GUEST COLUMNIST: The people you'll meet

The last class I ever took at college ended 10 minutes late, in a series of interminable, uncomfortable fidgets. For 10 minutes longer than he should have, the professor droned about the aims of his course and what he hoped we had pulled from it. And for 10 extra minutes I shifted in my ergonomic swivel chair, clicked my pen on and off and squirmed. And when it was finally over, I clapped automatically with the rest of the class and rushed out the double doors into the new, rainy twilight, thinking, "Thank God that ordeal is done with." It wasn't until later that I fully realized what had happened: my college career had ended, and I had been glad. Glad to escape the sterile classroom, glad to stop paying attention, glad to be moving again and not just sitting passively as a student. College is over, and now I am a stranger in my own world -- the niche I had slavishly created for myself cruelly dismantled by the natural progression of time. And so I am left with the daunting task of trying to figure out what's next, and just what eight semesters at Penn have taught me. For every day I drift closer to graduation, I recall a whole new set of things that I'd meant to do, from the most mundane chores to the most important of tasks. For better or worse, I have never had sex under the button on the cold, wet red bricks. I have never eaten a cheese steak, or a chicken cheese steak. I have never crossed the compass at 37th and Spruce. I have never pledged a fraternity. And I have never taken a class in the Wharton School. In four years of college, I've never failed a class outright -- a fact I'm sure I have in common with the rest of Penn's overachievers. And, like most of Penn's overachievers, I've never even felt particularly challenged by failure. As I look back on 17 years of formal education, it occurs to me that all of it -- even graduating high school and graduating college -- always seemed like it was a fait accompli from the first. For me, and I'm sure for many others, school was never particularly interesting, or difficult; it was just one of those things I had to get through, like church or visits to the dentist. (Actually, the dentist was often considerably more interesting, thanks to nitrous oxide.) What made school worth going through was all the people who had to be there, getting it over alongside me. Which is why leaving the academic world doesn't trouble me particularly -- it was never a place I lived; I was always just passing through. Passing through on my way to go see someone, or listen to a band or dance to some amplified electronic paean to disco hedonism. Or, alternately, to spend hours fooling with refrigerator poetry or sitting on my Pine Street stoop watching cars go by. The point of this little rant is that I've always cared more about people and their weird, inexplicable behavior than I have about academia. It's people, personalities, experiences that have always motivated me. But before I came to Penn I had never realized it. And for that realization I am indebted to Penn. The fruit of eight semesters at this great university, for me, has been to realize that I'm not interested in talking about text or theory or philosophical debate; I want to be talking to, writing about, looking at, working with and analyzing people and events and trends. Eight semesters at this university have revealed to me the $100,000 punchline: more than anything else I want to go out six nights a week and drink dark ale and dance and gossip with friends and with enemies and not worry about what will happen next. And I want to make a living doing it. Hey, I never said I was a realist. We sat over Fling weekend, three friends and I, the aging culturemongers, discussing just what it all boiled down to. One had a theory: "Small people," he began, "talk about people; medium people talk about things; and great people talk about concepts." And just for that moment, our heads were filled with significant thoughts and theories and uncomfortable philosophical meanderings, and while I can't speak for my friends, to me it felt horribly fake. So I shook those concepts out of my head, and I looked up at them, my beautiful, silly, complex friends, and said, "You know, I think I just want to be small. Medium at the most."

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