seeing red

My boss is taking a vacation day, so I'm at work, despite the fact that I feel like total crap, have a fever and chills and wish I could just be home in bed.

So, I will comfort myself by rambling randomly along on my blog….

I recently had an annual physical with a new primary care physician, and she asked me a ton of questions about my health and my history... routine fare, of course, but as I was answering 'no' to all her questions, I found myself thinking again about why it is that I've never once been tempted to try drugs or cigarettes, why I don't find stories about the antics of drunk people very funny, why I feel uncomfortable in bars. Through the years, there have been people who have concluded that I must have a prudish, puritanical conscience that won't allow me to 'let go' and 'have fun'. But really, my dislike of all things druggy stems from the fact that I was brought up in a 'drinking' college town, and that I developed, at a very early age, a hatred (and I don't use that word lightly) towards out-of-control college students and all that they stood for. And this, of course, includes all substances, legal and otherwise.

The students wander around Oneonta in packs every evening when the weather is good (every weekend when it's not), breaking off the tops of our picket fences, having loud arguments at 2am that wake up the whole street, walking through everyone’s yards, trampling flower beds in their drunken urgency to get from one party to the next. They throw down cigarette butts everywhere, leave empty plastic beer cups and bottles on your lawn, smash empty gin bottles on the sidewalk. Furthermore, they do unconscionable things like adopting kittens in September, keeping them for the academic year, and then putting them out on the street when they leave to go home in May, having no more use for them.

And the worst part, from my perspective growing up, is that they were old enough to know better. I was six, and I knew better. I could not understand why anyone 3 times my age would know less than me, and why there would be so many of them; more and more every year, and none of them ever learning from their mistakes; none of them ever maturing. (That’s the sad thing of living in a college town; you’re constantly stuck with people at the same maturity level; the students never get older; you never get to see them become mature adults; all you get is a fresh crop of headaches with every incoming class). And it was confusing, because I’d met many of them in person, and I could see that they were decent people at the core, so I concluded that their drinking and partying must have literally caused them to lose their minds, to lose all sense of who they were and what they believed in; I couldn’t think of any other explanation for what I witnessed on the streets at night.

And oh, how I hated everything they did! I hated it when they stole my Big Wheel; I hated it when they took my brother’s stroller and we found it a week later, mangled, and hanging on a street sign four blocks away. I hated it when they cornered my siblings in the park and threw snowballs at them until they were screaming and crying for help. I still hate it, even now, when they keep my father, who gave 31 years of his life to teaching and counseling them, from being able to sleep, night after night as spring creeps towards summer, because they’re standing on the street outside his window yelling and arguing with each other.

...And it made me even sadder when I met my neighbor on the sidewalk last week; she was kneeling on the ground, using a power drill to repair her fence; she gestured at the new boards, and then over at a For Sale sign on the lawn, and said "These damn students, they break my fence every weekend, and I just can't take it anymore. We're getting out!" It's just too bad.

Anyway, I vowed to myself, at the age of six, that I would never ever EVER let myself be ANYTHING like any of those students; that I would never let myself lose sight of my real, serious Self and become a rampaging, irresponsible, [drunk], lunatic 'college student'; not even for one minute. And, to date, I’ve kept that vow.

(I will leave for a subsequent entry my discourse on the irony of what I do for a living.)