A professor recently wrote a grumpy blog post about the year 1980. Her memories were of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, John Lennon and the murder of Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador. “These things I remember,” she wrote, “but the big event my students name, not a bit of it.” The professor’s grumpiness stemmed from the fact that students identified the “Miracle on Ice” Olympic hockey game between the United States and the Soviet Union as the most important event of that year.
I didn’t find the post interesting because a bunch of college kids remember more from an ESPN highlight reel than the beginning of the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan. What caught my attention was the way in which the professor herself recalled 1980 — by the costumes worn at an “end of the decade” party. She’s not remembering the events; she’s remembering how she recorded them.
I’m graduating in a couple of weeks. The truth is, pretty few of my conversations with my fellow seniors have much to do with the future. People talk about job prospects, sure, but a lot less about what they’ll actually be doing. Most of my conversations these days are caught in a sort of pre-nostalgia. It’s a weird way of getting ready to remember college, never mind that we’re still in it.
Really, it’s been a four-year process of getting ready to remember, a product of everyone not in college saying, “These are the best years of your life,” and everyone in college saying, “I can’t believe how fast that semester went!” Facebook photos are one way to remember, but everyone realizes how skewed that particular archive is. Most profiles seem like the illustration of an Asher Roth song. To be totally upfront, I tend not to put my arms around the shoulders of my closest acquaintances unless a camera is around.
A more representative photo album would include a whole lot more pictures of me sweating through a fourth cup of coffee at 3 a.m., hunched over a computer as a deadline ticks ever closer. And I tend not to snap a lot of shots when watching a marathon of Party Down with my roommates. The memory of college I’ve been busily constructing isn’t a mental compendium of the cool and less-cool things I’ve been through in the past four years. In a conversation a couple of nights ago, one of my housemates talked about remembering people and relationships first and foremost. That’s most of the truth, but I don’t think that’s quite how my remembering will work.
Plenty of psychology studies emphasize the spotty nature of memory as a means of positive revisionism — remembering what we liked, or what we would have liked to happen. In a couple years, I’ll be looking back fondly on my time as point guard for the Terrapin men’s basketball team, an activity which also gave me the opportunity to date the majority of the team’s cheerleaders.
But there’s an aspect of fuzzy memory that’s missed. Listen closely, and most graduating seniors are building a pastiche of four years’ worth of emotion. For me, it’s a weird mix of exhaustion, adventure and camaraderie. Remembering college for me is just a matter of plugging events into the constructed emotion. I’ll remember the relaxing joy of shooting the shit with my boys. I’ll remember the lonely isolation of working on a paper from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. and the camaraderie of arguing about who’s more tired the next day.
I’ll remember college more as a feeling than as an event. And it’s felt pretty sweet.
Mardy Shualy is a senior government and politics major. He can be reached at shualy at umdbk dot com.
