It's early December, the last week of classes in UMaine's fall semester. Only the next two days and finals next week to go before this one's in the can. It's not going to be another 4.0 performance, but I don't think I'll bring too much dishonor to my clan.

20 years ago things were a bit different. In early December 1991, I was a computer science major at WPI, the original Undocumented Features had been out for around six weeks, a second installment was in the works, and I was just beginning the academic self-destruction that would see me slinking away from the Institute in disgrace the following April. I didn't know that yet, of course. As Term B-91 wrapped up, I figured I still had everything pretty much under control.

I think it was around this time, though, that I first started getting the faintest inkling of a premonition that the fiction writing might not be the most efficient use of my time in the collegiate setting. That, or I was just getting fed up with the process. I distinctly remember attempting to quit at one point in late B-term and Zoner talking me out of it.

I used to have the cassette from my answering machine at that period kicking around. I'd saved it because it had two truly outstanding recordings on it. On one side was a series of increasingly drunken, irate messages I'd received one night in early A-term from some guy who was trying to reach the girl who'd had my phone number the year before. (In those days at WPI, you had to make your own arrangements with NYNEX for phone service in your dorm room, but they had a pool of numbers they kept recycling for those purposes, so it wasn't unusual to get a number that had belonged to some other dorm dweller the previous year.)

The first was angry but reasonably coherent:

"... What? 'Gryphon'? Who the fuck is that? This is Charlene Harrison's* number! Get the fuck outta here, ya losah!" ( beep)

Then there were a couple of hang-ups, a couple of mostly unintelligible ones that seemed to have been made from a very crowded room, and finally one with a quiet background and a deeply slurred, despondent voice carrying with it all the flagellant self-loathing of the drunken college boy who has failed to score with the girl he got a phone number off of the previous year:

"Gryphon. Jesus. You're such a fuckin' jerk, I mean, what're you doin' with your fuckin' life? You sound like - I bet you're one of those narrow-minded fuckin' Wedge Rats, I mean, why don't you just kill yourself before you fuckin' meet somebody? You fuckin' asshole." (beep)

So that was Side 1. I always thought it was particularly ironic that he was encouraging me to "kill [my]self before [I] fuckin' meet somebody," in a message he had to leave because, while he was getting drunk and not scoring, I was... out. Somewhere. With people.

Anyway.

On Side 2, I had a message from Zoner that he left while I was on my way back to Morgan 401 from E7, where he'd just finished talking me into not abandoning our creative endeavors. It is for the most part a typical Zoner voice mail, in that it's kind of rambling and he tends to wander off the beam and then come back and repeat the main point a couple of times, but it's marked by one crowning digression:

"... anyway, thanks for keeping it up with the story, I really appreciate - WILL YOU STOP PUTTING HOLES IN THE MATTRESS WITH THAT KNIFE!!"

"I'm SORRY!"

"...... anyway, I really appreciate it, and I'll, uh, I'll see you tomorrow... "

The other voice, shrill with apology, was that of Erik Swimm, who had been engaged in the standard E7 recreation of hurling throwing knives at a cardboard box set up on the apartment's hideously disreputable Hide-a-Bed sofa, but, being Erik, kept missing the box, or hitting it with the wrong end of the knives, such that they would bounce off, fall, and stick in the mattress instead.

Thinking back on that message and the circumstances surrounding it, I can still picture the late, wintry fall of 1991, how it closed in around the campus, and how I spent it going back and forth from my room to E7 to the Wedge to DÂKA to E7 to the Wedge to my room, and not all that often to class. That was the semester I took a Scheme programming class that I ended up NRing for no discernible reason. I went to class... occasionally... and did the homework... for the most part, so I probably would have passed, except... I didn't make it to the final.

I wish it to be borne in mind at this point that I did not drink at WPI. At all. I managed to blow the whole show without ever once getting drunk, dropping acid, smoking dope or snorting coke, none of which would have been hard to arrange. I came to my academic probation the honest way, by just... skiving off work a lot of the time.

In this case, though, I still don't know what happened. I studied for my Scheme final, I set my alarm, I went to bed at a fairly reasonable hour. I had had much later nights than that one. My final was at 11 AM and I was in bed by... oh, 3 AM at the latest. This was no big deal at all for me in those days.

And yet, I didn't wake up until 2 o'clock that afternoon, and then only because my RA, informed that my alarm had been going off since 10:30 and that I'd failed to respond at all to a fire alarm test in the building around noon, had decided that I was probably dead and used his passkey to come in and check. I wasn't, but my Scheme grade was. I didn't even go talk to the prof. What could I possibly have said to explain that? Even today I don't know how it happened.

That was still a couple of weeks in the future on the night that message was left, though. At that point I still thought everything was pretty well squared away. I'd seriously considered cutting back on my all-consuming extracurricular time sink and tending to my scholastic business instead, and... decided against it.

What a twat.

Fast-forward to 2011, on the brink of 2012. I'm back in school with less mental bandwidth than ever, fully and paranoiacally aware that this is my last shot at the big time. My parents are approaching their sixtieth birthdays. Won't be long before I'm supposed to be looking after them, and that's if nothing goes wrong. If I don't finish some sort of degree that can lead to a career, as opposed to the series of vocational errors my working life has consisted of to this point, I'm screwed and conceivably so are they.

Which is all by way of explaining why the 10th anniversary of Wounded Rose went by earlier this year and nothing special happened, why the 20th anniversary(!!!!!) of Undocumented Features went by around six weeks ago and nothing special happened, and why, well, in general nothing special is happening. I'm over here doing really unexciting stuff, like trying to pass physics and being crap at math (those two things really don't go together), and fighting an unending parking war with a couple of visiting-faculty members, and working in the tool crib. When the work is all done, I haven't got the mental bandwidth for much of anything else.

Ye gods. Still an hour and 40 minutes to go in this lab shift...

[I'm out now, safely bunkered down for the night in the spare room at my dad's place despite the rain's best efforts to put me in a field somewhere, and fixing a couple of typos. One more work study shift, tomorrow afternoon, but I'm only there from 2 to 5:30 because I have to go to physics lab at 6.]

--G.
* not her real name
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I did something very similar in my first semester of graduate school, simply because it was my first time away from home and I was too busy learning to live to pay attention to mere classwork. Fortunately, partway through the semester I landed a job based on my undergraduate scores, and I escaped the consequences I probably deserved.

Do what you need to do; we'll be waiting when you get yourself un-buried. And if there's anything we can do to help, don't be afraid to ask.

To be brutally honest, though...What I want the most is to survive with my GPA intact through Next Thursday. If I can do that, I'll deserve all of the sleep I plan on enjoying! Not to mention the four glorious weeks of Skyrim adventuring I've been putting off to be a good boy.

Congrats on the milestones, by the way. Cheers!

----
Now Playing:
The Gap Band -- Burn Rubber (The Gap Band III, 1980)

< THIS SPACE FOR RENT >

All I can say is good luck and I hope you recover quickly. Real life is real life, and has a habit of screwing up the best plans. Believe me, I know. B-(

Craig

----------------------------
IAMTW-Nominated Author

Author of the Battletech Novels, Icons of War,
Elements of Treason: Duty, Elements of Treason:
Opportunity, and Elements of Treason: Honor

Co-author of Four Outcast Ops
novels -- African Firestorm, Red Ice, Watchlist, and
Shadow Government.

Author of the The Russia-Ukraine War Factbook (Vol 1)

And good luck to all those who are still pushing through that last bit of classwork on to finals week! I -don't- miss that part of the college experience at all.

------------
~If you want my input the red explosions are really pretty and if you did enough you might live for a few more excrutiating seconds

My not so humble contribution to cyberspace

I missed completing one part of my own degree because I mislabelled my timetable. I thought the exam was in the afternoon... but it was in the morning. Whoops.

Fortunately I was far enough along that the University generously allowed me to take an additional course the next year to bring my credits up.

Do what you have to do, and we'll be here when you get chances to share with us. Otherwise, good luck, try to have some fun along the way, and Merry Christmas. :)

My first year (and collegiate career) weren't entirely that messed up. But it was close. I'd escaped - escaped the insanity at home (although I didn't really understand it was insane), escaped the dead-end town (that it was a dead-end I'd know since second grade and had been trying like a dog on a choke collar to flee for most of my life), escaped the expectations (I was at college, I could be, do, ANYTHING) that were going to try in four years to take me back to all that I loathed. I was damned if I was going back. But that first taste of freedom...

Any wonder that I lost my head? Like you, I didn't drink, I didn't smoke, I didn't do drugs, barely did boys, and didn't take up obnoxious addictions (like early Doom and telnet based gaming). I did start watching anime (once a week, and upon suffering of the 3rd year with the tapes). Instead I got drunk on the people, the ideas, the reading...and made what was to prove, over and over again, a fatal mistake.

I overloaded my class schedule with my _ideal_ schedule - as if I was Marie Curie, Archimedes, Octavio Paz, and James Joyce in one little 5'2" package, rather than some scrapy kid from a second rate public high school. I took three honors classes (should never had been in them) and another final on the same day (this is, btw, was against school policy, but at that time it didn't leash undergrads, much less intervene when they did something _incredibly_ stupid). I realized in the reading period (all two days of it, another anachronism I understand is long gone from my alma mater) that I was screwed, which is why I made the 2nd fatal mistake that near destroyed me.

I didn't ask for help. So when I woke up late, the morning of my FOUR finals, I found my roommate had let me sleep in, and that my first final has already started.

I'm not athletic, which is why someone must have found the picture of a chubby undergrad, clad in only sneakers, a plaid night gown, and a serape sprinting through two feet of snow across campus with a TI-85 and blue books clenched in one hand, and pencils/pens in the other, hilarious. All I remember is the snow, the cold, and the sudden teleportation to a science room with 150 of other students and a broken desk.

Amazingly I did well in three of the finals; I don't remember much about that first final other than the terror in my heart. I came home with a C, bunch of Bs and A. I expected kudos for my achievement - miraculous given the situation - and got nothing but got nothing by shit from the fam. I returned for the next 3 years, no wiser, because I repeated the same pattern (sans the sprint-at least I learned from that!) again and again.

>Fast-forward to 2011, on the brink of 2012. I'm back in school with
>less mental bandwidth than ever, fully and paranoiacally aware that
>this is my last shot at the big time. My parents are approaching
>their sixtieth birthdays. Won't be long before I'm supposed to be
>looking after them, and that's if nothing goes wrong. If I don't
>finish some sort of degree that can lead to a career, as opposed to
>the series of vocational errors my working life has consisted of to
>this point, I'm screwed and conceivably so are they.

When I turned 30 and went to grad school, terrified I'd fuck it all up again, this is exactly what I was thinking. I had clawed my way into a good job in the financial services industry, but it was 2005 and, dude I could see it coming. So I knew I had to get out or get buried.

I did fuck up some of the classes that first year - a full time job + full time grad school = bad idea - but I'd learned to ask for help. And that, as the poet says, made the difference. Maybe I don't have the highest gpa of my grad program, but my thesis made honors and I landed a job that is proving to be the launching pad for a complete new career.

I'm only an MA but a published author (usually 4th or 5th) in top tier journals in my field. My first, first author publications just came out this month. I've been producing about 1 paper/report a month for the last six months. And I'm expecting our first child early next year. When I get back from maternity leave (if I don't screw the pooch between now and birth) I should be in better professional position than ever. At 37. About 17 years later than I should have been if school had gone right, and if I'd known then what I knew now.

As they say, you never can tell.

t.

{author's note: I feel like I've told this story before on the Forum. I wonder how much has changed in my memories between then and now. Hope I haven't bored y'all if this is a repeat -t.}

Trigger Argee
Manon, Maccadon, Orado, etc.
Denton, never leave home without it.

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." - HST

No worries. In spite of the times when the Muse jumps on your back and starts chewing your ear off, EPU isn't your life, and I'm perfectly happy to wait until you have time to spare.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

Sal, the one-man teacher you puts his lessons on YouTube, has videos for just about everything it seems. Nearly everything in math worth knowing (from basic addition to differential equations and statistics) to the major sciences, art history and more.

I used some of the videos recently to remember statistics for a class project.

Anyhoo, take care and good luck!
---
Chris Stevenson

Finally a temp position finally lead to be hired fulltime. Just a factory job, but at least I have a chance at a pension now.

As others have said, real life has to come first (if for no other reason than that you can't post stories if your power or internet services are cut off. *grin*)

-------------
Lead me not to temptation, for I can find it myself.

Wound up back in the same department I left to go back to uni, but I was right about doing better for myself - they moved me to Canberra!

I'm loving that this thread is an echo chamber of folks who picked themselves back up and smashed (or are in the process of smashing) out a degree later on. I don't think I was ready for uni at 18, but I sure as hell was at 23 and it was an amazing experience.

The sad thing is, you're doing better than I am.

�They planned their campaigns just as you might make a splendid piece of harness. It looks very well; and answers very well; until it gets broken; and then you are done for. Now I made my campaigns of ropes. If anything went wrong, I tied a knot; and went on.�
-- Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington

William
"This too shall pass."

Dude,

Next semester, if you want me to do your physics and math homework so you have time to write UF stories, just say so. I'll even give you my discount rate. I get up to Bangor every now and then.

--Charlie

PS, Happy New Year!