Through the Sallyport

That's me on the far right. I had a great seat
for the graduation, up close, right on the aisle,
so I wound up in a lot of the pictures of the event.
STIPIMM: “With a Little Help From My Friends,” by the Beatles

Ten years ago today, I graduated from Rice University. It was a red-letter day, not just because that was the day I ceased to be an undergrad, and not just for the fact that I had reached the point of my “expected” education.* Though I would have been loathe to admit it at the time, it was a significant day for me emotionally, a day in which a lot of things about who I was were made clear, and a day that put an end to what was, in retrospect, the first big failure of my life.

Yes, folks, I consider my three years at Rice University (junior year was in France, and a much different picture) to have been, overall, a failure. Yes, I earned a degree at one of the better schools in the country. And yes, I had an eventful three years, full of all sorts of individual ups and downs. Late in my senior year, I had distinguished myself both in terms of writing (for the school paper and my residential college’s publication) and (pseudo-) leadership (among other things, I saved the French Club from extinction…whoopee). However, these individual feats didn’t add up to a successful three years.

Before I go on, let me state that I know this looks like a big pile of bitterness and regret. But it really isn’t – when I left Rice, I was indeed pretty damn bitter and I ruminated and griped about it a lot. I’m sure my friends loooooved it. But Rice U. doesn’t even register as a blip anymore on my “things I care about” screen. The only reason I’m bringing it up now is because it's the anniversary and, thus, I’ve been thinking about it lately. And in that thinking, I’ve realized that I learned quite a bit from my first failure.

Now back to the reasons I saw it as a failure. There were three big ones:


1) I was just a face in the crowd. During my long complaints about my life at Rice, I would often lament that I had few, if any friends. In retrospect, that just simply wasn’t the case. I had plenty of friends, even at the times when I was alone in my room only because I didn’t have anybody that I just hung out with. During my freshman and sophomore years, but best Rice friend was Wynn, who was an alum, and thus only tied to the school in spirit.

My lack of a group to be around was just a symptom of something else, which was the fact that I did not stand out in any way from the pack during most of my time at Rice (or if I did, it was for a bad reason, which is another story altogether). Much of that, I admit, was my own fault; I came to Rice already in a bad state of mind because deep down, I didn’t want to go there. And I was hundreds of miles away from Norman, Okla., where my girlfriend at the time was. But the truth is, even if I was in a bad temper about being there, I tried very hard, or at least as hard as an introvert can, to make friends; I went to every party, every college-wide event, every college** government meeting. I hung out incessantly in the college commons, sat at different tables with people during meals (half the time…I do often like eating in silence). I rarely holed myself up in my room just because I felt anti-social; even when I lived off-campus sophomore year, I spent an inordinate amount of time on campus. Indeed, during my second year, a senior told me that while I was a freshman, people who knew my face but didn’t know my name would refer to me as “the guy who’s always around.”*** That pretty much sums up my first two years of Rice – the guy who’s always around, but nobody knows.

My senior year was different. But even there, I was starting with a bit of a handicap, because I had been gone the entire year before. I might as well have been a freshman, and indeed, probably because I was in the same outsider state of mind at the start of the year, most of my friends would wind up being freshmen. However, I managed, though a combination of better luck and senior’s prerogative, to make a name for myself, if only for a little bit. It came very late in the year, though, and was the equivalent of making a basket from half-court at the buzzer when your team is down by 50 points. To make it worse, during the last few weeks at Rice, I finally began to fall into the groups I had wanted to fall into since my freshman year… just in time to say goodbye and be forgotten.

I only recently realized that my relative anonymity was at the center of my malaise at Rice. There were plenty of students in my college who were quite fine with going about their studies and not standing out socially. I was not one of those people. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t need to be BMOC; but I would have liked to have been something other than “the guy who’s always around.” Until Rice, I had stood out among my peers throughout my life, both academically and creatively. I never quite got used to the idea of being a face in the crowd.

And when I say "face in the crowd" I mean that literally. For all the times I was "always around," the only time my face appears in the college’s section of my senior yearbook is in a group shot during graduation.****


2) I got nothing out of it academically. Here’s all you need to understand this: I majored in English, French and Medieval Studies. Today, I still get Wordsworth and Longfellow confused, I can’t speak French anymore worth a damn, and I can’t tell you a damn thing about the Middle Ages anymore, save a few interesting tidbits that add up to little. I fell into my majors mainly because I took a bunch of humanities courses when I started at Rice as a backlash to all the study of math and science I had done in high school. Once I had accumulated all those credits, it was too easy to just finish it out, especially when I had no idea what else I would have majored in. I know I’m hardly alone in that (sounds like 90% of humanities majors), but still. There is one thing I’m proud of: I was probably the only humanities major in years to take Quantum Mechanics I… just because I wanted to.


3) I didn’t get laid enough. This is probably the one area that I’m still residually bitter about (as Bridget can attest) – that I went through my college years with a pathetic sexual record. There was a brief spurt my sophomore year, but otherwise, I was one very frustrated undergrad. Now, I know that some perspective is called for in this subject, and I can look back on my lack of female companionship with some wisdom, but still.

Let me set up some context, and maybe you’ll understand. At the beginning of my senior year, I had just come back from a year in Paris, the city that embodies romance, where I succeeded in getting…absolutely no romance. So I come back to Rice, a senior, with his OWN room. When you’re a freshman and you’re not getting any, you’re always told that just wait, they’ll be throwing themselves at you your senior year. How much sex did I have my senior year at Rice? ZERO.

Why? Partly my own introversion, sure. But also because I was never really comfortable socially at Rice (see section 1); I had plenty of crushes, but no situations in which a shy boy like me would have been comfortable enough to act on them. And the times when I got brave enough to act? They never turned out well. The best example is when I asked another senior to some dance (I forget what the hell they were called). This gal was quiet, but not unsocial. A bit granola and odd, but straight and cute as all get go; I’d had a crush on her since freshman year. We were friendly acquaintances, and I knew she wasn’t going out with anyone, so I got a bit of “carpe diem” going and asked her. Her answer, which because of her nature I could totally believe: “I don’t really go to those sorts of things.” Not mean at all, but a rejection nonetheless.

I did date one freshman girl my senior year… another odd gal who liked to wear a gigantic hat during the day. But in that case, I ran up against an obstacle that no seniority or room situation could overcome: prudery.


Like I said before, it did get somewhat better in the second semester of my senior year. People knew me for the few columns I wrote for the paper and the humorous publication I put out late in the year (The Phoenix). Indeed, the day I released the Phoenix, something strange and neat happened that stands out in my mind – it was probably a week before finals, and senioritis was hitting big time. I had just returned to my room from lunch and found that someone had put a small paper bag in front of my door. In the bag, there were three colored index cards and a tangerine. Each of the cards had something nice written on them (in lovely female handwriting) with black marker. I believe one was “Hope you’re having a great day,” and another said “Someone thinks you are très cool!” Meanwhile, the tangerine was decorated with a smiley face and the word “SMILE.” My friends swore it wasn’t them who put it there (and I had just seen them at lunch, so it couldn’t have been them anyway), and we couldn’t figure out who it would have been. I kept that tangerine until it got moldy, and I probably still have the index cards buried somewhere. One the best, silliest, most uplifting gifts I’ve ever received. And I’ll never know who gave it to me.

But 10 years ago today, under the blazing Texas sun, the small victories at Rice were far from my mind, and I was quite ready to leave for good. At the end of the graduation, the graduates walk ceremonially through the sallyport at the head of the academic quad, outside, symbolically leaving the school (when we enter as freshmen, we ceremonially walked in). On the other side of the archway, the graduates all celebrated with each other, hugging, taking pictures, etc., all while they waited for the ceremony to end, when their families could join them. But this graduate had no one to celebrate with. I stood there for over 10 minutes, uncomfortably and somewhat painfully alone, and watched other people celebrate themselves and their friends. It was one last rub-in of the failure to find myself and find my place at Rice University. But despite the vitriol that may be oozing from this post, I didn’t sulk, I didn’t let it weigh me down. I left Rice behind and, having learned something from my experiences in Houston (lesson #1: never date a prude...), I made my own way, as convoluted as it has been so far.

But I still do get a quiet joy every time I get a request for money from my alma mater and get to throw it in the trash.


* “Expected” education: From the time I was little, because my parents were of a particular economic class and because I was at least decently intelligent, it was always taken for granted that I would go to university and get at least a bachelor’s degree. After that, it was all up to me, in terms of decision-making and financing.

** When I say college, I mean residential college. It got confusing, especially since my college was named Will Rice College.

*** Vintage. Scout's honor.

**** I don’t mean that to sound as pathetic as it does…