So, remember how I was going to the party last night for my favorite professor who done run off and moved back to Kansas? It was so fun.
Pretty much every time I am just the least little bit social at all, I say about eight hundred times, “Boy, I am such a hermit! I need to get out more! This is so fun!” It’s true. I think the single best thing about my MSW program was just all the people I met there. The first quarter of the first year I was all Miss Getting Out There, having lunch with eight other people every day in the school lobby, going out on weekends, that kind of thing. I felt so sneaky for having provided myself with a built-in way to meet people upon arriving in a new city…and people with which I had sooooo much in common with, to boot! It was all very nice…until Carl moved up from San Diego.
Now, let me stress that the sudden drop in cabin pressure my social life experienced upon his moving up here was in now way his fault. (Carl, hi. Are you still reading? Totally my fault). I was just so happy to have him not only in the same state, but also in the same city…the same part of the city, no less, that I just wanted to take advantage of being able to see him whenever I wanted. I began declining invitations, one after the other, pleading a need for “alone time.” It took a while, because the people in my program were and remain very gregarious, but you know what happens when you keep telling people you can’t go out, right? All of a sudden you don’t have to tell them you can’t go out, because no one’s calling you to go out, and that’s that.
During the first year of my program, everyone was all together because we hadn’t chosen our social work concentrations yet. We all had to take the same classes, and as most of our classes were pretty darn huge, it meant you got to know a lot of people. And, of course, since we we pretty much all had the same schedule, I could always count on someone to eat lunch with. This changed my second year with our dividing into concentrations…all of a sudden I saw only the folks in the Health/Mental Health concentration, and that was subdivided further into the Mental Health concentration, so that’s who I saw twice a week when I was at school. And I guess I liked those people fine, but really I was only close to My Friend Michelle (whom I saw last night wearing a very flattering pink cowl-neck sweater), whom I sat next to in every single class. This, combined with the awesome amount of energy and concentration it took to go to my practicum placement every day, plus still wanting to be with Carl a lot, made my social life even worse. I only woke up to that this time last year, when I went to all the graduation parties and realized what I’d been missing. Since then, I’ve gone out a little, but I tend to naturally retract into my little shell, and barring my birthday party in March, last night was the first time I’d seen many old classmates in several months.
So, it was great. I was the first person to get there, inclusive of the host, and so it was just me and Ed for a while. He had been a little shocked to be the first person there at a party in his honor…we said that it was like speed-dating, where everyone would have twenty minutes alone with Ed, and then get tapped out. It didn’t work that way, of course, but it was nice to hang out with him and, of course, talk about my miserable job search. I was actually really embarrassed to admit to him and to everyone else that I was jobless, but people were very nice and interested in what I was looking for, and so it wasn’t bad at all. It got really fun when more people got there and we started talking more…about how cool it would be to have a social service op ed in the paper every week, about whether we had karaoke in our souls, about organizing unions, about what we thought we would be doing with our lives now, about having kids. About work, of course. Ed is, as I mentioned yesterday, in town to give this year’s graduation speech, and so we talked a lot about our own graduation, fully a year ago, and about his new students, and about the differences between Kansas and Seattle. Ed told us that his students weren’t nearly as engaged as we were, and that they never came to his office hours…we were all amazed at that, because every class I had with him was such a circus, with people getting really into what we talked about and having all sorts of arguments, none of which were diminished in any way by the fact that we didn’t do much of the reading. He pretty much had to have people take a number outside his office whenever we were there. Um, also, we were much better looking than any of his current students, too. I think he must just sits in his office at KU, flipping through pictures of us and crying onto his desk.
And so, surrounded by people I really like, talking about stuff which really interests me, laughing really hard, I think I got a little drunk from three glasses of iced tea (with sugar). Sherman Alexie talks in one of his short stories about being able to get a buzz off mineral water at parties…I mean, maybe it was the caffeine, but I think I was just high from being with people, from the simultaneously laid-back yet raucous feel in the room, from the sense of having been through a meaningful experience together, from all the intelligence and idealism, from all the ways you can just be with your people.