RIT.
Spinning around in snow, slipping on ice and falling flat on my face. Insanely late nights in a lab half the campus didn’t know existed, in a room the janitors didn’t clean or check on the weekend. Struggling like mad not fail out of college. Sequester sequester sequester. It is all I ever did and it was never enough. I couldn’t make time. The internet, struggling relationships, and the hardest subject I have ever encountered crumpled me up, tossed me on the floor and used me like a terrible soccer ball. Bad, even at failing.
It was up there among the worst times of my life (a stupid sentence at age 24). 6th grade was the worst, the end of high-school and all those college rejection letters comes in second. But my time at RIT, my goodness is that a close third.
Anti-depressants, angst, failing grades. My life was chaos in the most unexciting way.
And how I miss that school. The nerds I met. The concentration of anti-social-socials is like few other places in the world. LAN parties with real emotion. Hours and hours of Mario Cart. Smash Brothers tournaments that had more emotional bonding wrapped up in them than some hugs. The swing dancing. Bullet (a sort of team dodge ball with socks that covered the whole campus). I fell in love playing flashlight tag and it took me 6 months to admit it to her or myself. During the days I thought the hardest I have ever thought with more discipline, detail and care than I have ever known before or since. And in the evenings, well, so many things ripped me out of my shell. We danced like fools. We played football in the snow and none of us knew the rules. We roared like Spartans and found the strangest uses for duct tape. Sporting event’s became prime opportunities for aloof elitist meta-jokes and life was so very good.
I would never go back, but the memories this song brings to me are full, and for that I feel infinitly lucky.
