I graduated High School in 199X in a class of 5 other students. It wasn’t hard to be the best student among them. Given my natural aptitude at test-taking I had aced most all coursework I had been presented with up to that point, and I left fairly confident that I would be just as dominant throughout college as I was in High School.
Back when I was a Sophomore or Junior, I visited Asbury College as a prospective student. My Granny Mabel was obsessed with all her Grandchildren attending that University, because every couple decades Asbury seems to have a great “prayer revival” where the student body prays and worships God for days on end. This happened during my Mother’s time there and was a very formative experience in her life — it basically transformed her into the dedicated Christian she became. I think my Granny’s Secret Hope was that one of these “movements of the Spirit” would happen while one of us attended and transform us in a similar manner. (When I went there though, it seemed full of dead, dry religious formalism.) Since she was the one paying for College I wasn’t really in a position to challenge this decision.
In any case, I went to evaluate the school while at my High School. I didn’t get much out of it other than the Dormitory had “buddy showers” (possibly the worst type of shower ever devised — a two man shower where you stand hip-to-hip) and the student body was perhaps not as devout as everyone let on. I was shocked when I found a secular music CD (it was Nevermind by Nirvana) in the floor of the students’ room I was staying with. Later I entered a College Scholarship competition, and had to take a test and write an essay on some Biblical subject. I was disappointed when I received second place, gaining a half-scholarship instead of a full one. Obviously I should have won! But this eased Granny’s financial burden for my education and thus established Asbury as my definite choice for college.
I entered Asbury in the Fall of 1995. I knew things were going to be troublesome when I met my room-mate and he laid his head in his mother’s lap and refused to let her leave for about an hour. He turned out to be a seemingly closeted type dude who loved Disney films, musicals, repeatedly watching Clueless, and nitpicking every single thing anybody did, ever. I remember one time he got snippy with me for pulling off those little strings on bicycle tires left over from the molding process. He said it might “ruin the balance of his bike.”
Shortly after I got there I set up my Windows 95 machine (a bit outdated, a 486-33) and started playing Heretic on it. I vividly remember thinking to myself that it wouldn’t matter where I lived or what situation I found myself in so long as I had a videogame to distract me. I envied one of my neighbors, though, because he had a Pentium computer and could run the recently-released MechWarrior 2.
Things were worse as I worked myself into the social life of the dorm. For some reason I gravitated to the most popular group of students there, not my usual modus operandi. I think it was because their rooms were the closest to mine. They were Preppies obsessed with looking and saying just the right thing.
Needless to say, I was a target of their ridicule. I remember one time, after I had established a reputation as a late-night gamer (and built several successive towers of Pepsi cans on my dorm room desk) one of the Dormies called me “some kind of Pepsi Vampire.” It wasn’t so much that they openly mocked me all the time, but that their tone and attitude toward me was one of perpetual derisiveness. They came up with little nicknames for everybody. I remembered it caused a huge storm among the girl clique they hung out with when it was revealed one of their nicknames for one of the girls was “The Deuce” because she was “a 2 out of 10.”
I wasn’t the only weirdo who tried to fit in with them, though. There was also another dorky dude everyone called “Switchblade” because of his predilection for knives. He was about six feet tall, thin as a rail, and wore pop-bottle glasses. I remember being amazed because he beat my ACT score by several points. The whole time I was there he actively tried to worm his way in, as opposed to my disinterested proximity to the “normal” students, even renouncing his geeky hobbies to a degree. (He was the guy who introduced me to BattleTech, which went on to become the full-edged P’n’P RPG obsession I described in the 1997 entry.) He apparently felt himself a rung above me though, since he had the exact same attitude toward me that the rest of them did.
I never developed a significant friendship during my career at Asbury and mostly kept to myself, playing my Computer Games, browsing the Internet using an AOL connection and a flashy new browser called Netscape, and of course downloading the occasional sexy image. I was still a teenager, after all. One time I lent a disk to a Dorm-Mate that had like fake nudes of Deanna Troi on it. You can imagine the response. One of the sites I visited all the time was “Loser Living Upstairs” which you can probably still find archives of somewhere.
I don’t know if it was my alienation or the difficulty of the material, but by the end of the second semester I was on track to fail several of my classes, and only a last-ditch effort of cramming and writing saved my ass and let me limp through with C’s. After that I was fully disgusted with the place, though, and decided not to go back. I’ll never forget the look on the Financial Counselor’s face when he offered to forgive the unpaid half of our account balance in order to have me back and I turned it down. I think I really did hate the people I was around that much.
It’s kind of sad, though, because there were much cooler people at the school — even on my floor. They were stoner-looking guys (although I wouldn’t have known what a stoner was at the time), dressed casually, and were generally nonjudgmental toward everyone. They hated the clique I found myself with and considered them intolerable jerks, which was probably an accurate assessment. I don’t even clearly remember a lot of outright cruelty toward me on behalf of anyone — I think if I had found someone I could be a friend with, a mentor, or heaven help me a girlfriend I would have developed the pluck to stay on at the school. Needless to say this failure at Asbury crippled my opinion of my academic ability and I never really tried to return to college — every other attempt I made was abortive.
PostScript: I do vividly remember one of the games I used to obsess over back then, though. It was called GemStone II and it was available on AOL. It was a essentially a pay-by-the minute MUD, a text-based RPG where everyone role-played elves and shit and killed monsters together. There was a really active community of live Game Masters who would create unique events for the players to explore, and it was really easy to modify the world and engine since it was all text. It was a precursor to the MMORPG, and I don’t know why, but the player base was much more interested in role-playing than any MMORPG I’ve ever tried. (Even “RP servers.”) I took up this mantle, creating elaborate characters with personalities and families and designing custom gear I would make when I gained the ability. I would draw pictures of my characters in class and plan out their level progressions. Of course I ran up a huge bill playing this game, and Granny Mabel bailed me out of it as always. That’s just an example of the type of person I was.
PostScript 2: Another game I discovered there was Chrono Trigger, so I guess the experience wasn’t a complete waste! I used to play it on the bigscreen TV at the Salvation Army “hangout place” that no student would be caught dead inside, until the old lady caretaker got mad at me and told me I was going to “ruin the audio-video plugs.”