which case fuck you.
The last time I had any meaningful exposure to the sport was in Augusta–a different job, a different era, and, at the time, what I thought would be a fitting capstone to my dalliance with golf. I mean, even haters aren’t immune to the splendor of the Masters. My own clubs would languish in the hallway closet, never to see sunlight again until, hundreds of years later, archaeologists would unearth the entire set, minus the 3-iron, and marvel over what purpose these misshapen bits of metal could’ve possibly served. Weaponry? Implements of torture? I would tell them yes, yes to both counts.
It doesn’t look like these clubs will have to wait for centuries, though, because they’re going to see the light of day next week. And I suppose I’ll have to join them at the range, where I’ll be meeting the Professor for the first time in months. Truth be told, I’ve been secretly thinking about getting back into the game for a while now. It’s a skill that continues to be notably absent from my corporate toolkit, but as much as I’d like to fill that gap, the road to proficiency is painful. The plan is to approach golf from a different, calmer angle. No more violent backswings. The way I see it, I’m not going to invest time or money in a postgraduate degree, which frees up two years and a small fortune to pool into a wholly different kind of education. Let us call it a cross-disciplinary competency in walking a lot, swinging at shit, and anger management.
Against my better judgment, despite every inkling to turn tail and run, I signed up for the programming committee, driven by some vestigial notion of duty. Be assured that raising my hand was in direct contravention to my standard operating procedure, which is not raising my hand, then disappearing. So why did I do it?
It certainly wasn’t a keen sense of optimism that drove me to action. Let me paint a likely trajectory for you. There will be reply-all strings about 20 e-mails deep (already happened, so I’m cheating here). There will be sporadic attendance at the in-person meetings. There will be a last-minute crush when the inaugural event nears, as people try to wrest time from their normal lives to pool into a blatantly manufactured community. There will be the actual event, followed by a sigh of relief. And then the cycle will repeat, over and over, as long as a quorum of members retains the wherewithal to meet for reasons unfathomable.
When you think about it, that’s the ultimate purpose of an alumni association, is it not? To foster a community that in turn fosters donations. You may already be privy to my decidedly grim view of higher education: namely, that it is one of the few products known to man that calls for you to continue paying, even after you’ve paid in full. Additionally, participating in these events also carries with it a strange vibe, kinda like how you’re that one guy who’s long since graduated, yet is unable to stay away from campus.
But I’m intent on at least making it through the kick-off event. I’m trying to infuse myself with the spirit of possibility here, rather than pessimism. Maybe I could be somebody who wouldn’t even think to write the preceding three paragraphs, a content worker bee, happy with my piece of the hive. Maybe I could be somebody who celebrates the notion of a shared alma mater. And maybe I could be somebody who isn’t compelled to squash content worker bees.