The Manda Goes to Harvard

Intellectually, I'm no slouch. I ran the rat race of academic competition for a long time. In high school I scrambled for grades and activities alongside the best of them in my quest for admission to The College of My Choice. I spent the first three years at The College of My Choice working like crazy, playing that sick little game that was so popular with us in those days, "My Life is Busier Than Your Life." That was, of course, just code for "I Am More Important Than You Are and Will Achieve Success in Life That You Can Only Dream About."

I don't think I had as much fun in college as you're supposed to have. But then some events took place that pretty much obliterated the plans I had made for myself. Once the crushing disappointment passed, I realized that I no longer had anything to prove to anyone. It was liberating.

I found some new friends and developed an appreciation for microbrews-- this was the mid 90's after tall. I pulled all nighters to crank out papers because we just had to go see some band play at some bar. My last semester, I took a class with some grad students and found them pointless and boring with their giant volumes of Roland Barthes tucked into their backpacks.

It's not that I don't love learning. I do. I did the grad school thing twice. The first time I went to "a top five program" according to the disbelieving grad students clutching their Roland Barthes anthologies for support. But I chose both of the programs I attended because they placed more than a little value on practical application, because what I don't love is learning for the sake of lording it over other people to make them feel small.

Not that I'm suggesting that most people do this intentionally. But I went to a seminar at Harvard today-- it's a two week course on comedy and film-- and it brought these ideas back to me. It was like being in class with those grad students again, vying for the professor's attention and approval, hearing them stretch their vocabularies to use words like "postmodern" and "meta-analysis."

That's all great, but how's about you give me something I can use to get 28 bored teenagers to forget about who's going to hook up at the big party this weekend and how blotto they're going to get?

In all fairness, I think I got a little bit of that from the day's lesson as well, but in an environment that is so purely academic, you have to look for the useful stuff a little bit harder.

I had to hike across the campus back to the parking garage. I felt out of place among the students in their skinny jeans and emo hair, carrying overloaded backpacks and trying to impress one another by whatever means necessary.

And here's me. Red Dooney handbag. Sprigs of gray appearing near my partline. Wool peacoat. I am too old for this.