clay

I really loved my grad school. I loved it so much. Maybe the best decision of my life was going to that crummy little huge place. Man, I milked it too. I wore tank tops all year and read by the pool and zoomed around on my scooter to seize buttermilk bars from Donut Hut in the dead of winter in the dead of night.

I loved campus. It smelled like clay. There was the term I would habitually go the gym after Dramaturgy and take the long route through Palm Walk. There was the term I'd bike to the gym at 6, hit the machines, shower, and walk into 8 AM theatre history so fresh and sparkling. My first year on Fridays I'd do laps before my sketch comedy show. My second year I'd work the disability testing center Fridays, very slow and quiet. Struggling to remember my third year. That shocks me. That I could forget my class schedule. But time has passed, it seems. It's an interesting anthropological study of one's self, to reflect on what memories make it through all the purges. How did they cling on? Held in your arms like a fawn or like leeches on the back of your calves?

I loved all my friends. I had my comedy girls, first and foremost. Then there were the comedy girls' girls to varying degrees. Then there was the comedy girl's girl's Christian girls. Then! There was grad cohort. And undergrads. And then there was work. (I hung out with work people once my entire three years at the office.) And then then comedy in general, which was just so many people. And then all their little clumpettes. And then then then was Puhg and his whole world. Which was...well a whole world! The show we did, his college friends. Some were lifelong. Some I lived with. Some I went to Vegas with. More I went to Santa Monica with. And I loved just about all of them. Even my sibling roommates, why not.

I met Puhg in the desert. We went to so many adorable brunches and basketball games. We pirated Mad Men every week and some nights he would cook us a pot of beans with tomatoes. We drove that long highway stretch over and over.

I did the military play and wrote the religion play. I wrote many sketches and loads of stand-up and a bunch of plays and/or play-like things. I taught so much screenwriting and a little improv and a little playwriting and a bit of film ethics. I laughed so much. I got pretty angry. There was some sadness, but not much, and not for long. It was a different world. I made 13K or something, and that was great! My rent was $450 for a very nice room and bathroom in a lovely condo. All the best things were free anyway. I ate an incredible amount of Taco Bell and gas station nachos, also a record high amount of Ethiopian.

I learned so so much. Some of the classes were bad. But because I later became an educator, they were useful case studies for me. And other classes were very good! I really lucked out with my theatre history professor and my thesis director, specifically. I absorbed so much about the scope of theatre, got to be inside all the moving parts, keyed into the hot stuff. I squeezed every drop.

I remember so many students. I think I see them all the time. I might. Two of them got married and live out here. They work in post.