Diary of a 53 year old college student – week 1

The world is a strange place. Life is a mystery. Sometimes I’m baffled by the details of my life, other times it’s pure shock and awe. This week marks the start of a new chapter in my life. I find myself back in college after a very long hiatus – that’s 34 years to be exact. In 1981, when I was a college freshman, I listened to Stevie Nicks ‘Edge of Seventeen’ on repeat. Oh, alright, it wasn’t really on repeat, because I played the album on a Techniques turntable and there wasn’t a repeat button. You had to manually lift the stylus and return the needle to the beginning of the record to hear it played again. I must have replayed  that song thousands of times – one of my strategies for driving my roommate crazy and getting him to move out of the dorm. I wasn’t used to sharing anything. I was a spoiled, self entitled college freshman that thought the world was at my feet and that life was going to be handed to me on a silver tray. That was before life took a turn that I could never have anticipated. You see on my eighteenth birthday, July 3, 1981, there was an article in the NY Times announcing that doctors were treating gay men in NYC for a rare “gay cancer”. How was I to know, as I headed off for college, that I would come face to face with that disease? I hadn’t even discovered the Times yet.

Now, in the winter of 2016, I’m returning to school to finish something I started many years ago. I’ll be journaling my way to graduation and posting what I’ve learned on Friday each week. This week I’ve realized that my brain is a lot less flexible than it was when I was 18. I have to reread paragraphs and chapters several times to retain anything. That wasn’t the case back in 1981. I could scan a chapter after smoking a joint on the way to class and still pass the quizzes and tests. Studying in mid-life is much more challenging and far more rewarding than it was when I was a teenager. Let’s hope I have what it takes to see this through…

Here’s that article from the NY Times if you care to take a look back.  We’ve come a long way.