#vactioner

Vacationer - "The Wild Life" Official Video from Matthew James Gamlen on Vimeo.

While my co-blogging has the good fortune to spend another year in the best college in America, I have the distinct (dis)pleasure to have graduated last May. As I alluded to in the prior post, I have also moved, oh, 1,300+ miles from home. Good news is I absolutely love it here; bad news is I absolutely miss my friends. However, those are stories for another time and I’ll certainly be sharing my adventures.

Anyway, to the topic at hand.

As a typical student in the business school, I had a lot of groups to work with throughout the years. Senior year, though, shoved group after mediocre group at me. When you go to a big state school, unfortunately, shit falls through the cracks. This one in particular was a massive headache full of “how did you make it this far in college?” moments. Ultimately, it lead to a semester full of sink or swim moments, but when it’s your most important class you have to keep on swimming.

Unfortunately, this group started off as successfully as the soccer team in The Big Green. We basically were following a ball around the field with little to no purpose and we had too many characters to truly succeed.  It had:

A hipster/songwriter with early Justin Bieber success hair that constantly demanded the head jerking motion to get it out of his face

A Southern belle who was neither Southern nor a belle

A girl who should easily live at Bonaroo year round

An insanely quiet girl who would probably sit at the “cool Asian” table

And like all state schools: an extremely unresponsive boy with no motivation.

Me

In the end, I really ended up enjoying the company of the girl with the mysterious and inexplicable Southern accent. I was also surprisingly anxious for her as she stupidly took the hardest business class for our last semester, a class people have been known to fail. So when I saw her during our lineup for graduation I was beyond excited, so excited that I congratulated her! I asked about her post-grad plans, how she’s feeling, the whole nine yards, but you probably guessed the results.

She didn’t pass and she wasn’t “graduating.” She was retaking her test in the summer and was just walking through the ceremony. When I heard that, naturally that was my cue to go run over “to my friend who was waving to me in the distance.” While, I certainly felt guilty for rubbing her shortcomings in her face, what was I to assume? This ceremony was a four hours long affair, in black robes, in the sun and explaining to your family where you’re sitting is like explaining where a needle in a haystack is.

The real takeaway? It’s not avoiding foot-in-the mouth moments, because let’s be honest, they make the best stories. It’s about the importance of good scheduling. 

Hey I've got it good, real good.