A Letter to an Old Best Friend (trying to write in my voice)
To my almost 80 year old friend,
I started the spring semester of my Junior year today. Of college that is. Technically it was supposed to start last week, but there was a workers strike because no one gets paid enough these days. I sometimes wonder if they ever did. Anyways, I was 16 minutes late to my first class, an improvement from my first day last semester. I only have two classes on campus this semester and by the time I get to my first the majority of the other students are already leaving. I couldn't witness the traffic on the 10 freeway anymore, not during rush hour.
Whenever I come here it feels like a place just for me, which sounds preposterous because how could I be so selfish around 20,000 other people. None of my friends know this version of me really. My family neither. I don't really have friends on campus. I kind of prefer it that way. I feel like I can alter my personality or wear boring clothes with no makeup and feel completely comfortable. For some reason I have a hard time doing that at home, even if I am alone in my apartment. Maybe it is because everyone else is primarily dressed normal. Normal in Los Angeles is not normal, I mean normal for the city itself, but compared to any of the hundreds of other towns I have lived, ridiculous. Halloween has always been my favorite holiday, it still is, but Los Angeles is just a huge costume party everyday. I have a hard time telling costumes apart from souls.
Today I went to one of the restaurants on campus that I used to go to all the time and spent $8 on frozen chicken tenders. I just don't trust much of the other food they serve. It looks normal, something about it just resembles the plastic food I pretended to cook when I was six. I sat there and read for an hour between classes and really felt at home. Following this trivial step by step guide to life has a way of making you feel like you're worth something when your creative endeavors are slowing down. Just me, my book, and a bunch of normal people slightly younger than me with awkward jaws and beat-up sneakers. Normal is not an insult by the way - just an observation.
Being past the age of 22 in college makes me feel like I am aging at a more rapid rate than I really am. I don't have this insufferable way of viewing the other students, slightly envious because aging feels wrong. I don't know if it is because the men that I sometimes want to validate me look at me differently than they did 2 years ago or if it is the four isles of skincare at the grocery store that hold empty promises of anti aging. I know I look like I fit in just fine walking half a mile from the parking garage to my class, but I can't help but feel as if I slightly don't belong in this pond.
My professor requires one book for each class. I have the same professor for both classes. The books he requires, he wrote both of them. It slightly feels like a scam since I already paid an unreasonable amount of money for a mediocre education. Who knows, maybe he will be wonderful. I enjoyed my old community college a million times more than my current university. One of my classes is Multimedia Journalism; he somehow made it a class about drones? I think that is exactly what to expect from a middle-aged man going through a midlife crisis who wants others to share his hobbies. That was kind of mean. An assumption too. I don't think I am wrong though.
I miss you,
Sosana