Glorious Failures

The following is reprinted with permission from When I Was There, an anthology of life at U.C. Berkeley from the ’60s till now.

The super conservative former college…the café I opened at age twenty in San Antonio (“Can I get a taco with that latté?”)…the pot fragrance company…all of these glorious failures prepared me.

When I arrived at last at U.C. Berkeley, limping towards the finish line of my undergraduate education, I knew what I was getting into: an ambitious, unadulterated, sweat-and-study-groups-required, liberal arts education. An education. After two years in the real world, it sounded delicious.

My road to Berkeley had chugged from Colorado to the heart of Texas before streaking across the continent heading West. The ocean, I prayed as I drove, leaving behind in San Antonio the small college that wasn’t liberal or arty, and the café that wasn’t the coffeehouse I’d intended. Cal. Cal. Cal. I whispered. My mantra meant both the university and the state of California, where oranges grew and ideas originated.

I owed U.C. Berkeley to my Denver-based dad–I’d just pulled a switcheroo on him. After I left Texas, he told me he’d help pay for a state school. He wanted me to move to Boulder, from which he’d graduated as an electrical engineer. When I announced my immediate plans to disembark for the Bay Area to try for U.C. Berkeley, he tried to bite his tongue. There was just one extenuating circumstance: my psychotic and long-red-haired ex-boyfriend. Oh, yes, him.

I didn’t tell my dad I was also heading to California to help the (not yet) ex start a pot fragrance company. You can laugh now, since I can. But then, I really did believe it could work. Crazier things have happened, right? You know: a department-store-sold, high-end, natural unisex fragrance which smelled sweet and floral and herby and just a tad like kind bud?

You’d buy some if really sexy famous people wore it, right? Okay, okay, we were smoking it… and I digress. But back then, driving to California, I was crystal clear about my vision of the future. I thought: I’m going to help this guy make a million bucks and while we’re workin’ on it I’m gonna graduate from the best school I can possibly imagine in which to study political science!

As it turns out, we didn’t make a million bucks selling pot perfume. I had no control over the pot fragrance company, for which I held the position of indentured servant. But I did learn a lot about how—and how not—to run a small business. In addition to a pile of credit card debt, at least I came out on the other side with a ton of skills including “desktop publishing.” And in the midst of all of those humiliating-at-the-time life lessons about business, I reminded myself that I could at least control my destiny related to college.

I visited the campus, and fell more in love with it than ever. Professors at Cal had written the books we read in the classes at my former school! I visited the library. My God! how I wanted to sit at one of those little desks way back in the stacks, with a sweet little light, and look through piles of books. I collected the information I needed to apply as an in-state student. I worked as a temp for a year, paid my taxes, slaved for the ex in my “free” time, and painstakingly applied to U.C. Berkeley. I didn’t get in.

On a Thursday afternoon I left my long-time temp position in San Francisco and went to sit in the Cal admissions office. “But I’m going to graduate from here,” I said to the kind woman who finally saw me. “I just have to get in.”

“Take English 1B,” she replied. I’m sure it was more complicated, but that’s how it played out. I took English 1B at City College in San Francisco. Then, Glory Be, they let me in! I arrived for my first day of classes, a twenty-two year old junior with the freshman jitters.

You can’t imagine how idyllic life was as a Political Science major in 1995. Outside, I caught the scent of eucalyptus trees. Inside the older buildings: the scent of Xeroxed course guides and well-worn wooden furniture. I almost didn’t want to tell my dad how beautiful and freeing it was—I wanted him to be 100% sure I was (for once) putting his money to good use: doing the serious work of a student. I’ve been in real business, motherfuckers, I wanted to hiss at the lost student souls who wandered by complaining. This whole studying life is awesome! I was sitting out on the lawn in the Berkeley sun reading theories on history, economics, social studies, human psychology… Political Science as taught by the best! And right in front of my eyes, people from all walks of life were going in so many different directions! Discussing things like the physiological impact of stringed instruments!

I wrote my thesis on why the War on Drugs continues despite its failures. My professors pressed me, unlike the wild-haired ex-boyfriend, to consider every angle and to provide statistics to back up my theories. It was a much better way than a fragrance company to examine what I saw as a political phenomenon with widespread social and financial implications.

I was welcomed into study groups of smart, competitive students. I met my friends and partners in academic crime in their apartments, the International house, a sorority house (my first time in one!), and innumerable cafés. I don’t know if they wanted me because I actually asked questions in class, or took really good notes, or if it was my intoxicating scent, but I was happy. I knew I’d found my place.

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When I Was There

http://www.amazon.com/When-Was-There-Berkeley-1960-2010/dp/057805616X/

Please buy a copy if you’d like to support me and other local writers. Give it to a high school student or another Cal alumni. And/or use it as inspiration for your own piece about college…or about the time you could’ve spent in college, but chose not to! I always love to hear a good humiliating story. :)


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