Teddy Cahill

My only class Friday ended a little before 11 a.m., bringing my first week of classes in eight months to a close. It was largely uneventful and didn’t even come with that much homework. It did, however, come with two questions that I got asked so much they threaten to join a level of annoying previously only achieved by “Where are you going to college?”, “Who’s your favorite team?” and “You like rap music?”

The most obvious question this week is “How does it feel to be back?” or something similar. I was prepared for this. I’ll even attempt to answer it in a second.

But I wasn’t ready for “Are you still going to graduate on time?” The answer is yes, as long as nothing goes wrong this year. But it caught me off guard at first. I doubt I would have left school for a semester if it would have meant delaying my graduation. In fact, I only explored a spring internship after doing the math during my sophomore year and discovering I could graduate a semester early, do an internship during the year, add a second major or slack off incredibly in my last two years of school. I know I made the right decision.

In any case, I was at least somewhat curious as to how I would react to not only being back in Muncie, but also sitting in classes. As I noted last week, being in Muncie isn’t such a great feeling.

I surprisingly had more mixed feelings about class, at least initially. My first day of classes didn’t seem so bad. There were only three of them and they were well spaced out. I even wondered if returning to daily newspaper deadlines for the first time in months was worse than class.

Those happily naïve thoughts were destroyed on the second day of school.

I was in class from 9:30 a.m. until 3 p.m. on Tuesday, by far the worst stretch of classes I have had since graduating from high school. One might even argue that this stretch is worse than my senior year of high school because at least then I had a free period and an assigned time for lunch.

Soon, however, I discovered it is second nature to sit in class and take notes, a depressing revelation for sure. Since third grade I haven’t enjoyed much about school, but one week into my senior year of college, I find myself resenting it even more than usual. In the time since I last was in class I wrote for The Plain Dealer and Baseball America, two publications I’m proud to have on my resume. But that has only made it more difficult to return to the classroom.

No matter what freedoms being a college student grants me or how many professors allow me to call them by their first name, the act of being in a classroom makes me feel like a little kid again. There is nothing easy about leaving a cubicle behind for a chair that has a desk that flips up from one of the arms. I find myself getting sucked into things I happily haven’t thought about for eight months. I must once again deal with professors who treat sports as the bastard child of the newspaper instead of the one that pays the bills.

Most people, however, don’t want to listen to my diatribe against school when they ask what it’s like being back. So usually I just say “It’s weird” or “It sucks” or “I wish I was back in Chapel Hill,” and they nod like they get the point.

But I wonder if they do. I know I thought I understood what my friends were saying when they were college seniors about just wanting to be done with school and start real life. But now, I realize how much I really didn’t get it until this week.

For months, people have been asking me if I couldn’t wait to go back to school or how excited I was about it. Usually when people asked this they assumed I would answer affirmatively. I, after all, hadn’t been at Ball State since I finished with finals in December, a stretch that ultimately reached eight months. Better yet, I was headed back for my senior year. What’s not to like, even love? So people were often surprised when I told them no, I, in fact, wasn’t too excited about the prospect of returning to school.

Part of the problem is that I’m not a very excitable person and I have an even bigger problem looking ahead the task at hand to get excited about a future event. But the problem really was that I didn’t want to be back at school.

I haven’t set foot in a classroom in eight months. I haven’t had to listen to a lecture on a morning when I would much rather be asleep. I haven’t had to fight through a reading assignment or an essay when I would rather be writing a story. I haven’t had to study for a test instead of hanging out with my friends.

I guess most people are talking about the broader range of college activities like hanging out with friends and whatever else normal college students do with their lives. But, as much as I like my friends here at Ball State and enjoy spending time with them, I was doing those things already. And I was doing them without the second full-time job of being a student. In addition, because I am living in an apartment for the first time at school, I had all the added stress of moving.

So, no, I was not excited about returning to school.

***
Now, I am here, all moved into my apartment. There are still some boxes to be unpacked and my cable isn’t hooked up yet. But I am moved into the apartment that will serve as my home for the next nine months.

I’m still somewhat ambivalent. School starts next week, an event that hasn’t excited me since I left elementary school. The college football season starts a week later, but the anticipation hasn’t begun to build for that yet.

From the time I decided to spend my spring semester last year at Baseball America instead of in class, I knew returning to this routine was going to be problematic. Since I covered my first MAC men’s basketball tournament in 2007 as a junior in high school and saw that I really could be a sports writer, school has been more of a means to an end than anything else. If you want to be a journalist, you have to have a college degree.

But I escaped that last February. I got to do everything normal journalists do for a prominent publication without my degree. It was only temporary, but it certainly has made it much more difficult to return to being a student, which in turn has made it difficult to be overjoyed about my return to Ball State.

The people that asked me if I was excited about going back to school often would have some sentiment that I would enjoy my senior year of college more than any other. They may very well end up being correct. Right now, however, school is not the paradise they remember. It is more of a purgatory, as I run out the clock on college and look forward to next year when I can fully concentrate on work without the distraction of school.

Now, there’s something to get excited about.

There, in the bottom of the blue bag, were the flash cards. Kelsey had wanted to use part of the drive to Washington, D.C., to study for the GRE, which at the time was a couple weeks away. I got what I had been told to get out of the bag and ignored the flash cards. As much as I wanted to help her study so she would do well on the test, I figured she knew they were there.

She had packed them and knew where they were, but they remained in the bag all weekend. We did a lot in the 11-hour round trip, but reviewing the flashcards was not one of them. That was fine with me. The GRE was her thing, not mine. Who was I to tell her how to study anyway?

***

To me, it seems that there are two very different paths when you graduate from college. The first is to go get a job. The second is to take the GRE.

The second path is slightly more complicated than that. You can take the LSAT or the MCAT or any of the other graduate school entrance exams. But the point is the same. Either you get a job or you keep going to school.

Before I met Kelsey, the GRE existed mostly in the abstract for me. My sister had taken it, and presumably passed since she was in grad school. I had a few friends at school who had talked about taking it. I’m not actually sure if they did or not. I had met people in grad school who must have taken it since they were, in fact, in grad school. But I really knew nothing about it.

I’ve since learned a lot. There’s an English section, a math section and a writing section (just like the SAT, which I didn’t take either). You take it on a computer and get your results right away. What’s not to like about that? The questions are harder than I expected, if the sample ones I did are any indication. I still don’t know much, but that’s ok. I’m not the one about to take it.

***

When you stand on the precipice of the senior year of college, the future dominates all conversation, much in the same way the question of what your college plans were dominated our lives four years ago. So as I mentioned before, the topic came up quickly for Kelsey and me.

In our conversations, it became clear that both of us are at least somewhat jealous of the path the other had chosen. Perhaps it is a classic case of the grass seeming greener on the other side of the hill, but the more I thought about the admission process to grad school, the more I liked it. Take a standardized test, send your transcript, a personal statement and maybe a portfolio to a few schools, wait for a decision from them and then pick your best option. It’s familiar and, perhaps most importantly, has some very objective parts.

Kelsey, meanwhile, liked how my process worked. No standardized test, just another year of working as hard as possible to write stories that would impress editors enough to offer another internship and then working hard enough there to convince an editor at a completely different place to offer a job. The subjectivity that in some ways scares me was attractive to Kelsey.

I’ve been thinking about this again because Kelsey will take the GRE tomorrow and I have begun an expansive piece that I hope will become one of the centerpieces of my portfolio this year. It is an important time for both of us. I will write other stories that could replace my current idea in the portfolio should something go wrong, and she could retake the test. But finding success right now would be so much easier, so much less stressful than having to go through this process again. It also might give the future a bit more clarity, something both of us would love.

Kelsey has put the flashcards away and says she realizes she’s passed the point where she can make much of a difference. There is no point like that for me, which is probably the best part about the job track. There’s always one more story to write, one more interview to do, anything to get noticed.

Going to grad school isn’t as simple as just taking the GRE and Kelsey will have other opportunities to control the process again. But this is a big step, one that she has little control over anymore. She knows this is the time to let go and relax, but if I could look in the bottom of her blue bag tomorrow morning, I bet I’d find the flashcards again.

My introduction to Harry Potter was in fourth grade when my teacher read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone aloud to the class. I don’t remember if we read the whole book as a class or if I had to go find a copy of the book to finish myself. I do know, however, that I was drawn into the world created by J.K. Rowling.

I was an avid reader already, blowing through my elementary school library’s collection of the Redwall series, the Boxcar Children and, of course, the sports section. Still, like many children my age, Harry Potter became an integral part of my childhood. I dressed up like him on Halloween, for a while Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was the longest book I had read, I saw the movies (though never at midnight) and developed the requisite crush on Emma Watson.

I was a dedicated fan. Not the biggest, but for a middle school boy, I think I was a pretty good one. That is, until the fifth book came out.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix came out in the summer of 2003, the summer between seventh and eighth grade for me. I hated it. Harry was too whiny for my taste. There wasn’t enough of Hermione. Sirius dies. I’m not sure it was significant that the fifth book was the first I read as a teenager, but maybe I was looking for a reason to leave the series behind.

In any case, the luster was gone. I almost quit the series. I had already seen the first three movies, but wouldn’t watch any more. I read the final two books, but felt no rush to get my hands on a copy as soon as they came out. The last two books were much better, but my fanaticism was gone. They were just more books for me to read, which I did happily.

So when the eighth and final Harry Potter movie opens tonight, I will not be standing in line. Many of my friends, however, will be. They view tonight as a very significant event in their lives; some have even called it the end of their childhood. While I admit I am not much of a fan anymore, I still cannot understand this line of thinking.

The seventh book came out before my senior year in high school, a much better ending point for our childhoods. The books carried us from elementary school through high school; they were our childhood friends, the things that brought us surprise and a desire to keep turning pages. The movies are just an interpretation of what we already know. The movies have been well done, from what I have seen, but there are no surprises.

Perhaps my friends are seeing the same thing coming in less than a year. Perhaps they see graduation and real jobs or grad school and are doing their very best to cling to this last summer of “childhood” before school starts again. If that is what they are feeling, I can hardly begrudge them.

For we all know how the movie will end tonight. This is not the end of our childhood; this is watching the tape of our high school graduation for the first time. This is nostalgia, this is clinging to our childhood and, for those standing in line at the theaters, there is nothing wrong with admitting that.

Leaving Boshamer Stadium after the end of super regionals, I couldn’t help but feel a little sad. The feeling came as a surprise to me; I hadn’t thought I’d grown attached to North Carolina’s baseball stadium this spring. There aren’t really any standout memories of the Bosh. I saw a few good games and more than a few clunkers there. I didn’t form any lasting friendships with people in the press box, which is too big for the forced intimacy of Ball State’s Ball Diamond and too small for the cliques of Progressive Field. Boshamer Stadium is a great college baseball stadium, the best I’ve ever been to, but not one that I expected to tug at my heart strings upon leaving for the final time.

Really I wasn’t sad I was leaving the Bosh, I was sad I was getting reminded of how short my time in North Carolina had grown. At the time, the end was still a few weeks away, but it wasn’t something I liked to be reminded of. I had been following Kelsey’s advice of just not thinking about it, and it had worked up to that point.

But packing up my computer that night forced me to confront the coming reality of the end. And it was saddening.

***

Two days later in the early morning half-light, as we prepared for our day at work, Kelsey and I sat on the futon to eat our oatmeal. It was a throwaway moment, two college students getting ready for work at an hour they would much rather not see.

But those 10 minutes or so that we sat and whispered and ate will be one of my favorite memories from North Carolina. It’s hard to explain why they were special, why I know they’ll stand out six months from now, but I’m sure they will.

We were just two kids nearing the intersection of adolescence and the real world, alone, in the dark, eating oatmeal. And it was all I had ever wanted.

***

Today I moved out of Chapel Hill and headed for New York. By the time you read this, I will probably be excited to be on my way to the City. But that’s not how I feel yet. Just as I would have loved to stay in the amazing offices of Baseball America, I have no desire to leave this land of sweet tea and say goodbye to the people I have met here.

I’m not exceptional with goodbyes. No one is good at them, but some people can actually say the word. I will do just about everything in my power not to actually say “goodbye” or any of its variants. I almost invariably say “see you later” or “peace.” Goodbye feels too final, too forever. So I won’t say goodbye. I’ll be back. I don’t know when, but I won’t be able to stay away long.

Kelsey tells me these things have a way of working out. I take that as her way of saying there will be another early morning wakeup call and more oatmeal to share.