The roommate query via text message: an alien vibration but familiar question behind a duct-taped keypad.
So I'm a bit overdue for my senior year (cough, three weeks). In fact, I haven't hit up campus since December 2007. And I did just touchdown in Dulles International Airport yesterday three skin tones darker and transporting a potentially illegal satchel of wooden safari animals and a tooth plucked off an impala skull jawbone.
But here I am Durham! Here I am, Duke-back again from the African wilds and New Zealand vistas for two remote hours and already incapacitated by the sinking sensation of soul-consuming dread. Here I am, back to real minute-by-minute life: woohoo.
Technically, it's back to "non-real life"-the envied days of collegiate clubs and classes and camping out in front of Cameron. But it's sans the giddy relief of being college-free. My years on campus have been a flitting phantasm-a blurred mirage of blue and buildings used to shade in the gaps between real life away from Duke-real life thanks to Duke.
And the truth is I can't remember how to be a student.
There was an old-man time when I marveled in the musty pages of academia and Perkins' faux-antiquity, when I stocked up on dry Victorian literature and disillusioned American poetry in stacks solitude. There was a semester when I took masochistic pleasure in whipping up environmental policy memos until finger arthritis loomed and my contact prescription rocketed from -5.75 to -7.00.
And before that, I joined the league of aspirant scholars-boxed up and booted to college toting a hefty check and the expectation of formatting life beneath the almighty major declaration. But now as a gray and grizzled senior, it dawns on me that we students abide by something of a ludicrous arrangement. We're given one hazy year in one scholastic setting to configure the course and courses of our ambitious futures. We're given three years to sculpt our cognitive awareness into something that resembles a professional intellect. Indecision-the academic flip-flopper-is sentenced to undergraduate inadequacy (or graduate school absolution) where English majors who fancy pre-med their third year are akin to post-menopausal women shopping for bassinets. No wonder so many cling to campus, refusing to relinquish their grasp on the last remnants of humanly freedom before here and now is supplanted for a ten-year health insurance plan.
But work-party-student body shenanigans aren't enough to assuage the stabbing reminders of imminent responsibility. And even a Chapel-height perch doesn't permit a contemplative reimagining.
What I learned about myself, I learned outside of campus in down-under hemispheres and scattered time zones. And though I barely exist to Duke as an enrolled student, though 19 students might recognize me via faint hallucinations of freshman Focus, I maintain this counsel for the dazed and confused: Leave campus, gain perspective.
Because beyond this metropolis of petty details, this color-coordinated (but categorically unique) land of automatons thriving on the mini-reality that is University-living, big bona fide life ebbs and flows in unsystematic incidence, unsupervised by DSG or the Office of the University Registrar.
I'm the self-professed poster child of Duke International-the wannabe mascot happy globe that rolls down the BC walkway walloping undergraduates with vivid brochures of transnational arts and culture.
My suggestions: Weasel your way into a legit movie production company where you can barter slave labor for a true Hollywood experience. Check off Environmental Science credits in the celestial valleys of Nelson Lakes, New Zealand. Make the savannah your workplace, the rhino and zebra your colleagues. Teach Zulu children about elephants on Wednesday; hunker down in a reversing 4x4 to let a Maputaland male tusker pass on Thursday. Cross the Mozambique border on foot. Talk history with the local Rastafari. Clear invasive guava trees with a machete. Join a bush course in indigenous herbology.
That was my undergraduate OMG drama. Overcome the financial pretext and major-specific restrictions-at Duke there is a way: Find it. Why go Greek when you can go to Greece?
Don't get me wrong, I love Duke and being a Duke student. But what I love most about Duke is its capacity to let us go-to dispatch us outside the furious flurries of this collegiate shaken snow globe and exhort experience.
Janet Wu is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Friday.
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