Positive Attitude Orientation: Journal, September 1994

My mother grew up in this town. It was a railroad hub. It has a giant star by the zoo on the mountain overlooking downtown.

I've been coming here for most of my life.

I stare out the windows[1] of my first dorm room over the green fields toward the Boob Mountains and half-disappointed/half-relieved that my unpronounceably named double Georgian roommate[2] didn’t show up.

There are a lot of horses here and a lot of girls with blonde hair.

I hate it.

This morning my mother drove me to campus in a borrowed van and unloaded my life into this cinderblock cell and told me I should give the school a chance, that just because it doesn't seem like a place I belong, I shouldn't let my feelings get in the way of what could be a great experience. "It's probably not as bad as you think."

"I'll probably kill myself if it's as bad as I think," I said.

My mother like the suicide commentary. She said something about being disappointed in my attitude and helped me make my bed and plug in my computer in this mostly empty room. I wish I were my no-show roommate because at least she's NOT HERE.

Every single girl on the hall is playing that fucking Counting Crows song. We're supposed to go out to the quad to play get to know you games. I cued up Mozart's Requiem and smoke. I heard giggles and screams from the other girls in the dorm. I wrote CUNT on my white board. Then I erased it because Mom came back.

"I think you're really going to like it here," she said after some tea thing at the President's House.

I told Mom that I'm totally fucked and she should probably leave. She did, but only after making my promise that I wouldn't sit around and pout, which of course I'm going to do. I'm going to cry and pout and scream and temper tantrum all night if that gets me out of the fucking ice cream social.

On the way out the door, she told me that the girl across the hall[3] looked miserable and has shoes like mine and I should probably go talk to her, which probably means that she's nothing like me and horrible.

Everything is wrong with my life. 

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[1] These pages are in my general freshman year notebook, but their placement suggests that I wrote this sometime after these events took place. I think it was part of some very serious autobiography project I was going to write about myself at the time.

[2]Here’s how this went: I got my roommate assignment sometime in July and the name was recognizably Georgian (I’d gone to high school with two kids from Tbilisi) and the only contact information I had for her was a mailing service in Atlanta, so double Georgian. She never showed. Incidentally, I answered my Hollins housing questionnaire in some tantrum state of nihilistic rage. If the residential life office had even tried to match me with a like-minded individual, I suspect she would have been a real piece of work.

[3] She actually ended up being the first real friend I made in college. So go, Mom, I guess.