Friday, May 04, 2007

Ivy Schools

I have yet to see a show or movie about what life is like in an Ivy League school. There are plenty about what it takes to get in there. The underprivileged inner-city student that manages to overcome the odds and get into Harvard. The uniformed boarding school kid learning some incredibly valuable life lesson, writing an essay about it, deemed worthy of admittance into the elite. But I have yet to come across anything, anything at all that talks about life once you get in.

What is it like to go from the top of your class to the bottom, or middle? What is it like to have people who would otherwise never look at you twice randomly offer you a job? What is it like to have people tell stories about you? To be one of the connections that people brag about? I am used to being invisible; this is so disorienting.

I wish that I could be like Will Hunting before he was “discovered”. Just live life. Study at a library. Be yourself without any responsibilities to anyone else. Once you reveal what you are capable of, people start expecting it of you. Then again, if nobody expects it of you, you have fewer opportunities to explore with it. Well, I certainly will not have any problems with that.

I think that maybe people do not like to listen to something that they do not understand. A lot of times, they do not even like having it around. Why do people get so emotional when someone is speaking in a language that they do not understand? Is it really national pride, or is it because they like to know what is going on all the time? Is it bad to want to know what is going on all the time? That is considered one of the nobler pursuits of science and history and journalism and philosophy… maybe it is only bad if it involves stamping out what you do not know instead of trying to understand it. Nobody has tried to stamp out institutions like Harvard, except the communists.

I guess that my dilemma is simply that I do not know what I have gotten myself into. I have no idea what the next your years of my life will be. I am not sure that I am going to be prepared for change that is beyond my control, beyond my understanding, to have consequences that I cannot predict. Can I predict them? Well, I will certainly do my best.

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