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After my freshman year of college, I wanted to be Indiana Jones.
I ducked into the counselor's office between journalism classes to change my majors to history and anthropology, excited at the prospect of exotic digs in ancient civilizations.
It only took two periods of my intro to anthropology course to derail that adventure. Maybe class was too early, maybe I just wasn’t interested. Either way, I never dragged myself out of bed for it. On the day of the midterm, I slunk into a back-row seat to skirt the professor’s gaze.
“Thanks for joining us,” she said, as she dropped the test onto my desk. “It’s an important one.”
I didn’t crack that textbook open again until the night before the final. A few friends and I holed up in a vacant classroom in Patrick F Taylor Hall, clear across campus from all the distractions of our fraternity house.
Once an hour, someone would call out “fresh air?”
I rose with the rest and stepped out into the chilly night to inhale the secondary smoke.
We talked about life—girls, food, and plans for winter break—and consumed a quarter of each hour we’d set out to study. This took us all night, but our group of procrastinators didn’t mind.
If I had not devoted ten straight hours to the effort, I would have failed, but the next morning, I shuffled into that classroom for the third and final time—and remembered enough to get an A.
Let’s get one thing straight: I haven’t thought of a point to this story yet. Let’s discover it together, shall we?
The one piece of archaeological knowledge that sticks with me is the phenomenon of stratification. When you dig into the ground, you unearth a layer cake of eras, each a snapshot of thousands of years. Those lines have clear definition. Each represents a beginning and ending. Those were the pieces I memorized for the exam.
But they weren't the real story.
Looking back at my college years, those epochal lines were puncutated by exams and term papers. Ends of semesters. Graduation. But the most precious memories linger in all that dirt in between.
That anthropology exam is the last time my irresponsibility threatened to sabotage my academic career. Over the following years, I learned a purer form of procrastination.
And I did it semi-consciously.
It’s hard to believe we could stomach going out three or four nights a week in college. It’s also hard to believe the promotions that lured us to the bars. 50¢ shot night. Penny pitchers. Free drinks (with $10 cover).
I thought it was strange that, despite these 1960s prices for alcohol, people wouldn’t even arrive to the bar until about 11 p.m. That only allowed you three hours to do damage.
The damage, it turned out, was done at the pregame. We’d gather off-campus at someone’s house, or most often, we’d huddle into one of our tiny rooms in the house, drink bad beer, play whatever music we wanted, and watch Cool Runnings again.
I can remember so many small moments in these waiting hours, like the time we convinced a friend that he should give up studying and come out with us. We knew we'd cracked him when we heard the chorus of Pitbull’s “Don’t Stop the Party” booming down the hall.
Sometimes we’d just sit in my second-floor room where Mike, who’s a gifted freehand drawer and finance guy, would make caricatures of our friends. We even devoted half of a wall-sized whiteboard—and far too much time—to compiling a 30-something-point list of “Things We Hate.” A ranging catalog of the trendy (cupcake shops), the heinous (fluorescent lights), and the timeless (Tommy Hilfiger) annoyances in our all-too-cushy lives.
However relaxed, unguarded, or uncool you wanted to be, you could do it in the comfort of your friends, in the privacy of the pregame.
The bars awoke a whole new posture. Chests were pumped. Guys attempted to walk around with swagger, and a few even thought they could dance (one or two could). This performance was cringier than whatever we’d been doing when no one was watching.
Probably because of all the drinking. I can remember showing up to a function hoping to talk to a crush, only to fall flat on my face moments after walking through the door. Even on the best day, I’d spend most of my effort shouting to get people’s attention.
Of those nights—it wasn’t four times a week, but it was often—I can remember very few moments in those bars. Just a blanket feeling of disappointment.
What I didn’t grasp at the time, maybe even until now, is that every friendship, every crush, every great story started in those before moments, when it felt like we were putting off getting to where we needed to be.
You learn all that after the cap and gown has collected dust for a few years.
And even if you wanted to, not even Dr. Jones himself couldn’t dig back down to make that era longer than it was. You can’t go back and shout to 12 friends sitting around, locked in conversation, that they don’t need to be anywhere else. That it’s later than they think. That these four years might just be a prolonged procrastination for the real deal.
It may not surprise you that I sat down to write this at the last possible moment. I could have started at any point this week, but I spent most evenings entertaining my son, who had a stomach bug. I made a few dinners and worked after hours on a research tool that I’m excited about.
By the time this afternoon rolled around, morning thunderstorms had pushed through the area, and the sunshine and breeze pulled us outside for a stroll. My wife, son, a friend, and I spent a couple of hours sipping cocktails on a front porch. We talked about the smell of spring in New Orleans, and the ‘90s, and we caught up on his sister’s wedding.
And when I got around to putting these thoughts down, I finally thought of something to share that’s worth remembering.