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2005-04-25 - 4:10 p.m.

A friend of a friend of a friend emailed me the other day and her girlfriend (are you keeping track of all this?) in her early 30s was just accepted to Brown as a resumed undergraduate. They came up here from New York to visit and I met them today. Although the Brown administration seems to have not been very helpful about facilitating her visit, I hope I presented a good picture of college as an older student. I very much hope she�ll come here. (And shouts out to them and our mutual friend who�s apparently reading!)

But I�ve been thinking about my endgame here. I�m older. I�m 31. I�ve started many a new phase in life, gotten many a new job, moved to many a new place. So the prospect of graduation really shouldn�t scare me. But it does very much.

It would be so tempting right now, so easy in my senior spring, to just drink all the time and wonder about the philosophical implications of everything. What did it all mean? But I can�t do that. I have classes to finish. Must stay focused. Must not punk out in the clutch. Eyes on the prize.

Here�s the secret truth: I still have classes to finish from a year ago. Last spring, Alithea broke up with me in the middle of finals. Write term papers? I could barely see straight. I asked some professors for extensions. Brown has a very understanding outlook towards incomplete courses, especially for resumed undergrads. If I were regular-age, my 5 � year relationship would have to date back to early high school. Creepy. But teachers and administrators were pretty sympathetic to me and gave me leeway for up to a year.

Time is now running out. My original intent was to finish my work over the summer, but I was kind of wrapped up over the summer with becoming a full-on gimp. I should have completed things over winter break and I really have no excuse for not doing so. I went to my parents� house with the best intentions and them gone most of the time in Florida, but it was full of ghosts and I couldn�t focus on anything.

I finished one paper of three recently (on the film �Blade Runner� and the novel The Street by Ann Petry) and emailed it to my teacher. He�s a graduate student (I think he�s weirdly younger than me) who�s not around campus anymore. He�s done taking classes and I suspect is back home in Oakland writing his thesis (or smoking pot, more likely). I had a terrible dream that he�d gone to the jungle in Belize where he couldn�t receive email. He emailed me back and assured me this is not the case, but he does need to file some bureaucratic paperwork that he doesn�t have.

On Wednesday I�ll turn in my second final (on the city of Chicago and the concept of masculinity) to the same professor who teaches my gender studies class, �American Masculinities�. Which is definitely my favorite course this semester. I ain�t the Marlboro Man no more (granted, I never exactly was this way, but still). I�ve been thinking a lot lately about what I am. Anyway, hopefully he�ll be able to grade the extended paper soon. Then I have one more (on the contemporary renegotiation of the NYC public school teachers� contract), which I should be able to turn in next week.

Meanwhile, I also have to successfully finish my classes for this semester. In one of them, I�m afraid the gravitational pull of a B is inescapable. Brown has a bizarre �no +/-� policy. This actually makes little difference on your GPA (which the school doesn�t even formally calculate). It�s good if you�re an A- in a class; bad if you�re B+. Brown is generally and perhaps rightly dismissive of grades anyway, emphasizing that the point of school is did you learn something rather than what grade you got.

But this does mean that, based on my previous work and what I know of the professor�s grading policy, any grade I get on my last two papers in �Corporations and Global Cities� between a flat C and an A- means I get a B in the course. This kind of saps any motivation to perform. If I sweat things out, I might get a B+, which will translate as a B. If I slack, I�ll get a B-, which also translates as a B. Sucks.

I�m taking one class pass/fail and I�m pretty confident I�ll pass. And acing my other two classes is not out of reach. I have a lot of work ahead in the next few weeks. Then I�ll be done. I think it was Foucault, or perhaps the Donnas, who said �I don�t wanna wanna go to school no more, no no � gimme that cheeba!�

My first semester here, I took a great seminar on downtown urban development (actually with the same teacher in whose current class I�m inevitably getting a B). We had a short paper every other week. I got back my first one and it was a B+. Not bad; I was encouraged. I wrote the second one and thought gee, this is a great paper, I nailed it, I really know my stuff. Then I got it back. B+. Hmm. I wrote the third and I thought gosh, I didn�t get this at all, this is terrible. B+. Wait a sec.

I went to the professor�s office hours. I said that when I decided to go back to school I had told myself that I was just too old to sweat grades. There was stuff I wanted to learn about and worrying about my grade would just get in the way. And yet� �And yet you found when you got here that grades are actually kind of a big deal,� he finished my thought.

Yeah. (He did go on to explain the three separate reasons I had gotten B+s.) So I know it really shouldn�t matter to me whether I end up a 3.5 or a 3.44. I mean it�s certainly better than when I was 18 and like a 1.2. But there�s that annoying pride factor. If I�m really starting my own business as I�m planning on, who�s ever going to see my final GPA? Who�ll know? Well, I will and it�s hard to shake loose the importance that has to me.

Someone recently said I should just concentrate on multi-tasking to get everything done. But if I�m going to multi-task, I�d rather focus on that girl I had a date with (yeah, she�s the one who reminded me of Bjork, although she actually doesn�t anymore now that we�ve talked).

So, sorry to vent and obsess at you. Graduation is so close, I can taste it. Wish me luck in my final lap here.

� 2005 Geoff Gladstone

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