Life 101: learning lessons outside the classroom
John Kaizen
It was 9-something in the morning. I was experiencing that quiet
moment between being and nothingness before lecture. My notebook
was out. My pen was uncapped and I was spinning it like the drummer
in a Motley Crue video. I was still half asleep. My brain was still
in its pajamas and the strangest things drifted through my
head.
The professor started disseminating his information, but soon
all the four-syllable words that made him sound so smart faded into
a dull amorphous litany, like a substitute teacher taking roll in
third grade. As I became desensitized to the drone, I pondered this
thought: Do I ever really learn anything in class? (There is more
doodle art in my notebooks than notes.) Is it possible that the
subtleties of higher learning are lost in the real world? Where is
the meaning?
Sometimes it feels as if we are being educated in college for
the sole purpose of being educated. In the last quarter of my
senior year I’m beginning to believe this notion. It seems like the
most important lessons we learn here at UCLA don’t happen in the
classroom, under the palled glow of fluorescent bulbs. My
instruction began on an infamous night on the first Friday of my
freshman year.
It was one of those times when you notice the quality of the
janitorial services a university provides. This bathroom, on my own
dorm floor, had the affectionate aroma of piss, the foul miasma of
mildew. In that state, my mind tended to wander and the dizziness
was more than dizziness. My brain felt like a perpetual motion
device rotating inside my skull with my head rotating in the exact
opposite direction. A sticky cold sweat clung to my body. In the
third stall from the left, I was up close and personal with an
American Standard. I had learned my lesson  the moral of the
story was beaten into my head with the blunt end of a tequila
bottle.
My porcelain comrade didn’t survive the encounter, either. The
blast radius of spewage (including corn, a burrito and Pez)
extended from the front of my Smiths T-shirt, down my forearms,
around the rim of the toilet with just a light mist gracing the
tile of the back wall. The size of those chunks would’ve put any
pint of Ben & Jerry’s to shame. (Oh yes, I was a freshman!)
Between heaves I whispered the mantra, "Never again!" Though I
eventually went back on that desperate promise, it was still the
first lesson in a long chain of studies that defined my college
experience.
Life is a series of these lovely episodes where we are pushed
outside the boundaries of our normal existence and forced to
understand something about how the world and our lives actually
work. College is the same, except it’s a crash course.
Take living with people. There’s a lot that you are forced to
understand about a person when you share a toilet, a closet and a
kitchen. I figured that out last October.
It was a Thursday night. Drunken conversation has a way of
refusing to follow a set path. And the way the conversation went
that night you’d think Mr. Magoo was driving. We were four guys
sitting around the kitchen table drinking beer and tequila.
Conversations degenerated to tasteless jokes, philosophical
masturbation and the sounds of bodily functions. Matt told a joke
that went something like, "Three fags walk into a bar …" And then
everything changed. Two syllables slipped from Ross’ drunken lips:
"I’m gay."
You know when something important happens in the movies, when it
seems like everything is in slo-mo and there’s that single
high-pitched string sound on the soundtrack, as if life is holding
its breath? That’s how it felt. Everything else in the room fell
away and those two words hung between us.
In that moment questions fired through my synapses. How do I
share space with this guy? Is he attracted to me? How does this
change our friendship? I could see it on Hank’s face, and Matt’s
too. Hank said, "Uhhhh." Matt stared into his glass. Ross looked
pensive.
I don’t remember how long we sat there or how the conversation
got rolling again. But it did. And there were a lot of questions
all around. That night was about acknowledging differences not just
in Ross, but in all of us. What he said forced us all to come to
new conclusions about how we relate with our friends. We finished
the bottle of Cuervo and eventually all passed out.
These are the things I remember without the benefit of a
notebook, flashcards, a cheat sheet or discussion group. I figured
this shit out because it is relevant to my life. Every factoid,
every book, every bit of information can be reduced to one
qualifier. Does this make sense to me? If the answer isn’t yes,
then I throw it away (or doodle over it).
Even the littlest things have lessons to teach. For example, you
know Easter is over when the little bin of Cadbury Eggs on the
Smart Mart counter says "Three for a quarter." This is useful
information! These kinds of sign posts are helpful in life. If you
look carefully you can see them everywhere.
Every experience, every day has instruction potential. Life
isn’t about covering the syllabus. It’s about writing your own
course description.
I guess my mind really does wander. It was now 10-something in
the morning. The page in my notebook had since been covered in
doodles. Slowly the drone slipped back into audible focus. The
professor was saying "… to determine the exact nature of the new
criterion of reality which superseded the transcendental one, we
must subject the meaning of the word ideology to a more precise
historical analysis …"
Kaizen is a senior majoring in ethnomusicology with an emphasis
on songs sung blue. Send e(go)-mail to LSMFT0 (that’s a zero)
@AOL.Com.