I feel a need to justify a few things... Ordinarily, I HATE justifying my decisions and actions, because I don't think anybody is really worth taking a defensive stance, and explaining all the little nuances and intuitions and events that cause me to make decisions just takes way too much time and effort... But this is important.
As you know, I plan to relocate to Olympia, Washington in the beginning of January, to attend college at the Evergreen State College beginning with the Winter quarter.
Because people seem to be relatively uninformed about Olympia, I'll mention that Olympia is NOT the same city as Seattle. Olympia is the capital city, and it is about an hour away from Seattle, which is, to the best of my knowledge, the largest city in the state of Washington. Basically, saying "you're moving to Seattle!" is about as accurate as somebody telling me I'm living in Syracuse, which is about an hour's drive away from Binghamton. So. Just so you know, I am NOT moving to Seattle. First, I can't afford it; second, I don't want to go to school in Seattle; and third, Olympia is quieter, more tranquil, and would generally be a better place for me to move, because I wouldn't be making the transition from small-city to enormous-city all at once. So. That's that.
There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about WHY I chose to do this, and I want to clarify.
I never WANTED to drop out of college to begin with. Family problems, emotional problems, financial problems, and the fact that Santa Fe was so damned desolate and lonely were the reasons I left college. I didn't leave because I couldn't handle the work; I didn't leave because I didn't like school. I left because I didn't like living with cokeheads and I was in a state of despair much of the time I was there -- for various reasons. If you're interested in why I left, I suggest you read the archives of this journal from the beginning until about May or June of 1999.
In many ways, Santa Fe was very good for me. The classes were WONDERFUL, for the most part. And the school's general philosophy on education was wonderfully uplifting. I don't LIKE education that's "goal-oriented." I don't LIKE the idea of schools that you're just trying to "get through." I LOVED it when I'd leave a class feeling like I knew absolutely fucking nothing. I loved being filled with questions instead of walking back to my dorm room with a stack of study-sheets to memorize for the next test. I liked the professors that made me WANT to think. They got me hooked on wanting more insight. From the moment I left school, I wanted to go back. Just not to Santa Fe.
The urge came back to me, full-force, when I met Norman. Norman, in many ways, is very similar to some of my professors at CSF. He sat me down with a couple of books and said, "if you want more, I got it." So I devoured a nice little section of books on his shelves. Well, a nice little section considering I didn't read much of ANYTHING for a long time before we met. And the desire to go back to school only intensified when I struck up a nice regular correspondence with Brian, whom I met in Santa Fe, who is now attending college in Seattle. He made me jealous in a lot of ways; talking to him, I really MISSED school, even if he was just griping about the workload or whatever.
In June of this year, I contracted mononucleosis. I lost my job. I COULDN'T go back to work. Norman's and my relationship was sort of rocky. In June, I was about as weightless and groundless and insecure as a person CAN be without actually being homeless and doing the drifting thing. And the idea of waiting a month or two, and going out to hunt for another entry-level, low-paying, mind-numbing job did not appeal to me. I thought, I deserve better than this. But how does one GET a good job in the field of one's choosing when one has very little formal education? I couldn't get a teaching job, obviously, because I have no training, even though I've done some tutoring in my life (for FREE, mind you...) and I think I'm pretty damned good at it. I couldn't get an editting job, even though I think I'd be pretty good at that. Basically, I'm not QUALIFIED to do ANYTHING other than minimum-wage shit. Rather, I'm not VIEWED as being qualified. Talent means nothing when you have no degree.
But, I don't want to just suffer through a few years of study-guides and tests in order to get a degree and a nice job. I believe that "getting through" school is a waste of time. I believe that certificates and good pay are useless if you don't have your soul involved in it. So, mono-stricken and lying on the couch in front of the TV, I made a decision: I wanted to go back to school -- a good liberal school without so much emphasis on grades and degrees and employment options after school -- and get a degree, and eventually get a job doing something other than waiting tables and such. Once it struck me that I COULD do that, that I wasn't BOUND to anything here -- a job, a lifelong partner, etc. -- that I wanted to learn, and that I wanted an opportunity to do something more important than selling shit to people or feeding stuff to people, there was really no other option: I wanted to go back to school.
I began by asking everybody who reads this journal for their thoughts: where should I go, how do I get financial aid, all that... You all gave me some wonderful responses, and the first thing I did was locate a guidebook of colleges. I looked in its index and wrote down all the names of schools that had a creative writing major.
Clarification: it's not that I necessarily want to MAJOR in creative writing. If I was going to go to a school that had formal majors, (which Evergreen does not), I would likely major in English with a concentration in writing. But every fucking school in the country has an English major. And I figured that if a school had a creative writing major, it was more likely to be fairly liberal and concentrate on the arts and actual LEARNING. Schools that just want to hand you a degree and send you out to get a job do not offer majors in creative writing, because everybody knows writers don't make any fucken money. So, I wrote down the names of all 196 schools in the United States and Canada that offer creative writing majors or concentrations.
A hundred and ninety-six schools. I bought two packs of index cards, and wrote the name of each school on a card.
First, I threw out all the private schools. I just can't afford it. And no amount of financial aid is going to help me enough so that I can go to a $50,000-a-year school.
Then, I threw out all the religious schools. I'd tossed most of them out with the private colleges, but a few still lingered. I don't want to go to a school where my religious views are forced. I don't even want to go to a school where my religious views are important. They are important to me, and they shouldn't make a bit of difference to anybody else.
Then I threw out all the schools with very high student populations -- anything over ten or eleven thousand people. I don't want to be "part of a system." I don't want to be an anonymous number. I DON'T want to go to a school that has a higher population than my fucking hometown. That eliminated a lot of schools.
I threw out all the ones I couldn't possibly afford. I think my cut-off price was about $10,000 a year.
I threw out all the schools that were in downstate New York, or New Jersey. I do not like downstate, and I do not like New Jersey. They're too fast-paced and uncaring for me. I could not be happy like that.
I was left with about thirty schools.
Last, I eliminated the schools that were located in places I just don't think I'd like very much. I do not think I could be happy living in Iowa, for example. Or Minnesota. I grew up with hills in my front yard, and by gahd, I'm going to die with hills in my backyard. I grew up with rivers and streams all around me, and by gahd, I'm going to die with rivers and streams all around me. I grew up with rain and clouds, and by gahd, I LOVE that. I grew up in a small city, and I don't want to live an urban lifestyle. I could not thrive in a desert or on a plain. I like hills and I like water. And I don't like huge cities. So I threw those schools out that were located on Midwestern plains or in large cities.
I was left with seven schools.
I wrote to all seven of them, requesting more information.
The California schools sent me an admissions application that pissed me off beyond belief. It was like one of those SAT bubble cards that you have to fill out with a number two pencil. To CALCULATE your intelligence, you had to follow these mathematical formulae and add your GPA, your SAT scores, and so forth. Pardon me, but my potential is not a NUMBER. My potential is just about infinite. I'm not the smartest person in the world, and I don't have the best grades in the world, but I'll be DAMNED if I'll let myself be limited by a mathematical formula that wants to QUALIFY me with a QUANTITY. That's fucken bullshit. I recycled the California brochures.
There was a school in Vermont that sounded nice, but their brochure sounded kind of pretentious. The school was also located in the middle of the woods, not near ANY towns I'd ever heard of, and the student body was only like, 600 kids. That made me uneasy. I kept the brochures, but I didn't really want to go there.
The Montana school, in Missoula, sounded very nice. It looked very nice. So did the Alaska school, in Fairbanks. They both sounded like the sort of school I was looking for: ambitious, but not in a snobby capititalist way. Intelligent and artsy. Small but not tiny. Both located in small cities and lovely landscapes. But the idea of moving all the way to ALASKA scares the shit out of me. Look at a map of North America sometime. I'd be closer to RUSSIA than to New York state. That's just intimidating. I didn't discount Alaska, because it still sounded better than the Vermont school or the nasty California schools, but I sort of hoped I'd find something else that seemed okay... Montana sounded lovely as well, but I've never been to Montana. I cannot picture it at ALL in my mind. It's as foreign to me as... well, Russia. I didn't throw that one out, either, but I kind of hoped I'd find something else... It's scary to go to a place you cannot even imagine in your wildest dreams. I did that, and I ended up in a desert. The PICTURES had mountains in them, but the pictures are different from the town and the school.
I LOVED the school in British Columbia, in Canada, from the beginning. Their brochure was beautiful, the pictures of the town were beautiful, they sounded like EXACTLY the right school. But upon reading their application guidelines, I found out that there's no way I could realistically go there within one year. You have to get all kinds of citizenship papers and documents. You have to pay hundreds of stupid fees, not only to the school, for being an "international" student (for some reason, I still have a problem considering Canada as another country; I mean, it's like, right THERE, you know?), but also to the U.S. government so that they'll process all sorts of paperwork for you. It's bad enough that the federal financial aid forms want your mother's freaking blood type on their forms; schools in Canada want actual VIALS of your mother's blood. There's so much red tape, it's not even funny. And it's just not feasible. That made me really sad. I've never been to British Columbia before, but it IS only a few hours drive to Victoria, B.C., from Seattle, and I WAS planning to visit Seattle over the summer. Montana was different in that I wouldn't be able to see it before I went there. Anyway, I had to recycle the Canadian school, although I did so quite sadly.
That left three: Oswego, New York; Brockport, New York; and Olympia, Washington. Evergreen sounded wonderful. Brockport did too. I applied to all three. I decided, somewhere in the course of things, that I didn't want to go to Oswego. I don't remember why.
I went to Olympia, and the Evergreen, while I was in Washington, and I loved it. Just LOVED it. It was MY school, immediately.
They accepted me, and the rest is history.
There is the prevailing misconception that I'm planning to move to Olympia to be with Brian. Not so. First of all, Brian doesn't live in Olympia, and neither of us has a car, so it's not like we'd even see each other much. Second, while I love Brian dearly, I don't suppose a relationship with him is possible, and I don't suppose I'd even be really happy if it WAS possible. It IS nice to know I have friends nearby. It's nice to know that if I'm in Olympia and something terrible happens, and I need a shoulder to cry on, I have half a dozen sets of shoulders just an hour away. That is a comfort. It's NOT, however, a reason to move across the country and start school someplace.
There's the prevailing misconception that I chose Evergreen because Norman graduated from it. Not so, although it's WONDERFUL that I got to ask him what I could expect. It's nice to know that a well-adjusted, happy person with a lot of similar ideals to mine, graduated from Evergreen. It's been nice asking him questions like, "hey, which dorm should I apply to live in?" That's been a GREAT help. But it's not a reason to choose a college and move across the country. After all, Aaron really likes Potsdam, and I respect him a great deal, but I don't really think I'd be as happy there as he is. My mom graduated from Binghamton University, and I respect HER a lot, but I KNOW I wouldn't be happy going there. I know LOTS of people I love and respect who have gone to interesting colleges, but I had my criteria, and those schools didn't fit into them. Norman's, by chance, did.
There's the prevailing misconception that I chose Evergreen to be closer to Neil. That's pretty damned dumb, because Neil doesn't stay in one place any longer than it takes to have a cup of coffee there. Plus, even though I love him dearly, I could absolutely NEVER have any sort of nice, normal, satisfying relationship with Neil, because he's a total kook, with a totally kooky lifestyle. And besides, he doesn't live in Olympia either. He too, is an hour away. It will be very nice to be near him, but it's not a reason to move someplace and go to school there.
There's the previaling misconception that I chose Evergreen because it's "Twin Peaks." That's pretty dumb too, because the town where "Twin Peaks" was filmed is... I guess at least an hour away. And gahd knows, while I AM a "Twin Peaks" fanatic, and I WOULD have made the trek out to visit the filming sites even if I didn't have friends within a reasonable driving distance, I would not MOVE someplace because it was in a TV show I liked. I wouldn't want to live in the towns where Twin Peaks was filmed. They're a little too rural, even for me. That's about the dumbest reason I can think of, for moving someplace.
There's the prevailing misconception that I chose Evergreen because it's near where Tom Robbins lives. That's pretty foolish too, because I'm NOT really into the whole stalking thing. I think he mentions Olympia like, twice in ANY of his books, anyway.
I chose Evergreen because it's the kind of school I want to go to. And because it's not in some freakish place like Alaska. Because I think I'm going to like the academic stuff a fuck of a lot. Because the attitudes of the people I saw and met there were EXTREMELY pleasant. Because it made me really, really happy to be there. And because there are all sorts of other perks, like having friends nearby. Altogether, I'm very pleased with my decision.
I don't understand why people keep saying things like: "You're rushing into this." It's not like I just arbitrarily picked a school with a pretty name and set off for another coast.
"Why do you always have to pick places that are so far away?" Because if Evergreen was an hour away, I'd probably STILL choose it. But it isn't. It's far away.
"I hope you're not going there just because of ME..."
No. I'm not. I'm going there because of ME.
That's all. I'm going there because of ME.
I expect there will be no more comments about the reasons I've chosen this school. If there are, you can shove them where the sun doesn't shine. This is my decision. I was well-informed and of sound mind when I made it. I'm pleased and I'm looking forward to this. There will be no more assertions that YOU know better than me what is good for me. I don't care how much you "care" about me. If you cared about me and RESPECTED me, you'd understand that my reasons are valid TO ME. They don't need to be valid for you. This is for me, and I'm happy with it.
Anything further? Good, I didn't think so.
~Helena*
"I've got to live my life the way that's right for me... Might not be right for you but it's right for me..." --Sarah McLachlan