After high school I marched on to Purdue. Tens of thousands of dollars (and almost as many pizzas) later I was officially degreed in Computer Science. Simple as that! Nothing else to tell. Okay, not really.
I toddled off to college and for the first time I was absolutely surrounded by people. These things were absolutely everywhere. I lived in the worst student housing on campus, Terry Courts. Built as temporary housing in the 40s these were finally torn down 50 years later. I worked my way through a series of roommates from the drunken ones that weren’t there to the studious ones that actually went to class. The hilarity never stopped, not even for education. Despite the innumerable puerile amusements in which I took part I’m at least vaguely proud to say that I never had a drop of alcohol in college. Now I did freeze hockey pucks of ice and shoot them under the neighbor’s door at the end of the hall and call my own room and let the phone ring 300 times to wake the hung-over neighbors but these things were done in a spirit of complete sobriety.
When I wasn’t harassing the neighbors I spent much of my time just enthralled with all the people. I was star-struck by the fact that I could sit on the corner and watch hundreds of people walk by. Even more stunned that I could strike up a conversation with one of them and by my demeanor look like a total and complete weirdo. But the point was that I could do it. There were people here. There were thousands and they each had a story of some sort. Oh the bliss that would be mine if I could get inside those heads and roam around a bit and see what the furniture was like.
Among all those thousands though I did manage to find at least one person who didn’t think I was a complete weirdo. Waltzing through a computer lab one day I saw an appropriate female target for my affections and having been in the computer lab enough to know the layout I quickly discerned her identity. See, this was in the days before ‘security’ concerns. You could to all sorts of subtle tricks if you knew what you were doing. Anyway, one simple UNIX ‘talk’ request later and I had a date and later a girlfriend. I even went so far as to go home with her to
Not long after my return after the summer it was becoming increasingly clear that she and I had learned just about all we could from each other. At least that’s now I saw it. One day we sat down to have a serious talk and while she was expecting a ring I delivered a break-up speech. I’d say that overall it was not one of the moments in my life when I did job of setting expectations. Anyway, as always happens in these situations animosity eventually ensued and we don’t speak today.
Not long after that unpleasantness, I met the woman who was to become my wife. This was also accomplished the aid of a computer and the primitive predecessor of the modern chat room known simply as ‘The Haven.’ I won’t bore you with all of Haven history but for a really dumb trivia game sometime you may wish to know that I was known by the pseudonyms ‘Granite’, ‘Tigger’, and most amusingly ‘The Celestial Knight’ on this epic waste of time. I completely fail to recall what my future wife and I talked about on the Haven that first night but it was less than a day before we met ‘in real life’ as it’s called.
I strolled over to her dorm the next day, she lived in the new and posh Hillenbrand. When she stepped out of the front door I just about fainted. There I was with my shaved head, my velour shirt and my skin-tight pink shorts facing a girl who was unbelievably attractive. My first thought was, “I am SO out of my league.” She was absolutely everything that my ex-girlfriend wasn’t. She was attractive; she was assertive; she was intelligent and she had a driver’s license. What more could you want in a woman? We saw each other every day after that and have done so pretty much every day since. I still think I’m out of my league but I’m careful not to tell her that.
Shortly after that my academic irresponsibility finally caught up with me and Purdue asked me to go off into a corner and take a break for a while. I, Purdue reasoned, had other things on my mind and needed to get my stuff together for a while. Of course it was correct in its assessment. During my tenure there for the first few years I’d guess that I attended about half my classes. As such my grades were utterly rank and it was clear that I wasn’t really applying myself. After a semester off in the most abhorrent apartment I could have possibly conceived of I came back to Purdue with a renewed determination to actually graduate. When I came back I tried some things I’d never done before. I went to classes... all of them. I did the assigned work. I made a half-hearted attempt to study but it wasn’t really necessary. I was stunned at how laughably simple college was when you actually did what you were supposed to. I sometimes wonder where I’d be if I’d actually applied myself to college the first time around. But I was too busy with other things; for one, trying to figure out these people that there just seemed to be so many of in the world.
Currently
Periodic Robism: No institution of any size was ever devised that did not have as its fundamental purpose the movement of money from one party to another.
