Honest Student Bloggers

I'm sitting in a computer lab on the 4th floor of the Cleveland State library, looking at a seagull, getting more agitated by the second. The seagull is perched on a spire on a church across the street. Behind the church are treetops and more rooftops and a rusty water tower, and beyond them I can see the lake, which is gray today.

I don't care. I'm only staring out the window because there's a voice in my head saying, "Let's never go back," and I have to keep telling myself that it's just the view, Cleveland's East Side beats Limon Puddles. But it’s too late. This place is making me hate what I'm supposed to love about Carleton.

Five minutes ago, a random student came in and sat down at the computer next to me. We haven't acknowledged each other's presence, and we probably won't. It's glorious. How could I possibly explain to her what it's like not to be a number?

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College waited two years to happen, nothing and then everything. A week into this – I'm giving it a pronoun already, see, because I'm looking at double comps and LSATs and summer internships – Dad had already done two by junior year but hell, everything moves slower away from the coasts, I want to explain, wondering why it sounds like an excuse.

He doesn't know. This is Carleton. Eight people asked me how I was doing today. How am I? Seriously? No one is that nice. You didn’t come here because you love people and snow. We filled out the same application, and chances are we both sold out somewhere along the line. The only difference between us and those pricks at Amherst who “think they’re better than everyone” - they have the balls to admit it.

You’re not nice, you’re terrified. Stop smiling at me. It’s making me retarded, and now I’m terrified too, because I feel like Algernon. Law school is two years away and we’re playing Quidditch.

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I'm fifteen years old and trying to learn the second movement of the Moonlight Sonata. I haven't realized it's impossible.

The notes just won’t fall into place. They rush, and scatter, and land like bricks. It sounds decent, but anyone who’s heard it done right knows that it is not what Beethoven intended. My piano teacher Jackie, for example.

“You have to practice your arpeggios confidently. I mean, your forte is a mezzo piano.”
“Really?”

The Russians got it down to a science, Jackie is telling me. It’s all in the release – you have to let the weight of your entire hand find the bottom of the key, come off clean, and then transfer it to the next note in line.

Every pianist has struggled with it. It's our version of whatever blues legend Robert Johnson, as the story goes, sold his soul to the devil for.

Transference.

At this point, you might be wondering how this relates to my life at Carleton, and mentally suggesting that I go out and socialize instead of sitting here discussing piano technique. But it's the only way I can describe this crude improvisation I've called college for the past three months. Because when I talk to people – something is still soft, hesitant. It's hard, I want them to see, and I have been trying but straw just won’t spin into gold and my hands are getting tired.