My first day of college was a bit unsettling. Putting my butt in a seat for three hours to hear someone squawk is a very primitive way to learn. And honestly, so was attendance being counted and being penalized if I didn't show up without an excuse more than three times. If someone missed three classes, it was their problem. It was their tuition being blown.
I'm making it sound worse than it is. Doing forty hours a week (which honestly seems so easy after doing sixty over the summer) makes lectures seem like the easy way out, and also the easiest way to catch up on the work. It feels so much better without someone breathing down my back every five minutes checking to make sure that I get it, and now they're just assuming I did.
It's also not like there isn't a way to get one on one attention in college either. Some of my professors having office hours, and there are math and English centers within my school. Basically, I'm not mandated to get extra help because everyone is mandated: I can choose to.
I'm really loving my academic independence. I just wish I could get some freedom from my workplace. It's starting to feel like it's a second home. I'm on call on my days off and it's stifling, because how can I say no? I'm not doing anything to warrant a call out. I don't see any of my friends anymore. I used to think that if friends were important enough you'd make the time after high school to see them, but I'm starting to doubt that now. My best chick friend never calls me or texts me anymore, and it's not that she doesn't pick up or reply whenever I get in touch with her, but she's distant. All of my friends are distant except those that I work with, of which there is one, because my workplace is run like a high school and they all gossip and talk crap about each other.
I don't get it. I felt such a bond with my friend, as if we blood related. No, that's also inaccurate. The people I actually am related to don't always treat me half as nice as she used to. I took a week off of work. I put in for it about a month ago, because my parents insisted we needed a family vacation and that we were all going to go and be happy and skip around in sweater vests like a bad after school special. The week comes, and we've planned nothing. My dad made a stink about how nothing gets done unless he does it. Because despite the multiracial and liberal house we live in, he claimed nobody else including his working wife is capable of doing such a thing like planning a vacation.
So out of guilt, we went to some historic sites in Sleepy Hollow which I loved. My father and my brother hated it. With a burning passion for all things seventeenth century. Sucks. It sucked, that whole week. I'm well rested now sure, but my family is falling apart. Just like it was at the start of my freshman year of high school. Except now instead of me being crazy and trying to desperately to come up from eighth grade slump, my brother is two steps away from dropping out of high school.
It really does feel like deja vu. I'm sitting in the back of the room again with my head down in almost all black. I'm breaking things and saying things I don't mean, and I'm stuck here trying to save people that want to be defeated. They're losing against themselves.
I'm still being asked to get a better job and move out. I could never forgive myself if I left my brother high and dry. He keeps pushing me away. I made a move, I got him help, and I did what I could. But I can't make him want to be better. I can only stick around to help pick up the pieces. I'm just doing damage control.
He's so lucky. I left the only person who could help me, and that person hasn't spoken to me since. I can't believe I thought I was on my own last year.
The next time I say that will be when I move out.
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