when all else fails...try, try, try again.

[I seem to have fallen into a rut with this page. I don't post in a while, come back lamentable, post a brief and rant-filled update and then leave again for weeks at a time. But, to my credit, I am quite the busy girl. And, I know you will still love me, despite my frequent attempts at trying to get it all right and failing.]

A strange thing has happened. I am taking a lot of my general education requirements in my last year of college because I loathed the thought of taking them at all and of course, put them off til now. Most of my classmates are young, bright kids, fresh out of high school. This makes me ten years older than some of them.

A lot of them are amazing; I think back to when I was that age and I remember a half articulate, mess of a girl who was terrified to talk to anyone I didn't know. I was comfortable with words, but only as long as they were not spoken. Some of these kids spent their high school careers being outcasts, rejects, nerds, cool, what have you, but they are all immensely further along than I was at that age.

There is one trend I've noticed though. There's not a lot of variety in their thinking. Having been groomed and grown up under the same general time, they all tend to think alike, with a simple construct or one variation of the same thing.

For instance, in my Comp I class where I have more in common with the teacher than any of the other students, we were asked to bring in images that represent poverty to us. We were told to search high and low over the next few days and find whatever we could.

In my traditional fashion, I mused over the idea for sometime, and then did it all in one rush at the last minute. I could only find images in magazines that seemed to represent the opposite of poverty, things like fur, fancy cars, nice jewelry, etc, so I clipped these things out, pasted them onto some nice black charcoal paper I have and placed a giant red circle with a line through it. To make the circle bolder, I painted it with bright red nail polish, which was shiny and rich looking. It said to me that poverty was all about seeing and knowing the things you cannot have.

When I arrived in class with the glue still drying, I was excited to show off my work. I was proud. Look at me! I collaged! My work was like a piece of art! The teacher asked the students to show their images and I, never being so bold to go first, watched as one by one they held up their images.

They were printed off the internet, mostly photographs that showed ruined towns, full of garbage and rubble, with sad children whose faces were smeared with dirt. A couple people had cartoon drawings, a magazine cover; one student who is possibly a worse procrastinator than me had ripped a photograph out of that day's newspaper. But overall, it was the same. Their source (the internet) was the same. Their lack of thought was the same. I was intrigued and slightly appalled.

Just the other day in speech class, we heard a speech given recently by Al Gore. We were asked to write a three minute speech in response and given a question to answer by our teacher. I was forced to go first because I was sitting closest to the teacher. (Damn my brownnosing tendencies!) I read my angry argument about Gore's presumptions that there is no more public discourse on events in our country and that television is to blame. I ranted, I got angry, I even made a couple good points.

At least two other people had the same question I received. Neither of them argued against Gore's points. They agreed wholeheartedly, claiming television was to blame for our nation's poor attention span to current events. All of them began their speech with the teacher's question and then answered it. I did not. The other students all took up Gore's points, except for three who did not argue seriously; they contended that they enjoyed being television viewers and hated when their favorite programs were interrupted by "breaking news."

One other eerie thing occurred. When referencing the different "serial stories" the media covers, they used examples I would not have used at all, the Michael Jackson trial, the Robert Blake trial, the attention given to "Bennifer" stories. That was when I realized that part of why my thinking was so different is that I am so much older than they. I have experienced more, done more, seen more, and known more of the world.

It has given me a new confidence, even among people my own age. I guess I just needed the contrast of being around people who weren't like-minded to realize that I had many sound opinions and thoughts and I just hadn't trusted myself to share them.

Sometimes I wonder if they know I am that much older. Some of them ask me what year I am and nod understandably when I say I am a senior. I seem to know my way around campus and offer them resources to check out that aren't advertised to new students. So maybe in their minds, I am just a little older than they are, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. I don't know for sure if I actually pass for five years younger, but I'll take it. Heck, to actually look younger and have the experience of someone who is older? Isn't that every woman's dream?