I’ve gotten into the habit of coming to alt.coffee in the East Village. I’m clearly older than most of the clientele, but I don’t care that much. I get the same feeling I got from hanging out at the SU at Reed. And if anyone ever told me I’d miss that academic pressure cooker, I would have said that would have been gravely mistaken.

However, I think everyone gets sentimental for their past. In fact, I think I read somewhere that it is biological.

I didn’t think it would have been me, though. The scars of a Reed education were much too deep for that.

And, when I cop to it, my education at Reed was exactly what I made of it, which turned out to be “not much”. I couldn’t tie my shoelaces much at 19, much less take advantage of what a college had to offer. Alot of people took time off between their sophmore and junior years, and I should have been one of them, in retrospect.

Given the opportunity, I could do a better job now with the same opportunity. However, I understand that I’d never get in. As horrible as a stress storm college admissions were in 1989, I feel for the high schoolers of today, because there is no objective criteria nowadays that would guarantee you admission to a particular school. You could have a perfect GPA, SAT score and recommendations and be denied for your race (or even the background of another applicant). Its so random.

No wonder high-schoolers I meet are so well adjusted - they’ve managed to lower their expectations about what college is, and be realistic that they’ll have a future no matter what school they go to.

Perhaps this is a form of putting colleges in their place. I think that’s a good thing.

Anyway, I get my Reed fix here in New York City by Going to Alt.Coffee. Great secondhand furniture, Dylan on the radio, coffee of course, and snarky hipster merch for sale. No exams or papers. Ah, home.