But, Oddly, I Got an A in Existentialism

I needed to get an official copy of my transcript for this job-hunting nonsense. It took a while because my transcripts are from an era so far back in the mists of time that the records are still on a paper. Someone has to wake up an old monk who must light a taper and make his way through the dusty vaults below the university. He then carefully thumbs through the ancient and illuminated texts until he finds the required text. Then he must make his slow way back out of the vaults and hand over the delicate paper, sepia-toned with age, to one of the young things who will then prepare it for translation.

How else do you explain it taking over a week to get a document housed in a place only 10 miles from where I now live?

Anyway, I have it now and can get on with the business of getting business but I did take a moment this morning to peruse the document.

I sure wasted a lot of time in college.

Oh, my grades were decent enough. I'm graduated with a 3.18 GPA. That's pretty good, considering how half-arsed I was in my approach to most things academic. You can easily tell, for example, that science was not a great love of mine but I never got anything lower than an A in any writing class. It's my course work in Literature that's spotty and it makes me a little sad. Really, I should never have gotten anything less than an A in a lit class. The whole reason I majored in English was so I could read all the time. I loved discovering new authors, actually thinking about and discussing the themes, writing witty and insightful analyses. Seriously, I did. But man, sometimes I managed to slack off, too. When I think of some of the professors I had, the amazing thinkers they were, the challenges they set before me and how I, in my youth and arrogance, gave 'em an intellectual shrug and a "whatever", how I phoned in so many papers because somewhere in my mind I decided it was ok to wait until the last minute and settle for a B than work hard and go for the A.

And it wasn't, you see, the A that was the issue. It was the attitude. The carelessness. The failure to recognize that this collegiate experience was, in fact, a gift and that at no other time ever again in my life would I have the sort of opportunities that were daily spread before me. It was, I fear, a little like going to a banquet and saying, "Eh, I'll just have a cup of the soup".

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that such is college life. We all do it. We're becoming adults and college is as much about learning to manage yourself as it is anything else. And you'd be right. Certainly that C- in "Men and Women in 19th Century British Literature" is a classic example of what happens when you don't trouble to manage yourself. But it still galls me a little.

Sometimes I wish I could go back and do bits of it again, knowing what I know now. I wish, at least, that I could go back to Dr. Erickson, she of aforementioned Brit Lit class, and ask for a copy of her lectures so I could see what I missed.