It’s a strange thing, education. Perhaps mine has done a fairly naff job all in all, reducing me to beginning blogs with entirely meaningless platitudes, but the baulksome concept of uni – and yes it is as much of, if not more of a concept than an actual reality – still floats around me like some very old, but very well-hidden cheese.
You get the distinct feeling after graduating that, you know, this must be how ex-servicemen feel after being thrust back into regular civilisation. No, not the giddy possibility of surprise anal gang rape hiding around every corner, more a glum realisation that you’re ultimately just another one of the grim-faced shits sitting opposite you on the bus, periodically breaking wind out of spite and vague self-loathing. Coming to the shop counter, you instinctively reach for your student card before you realise that, oh shit, I’m just a norm now. A great big fucking civvy square. I may as well wear a grey bobble hat and do the lottery. The low point of the entire student card debacle is arguably the point at which you can no longer even uphold the flimsy pretence that you thought the card was valid until the end of the actual year, not the academic one, pathetically determined to hold on to that 2% NUS discount on Jeffrey Archer scrotal wash or whatever it entitles you to these days.
That said, however, I spent the entirety of my degree absolutely loathing students. Self-congratulatory, scarf-wearing arseholes to a man, it nevertheless took the best part of a year to realise that these were not gods, Jim, but wankers. Absolute, velvet-lined wankers. Parochial, first year Hull boy that I was, I couldn’t defer quickly enough to the nearest tosser with excessive facial hair and a wanky southern accent. Mid-seminar you’d hear them interrupt the lecturer only to ineffectually repackage an ambiguous proposition into some cool, rebellious imposition of their studenty, ‘question authority’ modus operandi. ‘But is it? Really?’ Wankers. Absolute wankers. They may as well have halted the whole thing just to excitedly present the class with a crude, messy sculpture of themselves, crafted entirely from a lump of steaming shit. It’s essentially the same principle. Until then, ‘wanker’ had been little more than a dull and faintly inoffensive pejorative, yet all of a sudden it so wondrously described all such omnipresent, guffawing ambassadors of student cool. Swaggering from one event to another in pseudo-bohemian knitwear, irritatingly self-assured, syrupy accents and mahogany-carved smirks, they looked, to my eyes, merely chirruping, idiot-faced hatstands.
Yet, the more keen-eyed of you may have noticed the arch-hypocrisy here: namely that yes, I was, technically, a student myself. Except that I wasn’t. Not really. I liked metal, not faux-arty NME toss and squawky singer-songwriters with stupid, outlandish names. I liked Jeff Buckley, not Jeff Backley, and I’d actually listened to all of his songs, not just Hallelujah, the worst song he never wrote. Neither did I live in some kind of feral sub-community constructed entirely of dried cheese and pizza boxes. Admittedly though, there were occasionally parts of university that didn’t solely involve berets, white wine and pretentious simpering.
The greatest thing, speaking retrospectively, is probably the lack of external pressure: the world refrains momentarily from voiding its filthy, wretched bowels all over your head because, well, you’re just a cheeky student arntcha! There is, of course, the occasional fuzzy, hovering guilt of, well, I should have probably read that, or, I shouldn’t have called so-and-so a pubic-bearded cuntrag etc etc. The list goes on. But what are you doing with yourself now? Oh, you’re a student? Well, why didn’t you say! You lovable little scamp, enjoy your cold baked beans and piss-weak cheap cider young leader of tomorrow!
Cruelly thrown back into civilian land, blinking blearily-eyed after graduation I could already feel the mental rot setting in. Barely a second had passed before I was hurling myself back at the now-locked door of higher education, hyperventilating and desperately clawing at it like some hunted teenage girl in a crap horror film. And it’s true. The ink had barely dried on the degree certificate before I’d regressed into some sort of gurgling man-child, alternately hacking at tins with sharpened flint for nourishment and licking condensation from the windows. Any notions of post-structuralism or contemporary literature had decidedly evaporated from my rapidly shrinking skull. The truth is, without the rigorous program of lectures and seminars to continually reinforce the perception that you’re a preppy, liberal, free-thinking intellectual those delicate, ever-so-carefully-built layers of student identity all too easily melt away back into the yawning abyss of lifelong personality flaws and imperfections. It’s why it’s so essential to snappily garner that graduate job: the ego can thus hop effortlessly from ‘pretentious tosser student’ to ‘pretentious tosser businessman’ without once having to sulkily shuffle down from its egotistical stepladder.
I can see now, though, that I went to uni almost exclusively to become a grown up: in short, to become someone who would happily and without hesitation choose James Joyce over Streets of Rage without batting an eyelid. The truth, it slowly dawns, is that the graduate makeover ultimately resolves itself to be little more than fluffy dice in the front seat of the self. Am I alone in still feeling such a fraud? I’d still sooner stuff a box of pine cones up my arse than read the entirety of Ulysses in knotted-brow faux appreciation. That or play video games. Fawn breathlessly over the self-indulgently drab non-adventures of Stephen Daedalus or kick sinister looking people repeatedly in the face with surround sound? Joyce never had a chance.
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