Fun

It seems like, since I’m in college now, I’ve totally forgotten how to have fun. I’ll admit, I’m not alone, and I’m fairly certain the majority populous, that spends their free time face-deep in a red Solo cup filled with enough spirits to clean the rust off a ’52 bumper are also not doing a very good job at having fun, despite what they might tell you. But that really doesn’t make me feel any better, in the long run. Gone are the days of high-school, when extra-curricular activities and social engagements filled my free time with fun, laughter, and community. Now, I find myself laying on the bed in my dorm room, languishing about how long it will be until the next break, somehow experiencing total amnesia about what “break” actually means, either a summer of work, or a week or two, spent lounging on my bed, cursing the fact that I’m no longer at school with all my friends. Apparently, I’ve got a bad case of “Grass is always greener,” syndrome, and I don’t know when it happened.

I remember in high school, and even somewhat before, I really based my life off of perceived markers in time, and wanting to make it to that next, if you’ll excuse the video game metaphor, “save point.” Usually, these were things like school breaks, major holidays, or even just the next time I was going to hang out with friends. It was all about the race to the next rest, the countdown of days, and the thought of being able to take things “one day at a time.” I’ll admit, this often found me wishing days away in order to make exciting things like school concerts or Christmas come faster than they were, but overall, life always seemed a little bit less stressful when I could break it down into manageable chunks.

In college, time always seems a lot bigger. For one thing, the talk is always about “the rest of my life,” and my “plans for the future.” For the majority of high school, my future concerns were mainly “what’s happening this weekend?” and even when it came time to decide on a college, I was deciding on the next chapter in my life, but not its conclusion. Everything seems so fatalistic in the college setting, so very “enjoy the time you have, because once you’re out of here, it’s ‘marriage, kids, retirement, death!’” I harbor know delusions about this being the truth, and I do truly look forward to everything that I have coming in terms of my future experiences. I just don’t necessarily have a desire to be trying to grasp the implications of what “might be,” while I’m busy trying to get my homework in on time, and remembering to bring my safety goggles to my next anatomy lab, so I don’t squirt sheep brain juice in my eye. It’s not that I can’t handle thoughts of the future, or even want to ignore them. I just find dealing with them difficult among a myriad of other stresses.

As well, at least in my experience, college time is a lot different than real world time. In high school, everything got taken day by day: This assignment will get worked on tomorrow, and then on this day we’re going to do this thing, and you have to be here for this event on this night. Here, the days really seem to blend together sometimes. Class structure is much more nebulous, individually, and each day of the week has its own unique set of classes, so it suddenly takes 5 days to complete a learning cycle, instead of one.

Part of the problem might also be the fact that I live at school, so the work and play times really end up rolling into each other. I absolutely loathe the days that find me with only a few classes, but spaced in such a way that I’ll spend an hour in class, then an hour out, then another hour in, then an hour and a half out, so on, and so forth. It’s impossible for my brain to get into a comfortable relaxation mode for that small time that I have, with the thought of another work period looming on the horizon. In high school, I got up, went to school, had school, and then, when I was done, I was done. Now, I feel like my higher orders of thought don’t trust me, and it’s much harder to shut off and unwind at the end of the day, with some sort of lingering fear that another class is only a few minutes from starting.

I think another major issue, again, at least on a personal front, is the lack of extracurricular activity. In high school, I did basically everything I could manage. Football, pep band, jazz band, spring play, show choir, NHS, SADD, and counted myself as part of a number of other events, projects, and groups, both formal and informal. These were all guided, structured activities that gave me clear goals, and rewarded me for their completion. They were a good way to break up the school work, and helped me turn off my brain, or at least find a way to switch its modes, so that I didn’t constantly feel like I was in ”go” mode. Sure, I was tired and stressed a lot of the time, but the reward of an audience cheering after my trumpet solo, or the roar of the crowd when the team scored a touch-down left me with a major sense of accomplishment.

In college, the extra-curricular is non-existent, although, they do a fairly good job of hiding that from you until you go looking for them. Instead, in the place of these educational side-kicks are new activities, akin to their high school counterparts, and yet differing in major and important fashions. For example, no longer are things like sports or music considered another part of my life experience. Now, if I, say, wanted to play football, the basis of my existence for the period of football season, and a major guideline in the off-season, has to be football. Sure, there isn’t anyone on the team that isn’t attending school for some sort of academic reason, at least in theory. But it seems to me that the football team is there for kids whose main goal in life is “play football,” with their secondary goals and their back-up dreams being comprised of things like “middle management,” or “fitness guru,” which is what their major is actually supposedly guiding them towards.

I find the same with music. In high school, my band was a fun community of kids who wanted to make music together and have fun, made up of a minority of rising star talent who were dedicated to the craft, and a majority of hard-working students who just liked to play music because they enjoyed it. Now, the band is an impenetrable fortress of talent and expertise, surrounded by a moat that, instead of being filled with water, is a dark and horrible time sink that requires you spend more hours practicing or rehearsing than you dedicate to sleeping, eating, or studying. Even the pep band, which is as close as the campus comes to an “extra-curricular” group, is really mostly music majors, with a peppering of other kids who, like me, likely remember the joy of playing in the pep band in high school, and wish to see it continue. I’m sure many enjoy the experience, but on a personal level, it really just sounds like a place for me to play 2^nd banana to a preforming arts major while I try really hard to reach that same high I got being a part of the high school band, only to find myself in a place where I’m trying to find someone else to take my place game night after game night because I “really don’t feel like it.” The best I can hope for is being an “amateur musician,” which means applying my mediocre level of talent to the minimum amount of practice time I have available, worrying all the while about how long I can go before my next door neighbors call down an RA to ask me to “please quiet down.”

Of course, these activities aren’t the only ones offered on campus. There are plenty of “service organizations” (read “resume builders”) I could be a part of, and spend countless hours of my time raising money for some external cause that someone else has deemed deserved of extra money, for no more reward than a pat on the back and a new assignment when the job is done. There’s no doubting groups like these do good works, and ultimately, I suppose you could consider it a personal failing of mine that participating in bake sales and bottle drives doesn’t leave me feeling fulfilled. In the end though, I’ve looked, and I didn’t find anything that really made me think “Wow, that’s a cause I wanna work towards.”

The only thing I’m “officially” involved in right now, outside of the academic work, is the Bioengineer’s Club. A fine mess if ever there was one. Born out of the ashes of the now defunct “Biomaterials club (I know what you’re thinking… How could that club ever go down? Sounds like a fun time!) I have found, being the President of this prestigious organization, that the best idea anyone ever had with clubs in high school was having adults in charge. I love my friends, and fellow club-members, and I will admit that I am just as much to blame as any of them for the following complaint I have, but we are terrible at getting anything done.

Never mind the fact that there really isn’t a model to exactly what a Bioengineering Club should be doing with its time, but it took us 6 months to open a bank account and decide on a constitution. While I found myself excited about the possibilities of the new club at first, and proud to be a part of it, I find that now, our weekly meeting consist, basically, of us sitting around and questioning each other about why nothing is getting done. Every week it’s the same things, we all come in and ask what’s happened, and when we figure out why nothing has, we all go, “Well, that’s dumb!” Then, we all make half-hearted claims about all the things we’re willing volunteer our time for, delegate out nebulous tasks like “Plan for fundraising,” and “Make a website,” and then get up and leave, each person secretly admitting to him or herself the unlikelihood of anything being accomplished.

All in all, I find lately that my “fun time,” is mostly full of either the mindless playing of video games, in desperate search of a fulfilling goal to accomplish, or laying in my bed and staring at the ceiling, wishing I had “something to do,” even though there’s likely a pile of homework laying at the foot of my bed, just waiting to be accomplished. I guess in the end, the real problem is as I stated in my post about being “Big.” I’m best motivated by clear concrete goals, and well-considered, highly anticipated rewards. In high school, there were clear amounts of time I had to make it through, and big concerts, shows, play dates, real dates, and holidays to break up my time, and reward me for my efforts. Now, my whole life lays stretched before me, simply a black mass of existence, no promises or goals to be had, and nearly all of the daily effort and work I do simply gets boiled down into a number between 1 and 100, the less a reward, and more just an acknowledgement of “Yes, the past semester happened, and you were there for it. Congrats.”