Drop It Like It's Hot

I dropped history like one of these.

My dear friend The Aspiring Leader and I have a longstanding tradition: At the beginning of every term, she excitedly reads to me the list of all 43 classes and extracurricular activities she’s taking (for a grand total of 4000 credit hours per term), and I say, “Wow, that’s an awful lot of work, are you sure you have time for all that?” And she says, “Oh, it’s really not that much!” And then, nine weeks later during finals, I have to drop everything and talk her down from suicide as she tries to prepare for 17 exams, 4 speeches, and the final presentation for Grizzly Bear Deathmatch 301. Somewhere in this process, she utters the words, “I took too many classes!”, and then I utter the words, “I told you so!”, and then she utters the words, “Truman, you’re a horrible person who no one will ever love!”, and I utter the words, “That’s about right.”

As I’ve mentioned before, I feel a certain smug superiority that I don’t need to be occupied to be happy. People like The Aspiring Leader seem to thrive when they’re so busy that amphetamines are a legitimate study aid, whereas I tend to work best in situations that can be either postponed or forgotten entirely should something good happen to come on TV. This is why I never joined the National Honor Society at my high school – I mean, come on! Community service? Screw that! These YouTube videos won’t watch themselves, and even if they could, I wouldn’t trust them to do it as well as I can. I value my leisure time, and when it’s taken away from me I usually react poorly.

So here I am, then, staring the first week of school in the face with a courseload consisting of Spanish, Journalism, Humanities, and United States History, along with the marching band, my column in the paper, and writing/co-directing/costarring in my own TV show. I look at this schedule and I see frightening visions of the future in which there is no part of my life that belongs to me, rather than the school. In the future I see, the University of Oregon has electrodes hooked up to my balls and is forcing me to stand naked on one foot, wearing a black hood, and it is taking pictures of me and laughing. This is not the college experience that people tell fond stories of later in life, unless it happens as part of a fraternity initiation, in which case I suppose it’s A-OK.

This is unusual for me, because a schedule this tight requires me to be a lot more responsible than I’m used to being. Ordinarily, I’d flip off a whole busload of nuns if it meant I’d have the least responsibilities possible, because to me, responsibilities are the explosive speedbumps on the deadly postapocalyptic freeway of life – they are to be avoided at all costs. My previous experiences with responsibility have proven this to be a good strategy; when I was given the seemingly innocuous responsibility of leading the eight-person trumpet section in my high school’s marching band, the result was ten dead, fourteen wounded, and the near-destruction of the state of Israel.* Now I’ve got articles to write and actors to manage and drill and music to learn, not to mention some classes on top of all that if I’ve got the time (and for those of you playing at home, I definitely won’t have the time), and the only possible outcome I can foresee of a situation where there are so many “ifs” riding on my abilities is one with a lot of fire and people screaming.

*And, one more time, I’m really sorry about that, Israel. It won’t happen again.

As with most situations that worry me, the method I’ve been using to cope with my anxiety over my schedule is a healthy combination of losing sleep and nervously asking my friends what they think. The response I usually get is, “Wow, you’re going to be pretty busy!”, which doesn’t do a whole lot besides worry me more, which in turn leads me to lose more sleep and ask more friends, thus perpetuating the cycle. The real answer I want is either, “No, you’ll be fine” or “Yes, that’s too much” – essentially I want somebody to tell me what to do, because even being in command of my own fate is a little more responsibility than I need at this point.

Today, after some soul searching and premonitions of a bleak future with no time for peanut butter or Diet Coke, I made the executive decision to drop my US History class. Having done so, I guess I should feel better, but I can’t help feeling like a slacker. The course registration system at the University of Oregon has an oddly judgmental interface – once it had processed my dropping history, its response (“Class dropped”) felt oddly snarky. “Oh, congratulations,” It was saying. “You’re not even going to try, are you? You’re not even going to go to class for the first week before dropping it? Well, well – it looks like StudentID 950934549 is majoring in Quitting, with a minor in Sloth and maybe Music if there’s time.”

In the end, I guess that dropping my history class was the best choice. For one thing, it means that my head won’t explode, which works out pretty well for me seeing as I really enjoy having a head, and it also works out well for you, because without a head my hair would be pretty much homeless. What’s more, this is good news to the people affiliated with the other classes and activities that I didn’t get rid of, because now there will be marginally more Truman time available to them. But I think what’s best is that I chose to sacrifice a class instead of an elective. Getting rid of a class is one thing – there are plenty of classes to take, and I’ll always have to take them. However, electives are my own interests and passions – be they putting stupid jokes in the once-respectable school newspaper or playing a thinly veiled version of myself on public access TV – and I’m glad that when the time came to put something on the chopping block that I decided not to put aside my true interests in favor of busywork meant to help me attain a piece of paper that certifies me as Officially Smart.

So, it is with a heavy heart that I bear a fond farewell to my professor and classmates from History 352 – I’ve never met any of you because classes haven’t started yet, but I’m sure I would have either liked or disliked you all. If any of the women in this class are in the market for a boyfriend, please don’t let my absence from the class hurt my chances with you.

Truman Capps is counting the days until his creativity well runs dry, and worrying about the impending doom when that finally happens.