The First Real Week of School

It is Friday, muggy, warm, and overcast. Nevertheless, I am seated here before the computer in my favorite, hideous blue-green sweatpants with my hair pulled back. I was going for the elegant-meets-athletic sort of bun this morning, having wet hair and no time to dry it, but I think I kind of failed. As the day went on and my hair air-dried, the edges around my neck and temples got a little frizzy, and strands stood up from the middle of the bun at the top of my head. I think I ended up looking kind of like a Hoo from Dr. Seuss’s Whoville. But I don’t care, because it’s Friday. It’s the first real Friday of the school year, my bones are telling me.

What makes this, the sixth Friday of my 2010-2011 school year, the first real one for me? Well, I’ll tell you. There is a point in your semester (or I guess mine, at any rate) when you finally identify, somewhere in your being, which classes are going to be your hard ones, which ones you’re going to wrestle with for time and ideas and success, which ones you can live with at your own pace. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a point in the year when you finally get over your back-to-school idealism and settle down to the reality of your life as a student. You resign yourself to the amount of sleep destined for each school night and accept the sleep/social life compromises necessary to earn the grades you want. You grow familiar with your teachers and their routines, their grading and teaching styles, their fetishes, their workload. You begin to form friendships with your classmates and you learn which co/extra-curricular activities you most appreciate and which you wish you hadn’t signed up for. You learn to look forward to each day, or dread it as it comes. (I mostly look forward to each day, except for Mondays. Other than that, I love the whole week.) Most importantly, I think, you figure out how much effort you are humanly capable of investing into certain classes. You remember not merely to compare yourself with your classmates. For me, the school year truly kicks in when I become content with my classes and my scores because I know that I can live with the consequences of disciplining or not disciplining myself in certain areas. The first Friday of school comes when I spend my day in blissful apathy, just hanging on for the weekend to come, when I can stop and rest without that hunted feeling.

That’s the abstract meaning of the first week of school. I gained a little more perspective on it the other day, when Central Valley temperatures soared into the triple digits and poor schoolchildren suffered. I was walking between classes, in the afternoon, and, seeking to grasp the reason for my until-then subconscious irritation, I realized that the beating sun and my sweating skin were the cause. (I hate sweating. Makes me wonder why I live in the Central Valley.) I felt indignant. We’re already into the school year, I thought. The weather’s been fine, been verging on moderate–cool, even–the last few weeks. Why is it so darn hot?! Oh, the injustice, my selfish heart grumbled. And then I realized, the weather was like this for months before school started and I didn’t really care. I expected it, as a matter of fact. Over the summer, I minded the heat, the sunburn, the sweat. But over the summer, I had a different perspective. I spent time with my college-age and married, early-family-stage friends. I saw the big picture, rejoiced with them in their pregnancies and their new children. I babysat. I thought about getting married someday, expecting my own kids. I thought about being an adult. I thought with an opening mind, cared about people more. I spent scorching afternoons inside sweet, coffee-scented, air-conditioned Starbucks, observing people, reading, listening to music. But something has changed, in some degree, between then and now.

With school has come a new list of priorities: sleep, completing homework, and getting to school on time among the top ten. I don’t always have time for people, rarely have those meaningful hours of conversation and musing. I’m hardly ever thoroughly-rested, stress is a regular part of my routine, and my aspirations are kind of limited to things like college and getting a driver’s license. Pathetic, huh? I don’t think all of the changes are bad. There’s a time for everything, after all, a time for school.

I have realized that those first weeks of school, when I had an awareness of the world spinning around me, of the people driving past me and their imaginary lives, weren’t really the first weeks of school for me. In those early days, I would walk between classes and wonder what my parents were doing, where they were. I would speculate about my long-distance friends, from schools past and scattered across America, and imagine their first days of school. I don’t do that anymore. It’s like little exists beside my little world. How narrow-minded of me, how naïve. This is a common phenomenon among AP students, I’ve observed. I always wonder how teachers expect us to know anything about current events when it’s hard enough to keep up with our own schedules and family dynamics. Once again, pathetic in excelsis.

I’ll leave off with that food for thought.

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